by John Updike
The rules forbade running for Assemblyman a third time. He was out of politics. He thought of going to Philadelphia to practice and his father talked him out of it. He had a bilious fever; he was prone all his long life to illnesses of stress. Staying in Lancaster, he worked at the law. A local judge judged of him, He was cut out by nature for a great lawyer, and I think was spoiled by fortune when she made him a statesman. In the years 1816–18 he thrice successfully defended the Federalist-appointed judge Walter Franklin against impeachment charges brought by the Democratic legislature, arguing the case with what a witness called great ingenuity, eloquence, and address. He based his case on the United States Constitution and its separation of powers. He was always to take a lawyer’s careful approach to government, seeking shelter within the Constitution. That the Constitution, like the Judeo-Christian Deity, encompassed ambiguities and mysteries—invitations to men to improvise—was not borne in upon him. He was, we might imagine, in the infatuated stage of what was to be described, on the floor of the Cincinnati Convention in 1856, as a consummated marriage: Ever since James Buchanan was a marrying man, he has been wedded to the Constitution, and in Pennsylvania we do not allow bigamy!
His income rose from $2,246 in 1815 to $7,915 in 1818. He was a rising young man, still in his twenties, not only a Mason but a Junior Warden, and then a Worshipful Master. He achieved entry to Lancaster’s highest social circles. Candlelit balls in the great room of the White Swan Inn, starlit sleigh rides through the wooded farmland—harness bells jingling, horse flanks steaming, young faces tingling, hands entwining beneath the heaped furs and buffalo robes. The stars overhead in their frosted robe of eternity, a lit house and hot punch and mince cakes at their destination, one of the ironmasters’ stone mansions. Buchanan’s partner at law, Molton Rogers, son of the Governor of Delaware, began courting Eliza Jacobs, daughter of Cyrus Jacobs, the master of Pool Forge. Rogers suggested that Buck join them some evening as an escort for Ann Coleman, Eliza’s cousin. Their mothers were sisters, daughters of James Old of Reading. Jacobs and Robert Coleman had alike labored for Old and alike wooed a daughter. Jacobs fancied himself a rough-cut farmer and stayed on his Pool Forge acres, near Churchtown. Coleman had citified ambitions and had moved his large family, the same year young Jamie had begun his preceptorship with Hopkins, to an imposing brick town house within a half-block of Lancaster’s Centre Square. Coleman had been Old’s accountant, and had become an associate judge, a church warden, a trustee of Dickinson College. Marital ambition had no higher to climb, in this Pennsylvania countryside, than an ironmaster’s daughter. Klein, a considerable extrapolator, says of Ann, A willowy, black-haired girl with dark, lustrous eyes, she was by turns proud and self-willed, tender and affectionate, quiet and introspective, or giddy and wild. His “James Buchanan and Ann Coleman” (Lancaster County Historical Society Journal, Vol. LIX, No. 1, 1955), in which he gives John Passmore’s weight as 450 pounds, expresses it thus: She was by all accounts a slim, black-haired beauty with dark, lustrous eyes in which one might read wonder, doubt, or haughtiness as the mood suited. Her portrait, which hangs now in the master bedroom at Wheatland, her frustrated lover’s restored home—a national shrine with costumed guides and postcards for sale—tells us little of this except the black hair. She has a long nose and lace collar and a stray ringlet on her forehead, and even in the stiff style of early-nineteenth-century portraiture she seems a little too alert-eyed and high-browed, a bit menacingly apprehensive beneath the high arch of her long brows; her shapely small mouth is poised as if on the cusp of a querulous remark. Klein goes on, in his high-stepping style, That she remained unmarried at twenty-three may have been because she was emotionally unstable, but more likely it was due to the stubborn insistence of her parents that she make an advantageous marriage. Her father was not only the richest man in Lancaster County but one of the richest in these young United States. Yet why would he or, by some accounts, her mother object to Buchanan, who was already a man of substance and reputation, as full of propriety and promise as a plum is full of juice?
Here we come to history’s outer darkness, where my book was to take on its peculiar life. For a long time, on the safe excuse of further research, I circled, fiddled, held fearfully back, until a deconstructionist arrived in the English department—a certain Brent Mueller, who while landlocked at some Midwestern teachers’ college had deconstructed Chaucer right down to the ground, and also left Langland with hardly a leg to stand on. Brent, a pleasant enough, rapid-speaking fellow with the clammy white skin of the library-bound and the stiff beige hair of a shaving brush, explained to me that all history consists simply of texts: there is no Platonically ideal history apart from texts, and texts are inevitably indefinite, self-contradictory, and doomed to a final aporia.
So why not my text, added to all the others? I leaped in. I began, I should say, to leap in, to overcome my mistaken reverence for the knowable actual versus supposition or fiction, my illusory distinction between fact and fancy. Here, dear NNEAAH and editors of Retrospect, in continuance of my faithful if prolonged answer to your inquiry, is a section of my text, composed under the benign overarch of the Ford Administration, and no doubt partaking of some of that Administration’s intellectual currents.
In the middle of September of 1819, under a late-summer sky of a powdery blue, in the rose-red little city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania—incorporated as a city just the previous year, and within the past decade the very capital of the commonwealth—a tall fair man and a thin dark woman shorter than he but tall for her sex could have been seen walking together along East King Street with all outward signs of affection and attachment. They moved—her face frequently upturned toward his, till instinctive decorum dictated she again lower her eyes, and his head somewhat curiously tilted and given to an occasional twitch, as if making a minor readjustment of perspective or as if better to hear the murmuring words of his vivacious and intense companion—past arrays of three- and four-story buildings built of brick or closely cut limestone, some heightened by dormers and decorated by wooden merchants’ signs carved and painted to simulate the forms of lions and stags, leopards and eagles, Indian chiefs and European kings and other such of the emblems that once haunted New World dreams. The gentleman wore a russet frock coat with claw-hammer tails and an ivory-colored silk waistcoat embroidered along the button-tape, a white shirt with upstanding collar, and a loosely but studiously tied linen cravat. His tight-fitting buckskin breeches descended into jockey boots of black leather, with downturned buff cuffs. The lady’s dress of dotted lawn was high-waisted in the Empire style, tied beneath her breasts with a tasselled pink gown-cord. Over it she wore a grape-colored cape of light cloth trimmed in black velvet. A gauzy frill wreathed her throat; a small cockleshell-shaped bonnet of close-woven straw, with a pleated taffeta ribbon, defended her face from the sun, here in this latitude but a half-degree north of the Mason-Dixon Line; in addition, she carried a lime-green parasol of moiré silk. This enviable couple were James Buchanan, one of Lancaster’s leading bachelors, an accomplished lawyer and experienced politician, and Ann Coleman, the city’s pre-eminent unmarried heiress. They had become engaged this summer, so their public appearance together was the opposite of scandalous. The parrot-bright signboards, the dimpled small window-lights of the basking brick housefronts, the subdued glisten of the slightly hazy day could be imagined to be smiling down upon them.
Buchanan, having overcome his customary reluctance to exchange the security of his heaped desk for the uncertainties of the wider world, had departed his office on East King Street—two doors down from the Dutchman’s Inn, where he had found lodgings when first arrived in Lancaster nearly ten years ago—and had called for Ann at the Coleman town house in the next block, at the corner of Christian Street. In this latitude, at this hour of five o’clock, as Ann looked up toward the steady, gentle, finicking, rather high-pitched voice emanating from her escort, she saw the sun—its daily arc levelling toward the equinox above the roofs
, shingled in slate or split cedar—blocked by his large head. A chill gripped her heart at this eclipse, with the reflection that this imposing man, who had taken her eye when, at the age of thirteen, herself newly moved to Lancaster, she had watched him from the upstairs parlor windows, a long-legged youth with a dutiful, obedient, ambitious hurry to him, striding to the Court House in Centre Square in the service of James Hopkins, his preceptor at law—that this man was truly a shadow, an opaque phantom looming abruptly large in her life. Two seasons ago, he had been a mere name, a dim figure in the gossip of her friends, the Jenkinses and Jacobses, spoken of with warmth and respect and yet a hint of sly amusement, whether layable to some eccentricity of Buchanan’s person or to the inferiority of his self-made, hard-fisted father’s antecedents was not clear. Though a legal and political eminence, he lacked, in Lancaster County terms, real wealth or status. Now it seemed she had conjured this shadow up, in something like three dimensions, through a weakness of her will, a crack in her self-esteem. Since childhood Ann had battled waves of obscurely caused distemper—a pettishness, a sense of unjust confinement, a nagging disorientation sometimes severe enough to keep her in bed. The reality around her, like a bread lacking the ingredient needed to make it rise, did not seem real enough, though other people appeared to be fully, even passionately engaged in its show of reward and punishment, failure and success.
Her fiancé was favoring her with the details of a pending lawsuit, of great importance, for it threatened the existence of the Columbia Bridge Company, which had so recently erected, at the site of the old Wright’s ferry, the first span across the mighty Susquehanna River, an internal improvement crucial to the commonwealth’s and indeed the nation’s western development. “A threat to this company,” he said, “is a jeopardy not only to the public weal but to the private fortunes of our friends, for William Jenkins and his Farmers Bank are heavily invested in the company’s continuing to thrive. I foresee, my dear Ann, if Jenkins favors me with the grave responsibility of fending off this potentially ruinous suit, many hours in my office this autumn and more than one tedious journey to the courts in Philadelphia.”
What was he trying to tell her? That, having attained the promise of her hand, he must abandon her for men’s business? By encouraging his suit, in despite of doubts voiced within her family and her circle of female friends, she had exposed herself to ridicule, and his duty now was to stand near her, as a solemn safeguard of the wisdom of her choice.
They had turned back from her doorway eastward on King Street, pausing on the corner of South Duke. On the unpaved streets, their reddish earth packed to a dusty smoothness by the accelerated traffic of summer, buggies passed almost silently, the black-painted spokes of their high wheels shimmering to disks of semi-transparency, and the trotting horses’ fetlocks angulating like ratcheted clock parts, faster than the eye could follow. The sidewalks, away from the paving stones rimming the cobbles of Centre Square, were boards irregularly laid, and the young couple’s heels rang on these thick planks pit-sawed from giants of oak and ash and walnut within Penn’s great woods.
“Am I to take this speech to mean,” Ann asked, softening her voice so that his head deferentially leaned lower, “that I must prepare myself for large remissions in your attendance? Having endured,” she went on, regretting the petulant edge she heard in her own voice, yet finding its total suppression impossible to achieve, “your long visit to your family in Mercersburg this August, followed by a bachelor holiday at Bedford Springs, I had hoped we might be much together in the coming social season. My parents crave to know you better; my sisters and brothers wish always to have their good opinions of you confirmed.”
He slightly flushed, and coolly smiled. “That is, to have, you are too gracious to say, the unflattering opinions that reach their ears dispelled.” His posture straightened; he stared ahead; Ann allowed this demonstration of wounded dignity to pass her notice in silence. Their leisurely pace, rendered a bit crabwise by their sideways attentiveness, carried them past Demuth’s Tobacco Shop, its signboard since 1770 a carven bewigged dandy holding an open snuff-box, and the inn named the William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, which even at this early hour was buzzing, behind its drawn shutters, of the evening mood. Across the street, another inn, the Leopard, emitted its own growl of growing merriment, and high up under the left eave of the—in the reduced scale of a North American settlement—grand stone façade of the Bausman house, a small sculpted face, known locally as the Eavesdropper, smilingly stared toward the conversing couple with blank stone eyes.
“Dear Ann, I must work,” Buchanan protested. “I must improve my lot to such a station that our wedding, if not precisely between equals by the world’s crass standards, is close enough to quell comment. Your brother Edward has been all too disposed to give ear to those who slander me as seeking your fortune. He has welcomed the poison into your family, and furthers its spread in the town.”
There was a subdued fire in this man, Ann reflected, that might warm them both, if she fan it gently. “Edward is not well,” she explained simply. “In his infirmity and rage at his own body, he vexes matters that do not concern him. He and Thomas, being just above me in age, and my constant playmates once Harriet died, imagine I am still theirs to control, and no man who proposed to be more than brother to me would please them.”
“They scorn me and provoke me,” Buchanan went on, forgoing some of his usual circumspection and showing, she felt, an unbecoming womanish pitch of complaint, “and encourage your father in his dislike.”
The vigor of his petulance heightened the color of his face—a plump face, with an extra chin softly cradled in the wings of his upstanding collar and with dents of an almost infantile dulcity at the corners of his lips—and imparted a slightly alarming rolling aspect to his eyes, which were a clear pale blue but mismatched by a cast in the left, which led it to wander outwards and to gaze, it seemed, past her head to interests beyond. At times he frightened her with what he saw and what he didn’t; he did not realize, in the case at hand, that it was her mother more than her father who had objected to their engagement. “He’s not a man,” her mother had pronounced more than once, pinching shut her toothless mouth on the verdict. “Such a popinjay wouldn’t have lasted an hour at my father’s furnace.” There was something in these iron people, Ann had been made aware, that stiffened at the approach of her swain with his artful, patient, silvery voice. Buchanan, in love with his own poeticizing mother, didn’t see that a woman could be as stout an enemy as a man.