(This essay is a reflection upon Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, by Thomas J. Balcerski.)

Could the American Civil War have been averted if the “bachelor ticket” of Buchanan and King had been nominated and elected? This is the burning question with which Bosom Friends leaves me.

I once argued in a college essay that the ultimate reason for disunion was the nomination and election of Northerners — insensitive not only to Southern “interests,” but to the delicate sectional balance that Southerners were constantly concerned with maintaining — to the Presidency. As a Southerner myself, baptized in the bombastic belligerence of my section, I thought this a banterous suggestion, and not without intellectual merit, but also not something I would ever seriously defend. It is, on its face, just another piece of Southern belligerence: whatever the sins of my own people, we were committed to the Union, until y’all spoiled everything! (I might not always have been the perfect husband, but I tried to make our marriage work, while you were determined to see it fail!)

But (thoroughly beyond the actual points that Balcerski masterfully argued) Bosom Friends, if I had read it circa Fall 2016, might have made for strong evidence in support of my argument.

A recurring theme in the second half of the book is the increasing one-sidedness of Buchanan and King’s relationship: “King continued to give fully of himself and his family” — including encouraging Buchanan’s courtship of King’s eligible young niece, Margaret William King, which Buchanan took no more seriously than his other flirtations — “but Buchanan did not reciprocate.” [1] This was in contrast to their earlier emotional and political closeness: during the 1830s, when they served in the Senate together, they went to great lengths to hold together a mess centered around the two of them by “wooing” other Democratic congressmen to their mess — and their voting records converged to the point that, in their final congressional session together, of the questions upon which both men cast a vote, Buchanan and King voted the same way every time. They were known as the “Siamese twins” of the Senate.

But by the 1840s and ‘50s, Buchanan allowed not only emotional but also political distance to grow between himself and King, his bosom friend.

During the Polk administration (1845-49), when Buchanan was Secretary of State and King was Minister to France, Buchanan wholeheartedly embraced President Polk’s aggressive expansionist ideology, while King counseled caution. King understood that a vast territorial acquisition represented a bone for slaveholders and free-soilers to fight over. Though King was himself a slaveholder and a Southerner to his marrow (and could be a fierce sectionalist on occasion), he was also a staunch unionist. Faced with a choice between preserving the Union and building a slaveholding empire from sea to shining sea, King chose the preservation of the Union every time — but he was first a Southerner, and he knew his own people well enough to know that Southerners would ultimately answer to the clarion call of Calhoun’s infamously backhanded paeon to unionism: “The Union — next to our Liberty, most dear.”

Later, in the argument over slavery in the territories that ensued during the 1850s (as King had known and feared it would), Buchanan became a supporter of the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty championed by Stephen Douglas. King again counseled a different course: the extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean. By the end of Buchanan’s presidency (which King tragically did not live to see; his untimely death deprived his bosom friend of his wise counsel), this difference of opinion turned out to be the difference between union and disunion.

Perhaps because I’m a Southerner, inclined by Nature toward Jackson’s Democracy and against Whiggery, I always thought that Popular Sovereignty sounded reasonable. If there’s a disagreement about the laws of a territory, why not let the people of the territory vote and decide? It seems like common sense.

The trouble is easy to see in hindsight: the territories were open for settlement [2], without fixed voting populations, meaning Popular Sovereignty created an incentive for slaveholders and free-soilers to race west in a competition to create a voting population favorable to their vision for the future states which were to be formed from those territories — potent fuel for a violent explosion.

Popular Sovereignty did not take long to explode in the form of Bleeding Kansas, out of which the fraudulent pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution emerged during Buchanan’s presidency (1857-61) — and Buchanan, wanting to appease the South but lacking King’s political sensitivity and wise moderation, backed Lecompton to the hilt. The fire of Bleeding Kansas in just a few short years gave way to the blazing inferno of secession and the Civil War, for which Buchanan was widely blamed.

Today, James Buchanan is remembered (perhaps unfairly, though not without good reason) as the worst president in American history. How could a man of recognized quality — a longtime Senator from Pennsylvania, a Secretary of State, once offered a seat on the Supreme Court, four times a serious possibility for President of the United States — come to be regarded as the absolute worst president in American history?

Had Buchanan heeded the counsels of his bosom friend, perhaps he would be remembered for his many virtues instead of his greatest flaw.

Let me return, in conclusion, to my original question: Could the Civil War have been averted if the “bachelor ticket” had been elected?

It’s an empty question for a hundred reasons — foremost among them the fact that King died in 1853 of tuberculosis, a deadly disease unlikely to have been cured by the magic of friendship. Nevertheless, I think it’s a question with some merit, if only because it compels us to think about what a moderate unionist from the beating heart of the Deep South might have seen that was obscured from the sight of so many others.

King saw that the Missouri Compromise line, while undemocratic, snatched the bone offered by Popular Sovereignty from under the gnashing teeth of slaveholders and free-soilers alike. King, who had been willing to set aside his sectional interest when he counseled against the acquisition of new western territories from Mexico, might also have been more wary of offering the Lecompton faction in Kansas an uncritical embrace. Sadly, his bosom friend Buchanan was not so clear-sighted.

The clear vision and wise counsel of William Rufus King might have saved the spilling of untold gallons of American blood. [3]

Notes

[1] Balcerski, Bosom Friends, pg. 166.

[2] “Settlement” is, of course, a word which erases the presence of many thousands of indigenous people already settled in the territories — whom, to be sure, White American settlers had every intention of erasing.

[3] On the other hand, averting the Civil War would have extended the life of slavery by decades more. There might be an essay to be written about the uncritical fantasies of White Americans about the aversion of the war that ended the enslavement of millions of Black Americans. Unfortunately, that is beyond the scope of this essay.