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the future, not yet history. Lancaster, with six thousand inhabitants, considered itself a metropolis, the biggest inland city in the United States. The nation’s first turnpike, a gravelled, stump-free road from Lancaster to Philadelphia, had been opened by its private promoters the year Buchanan was born—born at a western stage of the Great Wagon Road which the turnpike improved and replaced. Eighteen years later, he arrived in Lancaster to learn the law.
I determined that if severe application would make me a good lawyer, I should not fail in this particular; and I can say, with truth, that I have never known a harder student than I was at that period of my life. I studied law, and nothing but law, or what was essentially connectedwith it. I took pains to understand thoroughly, as far as I was capable, everything which I read; and in order to fix it upon my memory and give myself the habit of extempore speaking, I almost every evening took a lonely walk and embodied the ideas which I had acquired during the day in my own language
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    A lonely walk. A bell about his neck in the forest. An Elysian landscape wherein one could declaim aloud to oneself and not be heard. When Hopkins’ preceptorship ended early in 1812, and Buchanan turned twenty-one, he went west, against his father’s advice, by horseback, to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to investigate a tract of land to which his father had a partial, disputed title. Had he stayed, would he have become a Clay, a Lincoln? Possibly, that summer, he encountered Thomas Lincoln, who, according to Klein (Buchanan’s autobiography says nothing of this excursion),
lived near Elizabethtown and was on the court docket for some land-title cases at this time
. Lincoln might very well have had in tow his three-year-old son, Abraham. When he himself was three, Buchanan very likely saw George Washington passing through Cove Gap on his way to squelch the Whiskey Rebellion. From President Washington to President Lincoln in one patriotic lifetime. The Elizabethtown land case had been in litigation since 1803, and Kentucky already had plenty of lawyers. Years later, Ben Hardin recalled Buchanan’s telling him
I went there full of the big impression I was to make—and whom do you suppose I met? There was Henry Clay! John Pope, John Allan, John Rowan, Felix Grundy—why, sir, they were giants, and I was only a pigmy. Next day I packed my trunk and came back to Lancaster—that was big enough for me
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    He was admitted to the Lancaster bar on November 17, 1812. He hung out his shingle on East King Street, advertising himself in the papers on February 20, 1813, as being available
two doors above Mr. Dutchman’s Inn, and nearly opposite to the Farmers Bank
. He was appointed, young as he was, prosecutor for Lebanon County, eliciting a letter from his overbearing father advising him to show
compassion & humanity for the poor creatures against whom you may be engaged
. In 1813 he made $938. In 1814 he made $1,096. He and
the town’s jovial 400-pound prothonotary, John Passmore
, bought the office building on East King Street, which included a tavern. Four hundred pounds: another giant. Giants were common in that miniature America—a trick of scale, perhaps. After Jackson, an irascible giant, they thinned out. Polk was “Little Hickory.” Douglas was “The Little Giant.” Lincoln obtained giant-hood but by taking giant woes upon himself; it was a gigantism of suffering, reinforced by chronic constipation, depression, and fits of noble prose. Buchanan was six feet tall, a goodly size but in human scale. In 1814, at a Fourth of July barbecue, he gave a rousing speech denouncing Madison’s bungling of the current war against the British. James Madison was a true giant, but physically too small for the fact to be universally recognized. Buchanan was the president of the local Washington Association, an organization for young Federalists; Madison was, of course, a Democratic-Republican, of the