A revealing autograph letter signed by James Buchanan, written from his Wheatland estate near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on 17 July 1851, to Thomas J. McCamant, Esquire, at the precise moment Buchanan was in the thick of his third consecutive campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. The letter is candid, strategically crafted, and unmistakably Buchanan: courteous on the surface, calculating underneath.
Writing to McCamant, a Pennsylvania political contact, Buchanan explains that a planned visit to Pottsville has been postponed. His niece, who was to accompany him on a trip through the Wyoming Valley, has left Wheatland for Bedford Springs with a party from Philadelphia. The niece in question, almost certainly the future White House hostess Harriet Lane, was Buchanan's ward and constant social companion throughout this period, traveling with him as he quietly built support across Pennsylvania. Buchanan assures McCamant that Pottsville remains on the itinerary and promises two or three days' advance notice of his arrival. He then turns to the political heart of the letter: he has learned that a Mr. Hughes holds a favorable personal opinion of him, and he warmly reciprocates, calling Hughes a man who "well deserves the high esteem in which he is held." The catch follows immediately: Hughes is not his friend politically, supporting another candidate. Buchanan, with characteristic self-possession, waves this aside as no diminishment of his personal regard. He will visit Pottsville, he writes, "as a private citizen, without the least intention of making political capital" and will be happy to receive Hughes's civilities along with McCamant's own.
The protestation of political innocence is the most revealing line in the letter. In July 1851, Buchanan was anything but a disinterested private citizen. He had sought the Democratic nomination in 1844 and again in 1848; the 1852 convention in Baltimore would be his third attempt, and he was the leading candidate from Pennsylvania with substantial Southern support. The tour through the Wyoming Valley and Pottsville was plainly a fence-mending exercise in his home state. His care to frame it as a social call rather than political canvassing is the practiced language of a man who had spent four decades in American public life. The letter is signed in full, "James Buchanan," with the address leaf bearing McCamant's name in Buchanan's hand.
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