President James Buchanan
James Buchanan Jr.
Born April 23, 1791
Died June 1, 1868
15th President of the United States
20th United States Minister to the United Kingdom
17th United States Secretary of State
United States Senator from Pennsylvania
5th United States Minister to Russia
Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania
Member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives from Lancaster County
Buchanan was a prominent lawyer in Pennsylvania and won his first election to the state's House of Representatives as a Federalist. In 1820, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and retained that post for 11 years, aligning with Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party. Buchanan served as Jackson's minister to Russia (1832). He won election in 1834 as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and also held that position for 11 years. Buchanan was appointed to serve as President James K. Polk's secretary of state in 1845, and eight years later was named as President Franklin Pierce's minister to the United Kingdom. In 1846, Buchanan was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.
Beginning in 1844, Buchanan became a regular contender for the Democratic party's presidential nomination. He was finally nominated in 1856, defeating incumbent Franklin Pierce and Senator Stephen A. Douglas at the Democratic National Convention; he benefited from the fact that he had been out of the country (as ambassador in London) and thus had not been involved in slavery issues. Buchanan and running mate John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky carried every slave state except Maryland, defeating anti-slavery Republican John C. Frémont and Know-Nothing former president Millard Fillmore to win the 1856 presidential election.
As President, Buchanan intervened in the Supreme Court to gather majority support of the pro-slavery and anti-black decision in the Dred Scott case. He did what Southern leaders wanted in attempting to engineer Kansas coming into the Union as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution. He thereby angered not only the Republicans but also many Northern Democrats. Buchanan honored his pledge to serve only one term, and supported Breckinridge's unsuccessful candidacy in the 1860 presidential election. He failed to reconcile the fractured Democratic party due to a simmering grudge against Stephen Douglas, leading to a four way electoral split and the election of Republican and former Congressman Abraham Lincoln.
Just weeks after Lincoln was elected as Buchanan's successor, Southern states began seceding from the Union, precipitating the American Civil War. Buchanan's bumbling leadership during his lame duck period was widely criticized. He simultaneously angered the North by not stopping secession, and the South by not acceding to their secession. He supported the ill-fated Corwin Amendment in an attempt to reconcile the country, but it was too little too late. He made an unsuccessful attempt to reinforce the defenders of Fort Sumter, but otherwise refrained from taking any action to prepare the military. His failure to forestall the Civil War has been described alternatively as incompetent inaction, or passive acceptance of the South. Many contemporaries blamed him for the war, and he was much reviled after his presidency. He spent his last years defending his reputation.
Buchanan died of a cold in 1868, and was buried in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he had lived for nearly 60 years. Modern historians and critics condemn him for not addressing the issue of slavery or forestalling the secession of the Southern states over it.
Historians and scholars consistently rank Buchanan as one of the country's worst presidents.
The Gay US President
While his biographers have maintained that Buchanan was asexual or celibate, more recent commentators have put forward arguments that he was homosexual.
A source of this interest has been Buchanan’s close and intimate relationship with William Rufus King, the Alabama senator who became Vice President under Franklin Pierce. The two men lived together in a Washington boarding house for 10 years from 1834 until King’s departure for France in 1844.
King referred to the relationship as a “communion” and the two attended social functions together. Contemporaries noted the closeness. Andrew Jackson called them “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy,” the former being a 19th-century euphemism for an effeminate man. Buchanan adopted King’s mannerisms and his romanticized view of southern culture.
In 1844, after King had left for France, Buchanan wrote to Cornelia Roosevelt:
“I am now ‘solitary and alone,’ having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone, and I should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.”
There is little correspondence between the two men for historians to pour over, as the men’s nieces largely destroyed it.