by John Updike
Now, did Buchanan love King? Fellow bachelors and Senators, they lived together from 1836 to 1844, when President Tyler appointed King Ambassador to France. In 1845 Buchanan became King’s superior, as Polk’s Secretary of State. King asked in 1846 to be recalled; after his defeat as the Union candidate for Senate from Alabama, he returned to the Senate in 1848, as Buchanan was retiring to his idyllic Wheatland interim. A visitor to Wheatland in 1856 wrote in a letter published in Buchanan’s campaign biography, I was much gratified in finding in his library a likeness of the late Vice-President King, whom he loved (and who did not?). He declared that he was the purest public man that he ever knew, and that during his intimate acquaintance of thirty years he had never known him to perform a selfish act. American gays, having seized as theirs Whitman, Melville, and Henry James, among our crusty, straight-lipped Presidents must be satisfied with Buchanan, our only never-married chief executive, who in the heat of 1860 was characterized thus by a calumnious but not unpoetic pro-Douglas paper: Mr. B. has a shrill, almost female voice, and wholly beardless cheeks; and he is not by any means, in any aspect the sort of man likely to cut, or attempt to cut his throat for any Chloe or Phillis in Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, and in spite of all these drawbacks, the portly figure and courtier-like address of Mr. Buchanan form very striking features at a reception. Like Dean Swift and Alexander Pope, he rather courts the reputation of gallantry; and his half-fatherly, half-lover-like attention to such ladies as are presented, rarely fails to flatter the vanity and elicit the gratitude of the fluttering and glittering victims.
King was, history assures us, the epitome of a Southern gentleman and an exemplary—dare we say, a perfect?—Senator. In Buchanan’s eyes, it might be imagined, he loomed as a beau ideal, a masculine angel, conversant with the multitudinous ins and outs of Congressional politicking and the friendships whereby white political males maintained a network of interacting persuasions that up to the rupture of civil war extended from Maine to Texas, Michigan to Florida. The word friend occurs again and again in Buchanan’s letters; one standard source (The Dictionary of American Biography) says of him, His nature was adapted to friendships, and those which he made were lasting and gratifying to him. Nineteenth-century men were more easily gratified short of orgasm than men of our time. Indeed, the pleasure and relief which male companionship afforded Victorian Anglo-Saxons was in large part the decided absence of physical interaction, with its demands of tenderness, expertise, hygiene, energy, and extensive preamble and follow-up. Men were simply not educated to cope with women. Ruskin, seeing his bride nude, with her healthy pubic bush, embarked on six years of unconsummated marriage, finally confessing, after much evasive sophistry concerning his non-performance, to his virgin wife that (in the words of a letter she wrote her parents begging an annulment) he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April. This same underappreciated woman, born Effie Gray, survived to enjoy a successful marriage, producing eight children, with the painter John Millais. Yet Millais, anticipating the day in a letter to his close friend Charles Collins, likened anticipation of his impending wedding to the glimpse of the dentist[’]s instruments and, though he professed to be not in the least nervous, his bride’s diary recorded that in the honeymoon train He got very agitated and when the Railway had started the excitement had been so much for him that instead of the usual comfort I suppose that the Brides require on those occasions of leaving, I had to give him all my sympathy. He cried dreadfully. Impotence at the moment of defloration was not uncommon; Charles Kingsley warned his fiancée, You do not know how often a man is struck powerless in body and mind on his wedding night, but he looked forward bravely to the coming time when he had learnt to bear the blaze of your naked beauty. Throughout most of history men love one another, yes, but as spirits, not bodies; only our coarse materialist imaginations seek to de-Platonize the masculine romances of the previous century. Does not every detail of masculine personal decor—the black stovepipe hats and trouser legs, the constant cigars and chewing tobacco with their residues of foul breath—declare physical unapproachability? Shared housing among bachelors was common domestic economy; witness Doctor Watson and Sherlock Holmes. [Retrospect: details needed here on incontrovertible homosexual contacts among Victorians; informed demographics on results of male sequestration in schools, jails, armies, and above all navies (CK Melville, Dana); probable sub-elite carryovers from looser and more physicalized Renaissance and eighteenth-century mores, etc.: a book in itself, and perhaps already written. Let’s hope so.]
One surviving portrait limns King as a youthful Byronic beauty, but a photograph shows a King whose swarthiness, lustreless stiff hair, and high chiselled cheekbones convey a suggestion of Indian blood unexpected in a man who, writing from Washington to Wheatland in May of 1850, deplored the expansion of territory achieved by the Mexican War and warned against any expansion into Central America on the grounds that its remote situation and degraded mongrel population would involve us in constant difficulties. Mongrelization was much on these gentlemen’s minds. The Ostend Manifesto of 1854, drafted entirely in Buchanan’s hand, urged the acquisition of Cuba by purchase or force and asserted that by not interfering we would be recreant to our duty, be unworthy of our gallant forefathers, and commit base treason against our posterity, should we permit Cuba to be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo with all its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames [of black insurrection and rule] to extend to our neighboring shores, seriously to endanger or actually to consume the fair fabric of our Union.
One searches the correspondence of Buchanan and King for traces of homosexual passion, and finds little. Accepting, in his capacity as Secretary of State, King’s resignation of the French Mission in August of 1846, Buchanan perhaps puns when he relates, of President Polk, Whilst granting your request, he has instructed me to say, that he is deeply sensible of the patriotism, prudence, and ability with which you have performed the duties of your important mission; and I may be permitted to add that it affords me sincere pleasure to be the organ of his approbation. The hypothetical lovers had been separated for two years at this point, with a cold ocean between them. Again, in the letter of 1850 quoted above, King flirtatiously permits himself, while discussing the British incursion into Central America, a self-characterization suggestive of a feminine yielding, to a pleasant end: Now I am as you know a man of peace, and always disposed to adopt the most gentle course to effect an object however desirable. But by and large the two men repress written allusions to their relationship, and in fact invariably include closing courtesies to Miss Lane on the one hand and on the other to a certain Mrs. Ellis who seems to be ever at King’s elbow. Yet it is not impossible to imagine that Buchanan’s Congressional speech of January 5, 1838, supporting Benton’s motion to move to a select committee Calhoun’s resolutions against intermeddling with slavery (That the intermeddling of any State or States, or their citizens, to abolish slavery in this District, or any of the Territories, on the ground, or under the pretext, that it is immoral or sinful; or the passage of any act or measure of Congress, with that view, would be a direct and dangerous attack on the institutions of all the slaveholding States), is, in its uncharacteristic keenness of feeling, a love song to King, sung in the intimate old Senate chamber, with its desks arranged in concentric half-circles around the speaker’s rostrum, its red velvet drapes and mural paintings, and its semi-circular visitors’ gallery set above the main floor like boxes in a theatre.
King’s darkly handsome, smolderingly receptive face must have hung like an oval-framed steel engraving at the center of Buchanan’s wavering vision as he orated. Launching his high, clear voice into the space of the chamber, the Pennsylvanian tilted the magnificent head whose gauzy crown of pale oak-colored hair already held, at the age of forty-six, more than a few white filaments. His arms gesticulated in stilted imitation of the Roman orators upon whose Latin effusions he and his colleagues had been schooled. “The fact is,” he ringi
ngly stated, having noted that the Senators from Delaware and his friend Mr. Wall of New Jersey had voted against the motion, “and it cannot be disguised, that those of us in the Northern States who have determined to sustain the rights of the slaveholding States at every hazard, are placed in a most embarrassing situation.” He was pleading with the South like a man who, in love with his raven-haired mistress, yet still has a wife and children—those Pennsylvania voters in their pious, rural, tariff-hating innocence—to consider. “We are almost literally between two fires,” continued Buchanan: “whilst in front we are assailed by the Abolitionists, our own friends in the South”—his voice cracked, piteously, and then rose higher to carry to the back rows of the visitors’ gallery, where spectators of the fair sex, having troubled to obtain admission, now audibly conversed among themselves—“are constantly driving us into positions where their enemies and our enemies may gain important advantages.”
Buchanan in his stirred imagination felt the rhetorical heat, fore and aft, like a systematically roasted side of beef at an Independence Day barbecue; Senator King’s face, the sharp center of a wide-spreading vague radiance of listening faces, turned as the Alabaman murmured a word to his fellow Senator, whiskery Clement Comer Clay of Huntsville, a former state governor appointed to fill the place of John McKinley, who had been elevated by President Van Buren to the Supreme Court. Even in mid-peroration Buchanan felt a jealous pang that he was not privy to this murmuring, this political confidence between the two Southerners. The sight of King’s profile with its swarthy half-breed sangfroid gave the Senator from Pennsylvania the illicit sensation with which we observe a love object unawares of our attention, as if we are stealing a sip from a sacred vessel. Buchanan felt giddy in the curious gulf between this glimpse, in so public and already, as it were, historical a setting, and the multitudinous private glimpses of King he enjoyed in the leathery, cluttered, cozy, tobacco-scented bachelor quarters where, emerging from separate bedrooms and returning from divided duties, they often shared morning bacon and evening claret. King was always impeccable, appearing clean-shaven even at midnight and his masculine odors skewered by a volatile dash of bay rum or Eau de Cologne. Righteous indignation strengthened Buchanan’s clarion voice as it asked aloud, “What is the evil of which the Southern States complain? Numerous abolition societies have been formed throughout the Middle and Northern States; and for what purpose?” To vent New England’s perennial Puritan spleen, he knew the answer to be, and to effect a diminution of the South’s economic strength and prosperity relative to that of the North, with its industrial wage-slaves and miserable immigrant urban hordes. But he contented himself with a sop to the constituency at his back, that stew of Pennsylvania voters, heated by the national-bank issue and the hypocritical Philadelphia gang headed by Biddle and Dallas and the Quaker plutocrats: “It cannot be for the purpose of effecting any change of opinion in the free States on the subject of slavery. We have no slaves there; we never shall have any slaves there.”
King had a beautiful dark-eyed way of gazing, on the edge of anger, like Ann Coleman in the old days, as if a fathomless pool was welling up, and like Ann a spacious and strikingly white forehead, hers the effect of general feminine pallor and his the product of the broad-brimmed planter’s hat faithfully worn against the Southern sun. That lustrous black gaze appeared to interrogate and then to confirm Buchanan as he informed the assembled Senate, “The object cannot be to operate upon the slaveholders; because the Abolitionists must know, every person within the sound of my voice knows”—the crucial paradoxical point, the justification for the path of moderation and patient forbearance—“that their interference with this question has bound the slaveholding interest together as one man against abolishing slavery in their respective States.”
One man: King himself had often told his roommate how his views, barely distinguishable, when he was a youth in North Carolina, from those of a Pennsylvanian, favoring gradual emancipation followed by African resettlement in Liberia (of which hopeful young nation Buchanan’s cousin Thomas was presently Governor), had hardened in Alabama, as cotton plantations overspread the state, to an adamant patriotic defense of the peculiar institution from the assaults of those who, not living with the negro, quite fail to comprehend him—his limitations, uses, and needs. Buchanan yearned to protect King and his fellow Southerners from the slanders of the North much as he had unavailingly sought to shelter Ann from those sarcasms of her unfeeling parents and brothers which had crowded and blighted the space their tender union had required for proper ripening, for arranging its mutual sustenances with delicacy and patience. Giddiness at the chasm of time that memory opened under him threatened to weaken Buchanan at his very moment of pronouncing an incontrovertible fact: “Before this unfortunate agitation commenced, a very large and growing party existed in several of the slave States in favor of the gradual abolition of slavery; and now not a voice is heard there in support of such a measure. The Abolitionists have postponed the emancipation of the slaves in three or four States of this Union for at least half a century.”
King and his friends were, as Calhoun increasingly betrayed signs of not being, firm Union men, like Buchanan horrified by any attempt to rend the fabric of federal unity. Only madness, the madness of blood and fire and gunpowder that lurks in the wounded brains of some few marginal opportunists, could dream of destroying a fabric knit so circumspectly, with so cunning an interplay of checks and balances, rights and obligations. “They have, by their interference, produced such a state of public opinion that no man within these States would now be bold enough to raise such a question before any of their Legislatures.” This fact, of doctrinaire extremism, given publicity by an irresponsible press, intimidating the voices of moderating reason, had been learned from King and other responsible Union men of the South. A certain pity for the black man, with the friendly images of his Daphne and little Ann Cook and Enoch the colored barber on Queen Street present to his mind, now shadowed Buchanan’s voice, as King gazed unwaveringly upon him, seeming to ask a public show of loyalty that would enrich this evening’s nightcap of claret.
“What, then,” the orator asked, and even the ladies in the gallery seemed to rustle themselves into silence, and the negro attendants grew still as they lounged in the doorways and along the back wall, where on this bitter winter day an arc of fireplaces was all alight and dancing with flame, “is the purpose of these societies—I will not say the purpose, for I cannot, and do not, attribute to them such unholy intentions—but what is the direct tendency of their measures? To irritate and exasperate the feelings of the slaves; to hold out to them vague notions and delusive hopes of liberty; to render them discontented and unhappy, and, finally, to foment servile insurrection, with all its attendant horrors, and to cover the land with blood.” Blood! He thought of his sister Jane spitting blood in Mercersburg. He thought of the misery wrought by last year’s financial panic and widespread collapse of banks, and of the dangers of war wrought by the seizure and sinking of the Caroline on the Niagara, and of the old King William IV dead and his willful eighteen-year-old niece now queen in a world made perilous by Britain’s bullying ships, and of his own sister Harriet and her husband, Robert Henry, wasting away in Greensburg with all their children, and when he thought thus death indeed seemed to be steadily scything through the field of the world and our poor attempts to forestall the angels of ruin and destruction as pathetic as a voiceless outcry of grasses.
Yet, it was crystal clear, the attempt at forestallment must be made, beneath God’s heavy heel, while the Abolitionists ignorantly clamored for absolutes the Constitution had disavowed. “However devoted to the Union the South may be,” Buchanan warned aloud, a pregnancy in his voice like a bulging tear about to overflow a lower lid, “the cup of forbearance may yet be exhausted. If the father of a family be placed in such a deplorable condition”—and the memory of his own father returned, his bulky shadow moving in the low dark log cabin at Stony Batter, moving swiftly as
a bat flitting amid the sparks from the fireplace and the wavering candle over in the corner where baby Maria slept in her cradle, and little Jane on her trundle bed, their father moving things about just as he scrapingly moved barrels and boxes all day in the store, closing up the cabin for the night, against the Indians and wolves, the bears and drunken drovers and incited slaves—“that he cannot rest at night without apprehension that before the morning his house may be enveloped in flames, and those who are nearest and dearest to him may be butchered, or worse than butchered,”—the fair sex forced to submit, it might be, at an extremity of earthly misfortune, to the black man’s untamed animal appetites—“the great law of self-preservation will compel him to seek security by whatever means it may be obtained.” Killed, it is nearing twenty years ago, that vigorous shadow of paternal protection, by a bolted carriage horse, the old man’s head striking the iron tire, and proving to be the less hard. Died without a will, leaving it to his overworked son, freshly elected to the Congress, to untangle the estate.
“Now, sir,” Buchanan told the Senate in the singular, as if all the manifold personalities, participating and witnessing, within the chamber were in fact gathered within the attentive, receptive masculine face at the etched oval center of his fluctuating field of vision, his two eyes ever contending in their impressions rather than, as with most men, effortlessly harmonizing, “I have long watched the progress of this agitation with intense anxiety, and”—the confidentiality of his voice dropped to the pitch of earnest intimate conversation—“I can say in solemn truth that never before have I witnessed such a deep pervading and determined feeling as exists at present upon this subject among the sober and reflecting men of the South.” Sober, reflecting—such was King. He is among the best, purest, & most consistent public men I have ever known, Buchanan will write fourteen years later to Franklin Pierce, a few months short of Pierce’s inauguration and King’s death, & is, also, a sound judging and discreet counsellor. Also in 1852 he will tell another correspondent, I have written you such a letter as I have never written to any other friend except Col. King.