Flashback, March 1853: King, Unusual VP, Takes Oath in Unusual Place

William Rufus King is not an instantly recognizable name, but in his extremely short tenure as Vice-President under Franklin Pierce, he still recorded some firsts.

For one thing, he became the first—and, to date, still the only—Veep to take the oath of office outside the U.S., and on a date different from his running mate. Second, he assumed office when he, and just about anyone else with any knowledge of the situation, was aware that he was gravely ill. In fact, it required an act of Congress that his swearing-in occur not March 4—the way all Presidents and Vice-Presidents had done (and would do) from Washington’s second inaugural to FDR’s first—but March 24. Third, it is very possible that he was the first homosexual to achieve the Vice-Presidency—and his purported lover may have been the first homosexual President of the U.S.

Several years ago, a controversy flared up over C.A. Tripp’s claim that Abraham Lincoln was gay. Not only was the explanation highly speculative, but the supporting “evidence” was threadbare. As it turned out, many gay-rights advocates might have ignored a considerably more likely prospect: Honest Abe’s predecessor, James Buchanan.

Tripp made much of the 16^th President’s closeness to the friend of his young manhood, Joshua Speed. But they stopped being on easy terms with one another after Lincoln’s marriage to Mary Todd. Lincoln would go on to father three sons. Even during his time in office, when enemies seized on any remotely plausible rumor to cast doubt on his personality and policies, nobody thought to throw this particular rumor about intimate relations with men at him.

Nevertheless, who can blame gays for claiming the Great Emancipator as an Executive Branch role model? Certainly, you wouldn't want Buchanan, nor the good friend of his listed by Time magazine as among the 10 worst U.S. Vice-Presidents. (This ranking, by the way, was patently unfair: King had only three weeks to live after his inaugural oath, so he did not have time to cause mischief, as, for instance, Spiro Agnew and Dick Cheney did. By rights, Time should have given him no more than an incomplete.)

But it is important to recall this about King's short tenure: the Vice-Presidency—a position only the proverbial heartbeat away from the most powerful office in the nation—would be occupied by a man who himself was already dying of tuberculosis.

In a couple of ways, it seems inconceivable today to anoint for such a job an old party warhorse such as King:

*The fear that the President might die in office has been so frequently justified by events that parties are loath to nominate someone who is not physically vigorous—or, at least, who is not constantly monitored by physicians (e.g., cardiac patient Cheney). King was the same age at the time of his election as Joe Biden, but modern medical, nutritional and exercise knowledge enable Obama’s Veep to endure the stress of a campaign and office better than the running mate of Pierce. (Screening has allowed doctors to test whether additional problems are surfacing from Biden’s two aneurysms from 25 years ago.)

*Parties and Presidential candidates no longer fear running mates with their own independent sources of power, as Aaron Burr had when he vied with his ostensible boss, Thomas Jefferson, for the Presidency in the House of Representatives, in the disputed election of 1800.

*Vice-Presidential candidates are no longer content to sit at home, awaiting the verdict of voters, but instead are expected to barnstorm across the country, appearing in all media, all the time.

And yet, in another sense, our age can identify all too readily with King. Those living in a bitter era when a Congressman can leap to his feet and shout “Liar!” at the President during a State of the Union message can begin to understand an antebellum Congress in which duels were not uncommon and a U.S. Senator (Charles Sumner of Massachusetts) could be nearly caned to death right on the floor of the chamber over the slavery issue. King himself almost became involved in two duels, and he was considered one of the more even-tempered men of the Senate.

In fact, King was thought of as one of the above-average members of that body. He was certainly not intellectual, nor oratorical, so he, by default, could not be considered in the same breath as the “Great Triumvirate” of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. But, for all his sympathies as a slaveholder, he continually tried to tamp down secessionist fervor in the South (even joining in the desperate effort to craft the Compromise of 1850). Furthermore, even though he insisted on wearing powdered wigs long after they had gone out of fashion, his bearing was consistently acclaimed as handsome.

In short, he looked and acted like a Senator. His colleagues thought so well of him that, between 1836 and 1850, King won a record 11 elections to the post of Senate president pro tempore, the constitutionally recognized officer of the Senate who presides over the chamber in the absence of the vice president.

One Washington figure to whom he especially endeared himself was Buchanan. King met the future president in 1834, began rooming with him two years later, and continued to do so (except for King’s break for a diplomatic posting to France) until his final illness.

By itself, men sharing the same house, even the same bed, was not unusual in 19^th century Washington, since lack of ready transportation forced Congressmen into unusual arrangements. Some historians have pointed to a broken-off engagement that ended tragically with his fiancee’s early death as the reason why Buchanan never married, rather than any repressed homosexual leanings. Moreover, imposing post-Freudian understanding of relations between men up through the 19th century can be an anachronistic exercise, as expressions of friendship tended to be more effusive in those days.

But the relationship between Buchanan and King was close enough to set off more gossiping than normal, marked by the following:

* The two men were nicknamed “the Siamese Twins”;

* Andrew Jackson (whose lead King followed on Capitol Hill) dubbed the Alabaman "Miss Nancy," and

* Buchanan and King were lifelong bachelors, without children.

In other words, even much contemporary comment took note of them. 

One incident in particular fueled speculation about King. The origins of his near-duel with Clay are well-known (recorded in Congressional remarks), but not what lay behind an incident involving Major Michael Kenan back in Cahaba, Alabama. The major’s insult led King to withdraw a dagger from his cane and pass it across Kenan’s chest. Kenan then sent a challenge to King, which the senator refused to accept because of the nature of the insult. Kenan then induced a neighbor to challenge King, and this duel was only averted when the neighbor, after due consideration, decided it wasn’t worth engaging in an affair of honor when he was totally unaware of what it was really about.

One of my college professors, taking note of Buchanan’s childless status, suggested that lack of potency (wink, wink!) also underlay the president’s ineffectual attempts to head off secession. Nowadays, that kind of insinuation would have landed my professor before an academic committee, where he would have been fortunate to emerge unscathed. (In any event, his assumption is simply not historical: under the same reasoning, two reputed homosexuals or bisexuals, Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great--legendary masters of the battlefield--would have to be regarded as ineffective. The idea is preposterous on its face.)

Absent documentary evidence, any conclusions about the sexuality of King and Buchanan, like that of Revolutionary War general Baron von Steuben (discussed in a prior post of mine), can only rest on speculation. What is not speculation is that, when Buchanan’s bid for the presidential nomination at the 1852 Democratic Convention foundered, King was offered the consolation prize—the Vice-Presidency—to placate his close friend and allies in the Southern wing of the party, who had pushed his candidacy for the office for the last dozen years.

Shortly after he and running mate Franklin Pierce won the subsequent election, King fell ill. With doctors diagnosing tuberculosis, King journeyed to a sugar plantation in Cuba in the hope that a warm climate would help. Eventually, he notified Congress that he was too sick to make it back to Washington in time for the inauguration, so his former colleagues passed an act enabling him to take his oath outside the U.S. 

King was so frail when the oath was finally administered that he had to be lifted to his feet by two soldiers, the better to see the brown mountain peaks in the distance. With his condition deteriorating rapidly, he determined to leave Cuba so he could die at home. He was back at his Alabama plantation, Chestnut Hill, for only one day when he passed away on April 18, 1853, less than a month after perhaps the most unusual Vice-Presidential inauguration in American history.

In the end, it matters less whether Buchanan was literally intimate with King than that the future President— whose Mennonite, Quaker, and even many Democrat neighbors in the free state of Pennsylvania regarded slavery with horror—was metaphorically involved with the slaveholding class served by King—a group that gave Buchanan crucial support in his successful election in 1856, before undercutting him in the run-up to the Civil War. How King might have reacted to this turn of events regarding his very close friend rests on the same kind of speculation that has accrued ever since on the real nature of their relationship.

(The perhaps somewhat idealized image of King accompanying this post, taken from around 1840, comes from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)  

Flashback, November 1852: Pierce Elected Prez, to His—and Nation’s--Later Rue

Benefiting from good looks, a campaign biography by a famous novelist and a maladroit rival, Franklin Pierce roundly defeated Winfield Scott, his Army boss in the Mexican War, on November 2, 1852, in their race for the Presidency. Four years later, however, however, the Democrat left the White House so unpopular that his party didn’t dare renominate him for a second term, and Pierce himself had lost whatever joy his initial convincing victory brought him.

Faithful reader, you’re probably wondering why I’m writing about a nonentity such as Pierce. You might not have even heard of him, let alone know anything about him.

But there happen to be excellent reasons for getting to know the 14th President:

*Candidates who win the nation’s highest office, no matter their degree of fame, are remarkable in and of themselves. It takes drive to be positioned to win the White House.

*Such is the dynamic nature of American politics that each Presidential election is likely to reveal fascinating aspects of campaigning—and this one was no exception.

*This election offers proof that, even with two admittedly uninspiring candidates, voting really does count.

Let’s start with point #2. Many of us would love to have someone, anyone, write something nice about us for mass consumption, but imagine if that person was a friend writing a full-length campaign biography. Such was the case when Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852) for his old Bowdoin College chum. As Slate contributor James M. Lundberg notes, the book came at the height of Hawthorne’s great creative powers—which the novelist needed to call upon as he tried to explain why Pierce’s record more than a decade before as a Congressman and U.S. Senator from New Hampshire wasn’t especially stellar. “Having a powerful and influential author like Nathaniel Hawthorne lended a lot of credibility to Pierce’s campaign,” observes blogger Lucas Mills. “He was able to reach a certain audience that may have not listened to his views before.”

(Not every fine American novelist can bring himself to support a candidate in such a way. John Steinbeck, for instance, turned down a chance to write a novel that would damage Richard Nixon—though, as we learned from a recent letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review by biographer-blogger Bill Steigerwald, the future Nobel laureate didn’t mind a bit of skullduggery right out of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man—i.e., spreading gossip that Tricky Dick was seeing a psychiatrist.)

That brings to mind point #1 above. Despite his comparative obscurity, then and now, Pierce did possess significant gifts that enabled him to achieve the White House at age 49—the youngest man to achieve the office up to that point. His legal ability and standing in the Democratic Party were high enough that James Knox Polk had contemplated appointing him Attorney-General at the outbreak of the Mexican War. Instead, Pierce--first volunteering, then being commissioned a colonel by the President--became a war hero after being wounded in battle.

In public, Pierce was an accomplished speaker—so much so that he delivered his inaugural address from memory—and in private he was pleasant, the kind of inoffensive-seeming politico who could unite a Democratic Party hopelessly divided among several candidates at their 1852 national convention. On the 49^th ballot, Pierce won the nomination.

Pierce’s good fortune continued in the general election. Scott might have been America’s greatest soldier until Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant won enduring fame in the Civil War, but in contrast to his genial opponent, he was pretentious enough to have richly earned the nickname "Ol' Fuss and Feathers" while in the military. He was also an inept candidate, disregarding handlers’ sound advice to say nothing concerning his party’s platform position on the divisive Compromise of 1850. That angered enough anti-slavery Whigs annoyed by that omnibus bill’s Fugitive Slave Act that they did not support the Whig nominee in the fall--at the same time that his general anti-slavery feelings alienated Southerners.

Ambition had taken Pierce far, but now it would take a toll on his family and his country alike. A decade before, Jane Pierce, a shy, retiring type, had persuaded her husband to give up his Senate career for the family. You can imagine her shock when, after being told by Franklin that he had no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, he informed her it had been offered to him—and he had accepted. Jane swooned upon hearing the news.

The following January, after the election, the family were traveling when their train was derailed. The last of the Pierces’ three sons, 11-year-old Bennie, died in the accident. The grieving mother became depressed, reclusive and erratic, writing letters in the White House to her dead son.

Franklin, distracted as much by his own grief as much as his wife’s fragile mental state, could not see that his “Doughface” position as a Northerner—i.e., appeasement of secessionist-leaning slaveholders—was only emboldening them rather than preserving the Union. The Kansas-Nebraska Act that he signed split the nation further and brought into being a new Republican Party founded on free-soil principles. And Pierce’s diplomatic threats to force Spain to sell Cuba to the U.S., or risk war, and to wink at William Walker's "filibustering" campaign in Nicaragua, were outrageous attempts to provide slaveholders with even more land than they had already.

Theodore Roosevelt's usual black-and-white view of people manifested itself in a bitter description of Pierce, which nonetheless contains a strong amount of rough justice. Writing as a historian in his late twenties, while his own political career was on hold, T.R. summed up Pierce as “a small politician, of low capacity and mean surroundings, proud to act as the servile tool of men worse than himself but also stronger and abler. He was ever ready to do any work the slavery leaders set him.”

Harry Truman, without T.R.’s Harvard education, was a pretty good amateur historian, with views more detailed and more pungently expressed than the Republican: 

"It was Pierce's foolish notion that he could cool down the slavery question and make people forget about it by doing two things: filling his cabinet with people of different viewpoints, and concentrating almost entirely on foreign policy and territorial expansion instead of slavery problems. But the net result was that his cabinet members kept bickering with each other and didn't accomplish much, and Pierce's moves in other directions didn't distract people's attention from the slavery problems for a minute.... Pierce was one of the best-looking men ever in the White House. He was also one of the most vain, which I guess was on account of the fact that he was so good-looking. But though he looked the way people who make movies think a president should look, he didn't pay any more attention to business as president of the United States than the man in the moon, and he really made a mess of things.... Pierce was the best looking President the White House ever had -- but as President he ranks with Buchanan and Calvin Coolidge."

The post-White House years of Pierce were, in their way, just as bad as his single term as President. Unlike Jimmy Carter, who built an exemplary post-Presidential career, or the two Bush presidents, who have been largely content to let their Democratic successors work without constant carping from the sidelines, he continued to espouse his Doughface sympathies throughout the Civil War. While continuing to say that secession was wrong, he criticized the Northern attempt to put out the southern rebellion, even doing so (with Hawthorne by his side) on July 4, 1863, the day after the Union’s bloody victory at Gettysburg. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated nearly two years later, he narrowly escaped the wrath of a mob outside his New Hampshire home with a return of his once-hailed oratory. He died in 1869, largely unmourned by the republic he had done so little to keep free and united.

Commentators at the time of the 1852 Presidential election, in a twilight era following the passing of Andrew Jackson and the Senate “Great Triumvirate” of Clay, Webster and Calhoun, were wont to bemoan their sorry choice of candidates. In a sentiment that many readers of this blog will agree with, The New York Herald even editorialized that there had not been such a "ludicrous, ridiculous, and uninteresting presidential campaign" since the U.S. declared independence from Great Britain.

But the choice did matter then, just as it does today. All kinds of conspiracy theories have circulated throughout American history. But the one that, without question, did exist at the highest levels of our republic was the effort by Southern slaveholders to entrench “the peculiar institution” even more firmly, not only where it currently existed but in territories and even foreign lands where it didn’t yet. Slaveholders with increasing secessionist sentiments flourished on Capitol Hill, the military, the Supreme Court, and the Cabinet, all abetted by Northern Presidents (Pierce, plus predecessor Millard Fillmore and Pierce’s successor James Buchanan) who thought the problem would go away. Lincoln was speaking more than a bit of truth when he spoke of "a powerful plot to make slavery universal and perpetual."

What would have happened if Scott had won instead of Pierce? Though he abhorred the possibility of civil war, he would later act as one of the few people with any kind of backbone advising President Buchanan,  even, at almost 74 years of age, nearly coming to blows with Georgia secessionist Robert Toombs over the attempt to supply Fort Sumter. Moreover, as a Southerner, he would not have provided the cover of Northern appeasement given by Pierce. Scott might have been a disagreeable man, but he was also more temperamentally inclined than Pierce both to face down the slaveholders on their home turf and not permit them further opportunities to spread their malign influence in the Western territories.