Memories of the Ford Administration (30 page)

W. R. D. King [I wrote] is one of those eminences whose strong impression on their own times has suffered a gradual erasure upon the tablets of history. Five years older than Buchanan, he was born into the planter class of Sampson County, North Carolina; he graduated from his state’s university in 1803 and won admission to the bar in 1806. He served in the state legislature and was elected to Congress in 1810, at the
age of twenty-four; he was one of the young “War Hawks” who voted, in 1812, the fledgling nation into another war with Britain. Presumably [
Retrospect:
unable to locate facts of military career and rank; will do further research if this section is used in your Ford issue (unlikely)], it was amid the scattered and unsatisfactory engagements of little Madison’s little war that King earned the title of “Colonel” with which Buchanan in his letters and public addresses invariably honored him. In 1816, King was appointed secretary to the legation, headed by William Pinkney, to the Kingdom of Naples and then to the Court of St. Petersburg—those chilly parqueted halls constantly reverberant, it seems, with the tread of the thick boots of American politicians. In 1818 King moved to Dallas County, in Alabama, and in 1819 was elected Senator from that state. Thus he, thanks to faithful re-election by the sufficiently pleased voters of his adopted state, for fifteen years figured near the forefront of a golden age of the Senate, when the inexorably rising tensions of a growing nation divided by the slavery issue incited an epic eloquence from such giants of oratory as Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Benton; King, like Buchanan, Silas Wright, and John Crittenden, must be counted in the second rank of these noble arguers of the nation’s complicating case, but contemporary vision did not perceive a striking difference in stature. History buries most men, and then exaggerates the height of those left standing. King was president
pro tempore
of the Senate from 1836 to 1841, an office made unusually important by the erratic temper and rare attendance of Van Buren’s Vice-President, Richard Mentor Johnson, a profligate Kentuckian whose hammerlock on celebrity was his slaying of the Indian chief Tecumseh (“Rumpsey, dumpsey,” went his campaign chant, “Colonel Johnson shot Tecumseh”) and whose fathering
of two daughters by his mulatto mistress was so flagrant an indiscretion that even Jackson, who had pushed Johnson upon Van Buren, by 1840 admitted him to be a
dead wait
[
sic
] on the Democratic ticket. When, in 1850, Vice-President Fillmore became President upon Zachary Taylor’s abrupt death, King was elected to preside over the Senate.

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 ringingly 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.”