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.)  

This Day in Presidential History (Jackson Duels Over Horses, Wife)

May 30, 1806—Amid early morning fog, on the banks of the Red River in Logan County, Kentucky, Andrew Jackson—lawyer, planter, temporarily out of public life—engaged in a duel with Charles Dickinson, a Nashville attorney with a well-earned reputation as one of the deadliest shots in the state. Though Dickinson fired first and his aim was as true as ever, it wasn’t good enough—his opponent was only badly wounded.

The consequences of that day—the uproar over Jackson’s decision to continue the duel when he didn’t have to, along with the bullet that remained lodged inside him—would last for the remainder of Old Hickory’s life, and play no small part in creating his legend as a man not to be trifled with.

This is what happens when two men get excited over liquor, horses—and especially a woman.

Perceptions of Andrew Jackson have evolved dramatically over the last 70 years or so. As America rose to counter a foreign enemy (multiple enemies, in fact) in WWII, Hollywood contributed The Remarkable Andrew (1942), in which the spirit of the victor of New Orleans and seventh President (played by Brian Donlevy) comes to the aid of a wrongly accused small-town accountant (played by William Holden) who idolizes him.

Flash forward to 2010, nearly 40 years after America washed its hands of a conflict in Southeast Asia—and now amid two wars involving the Islamic world—when the Public Theater presented the Michael Friedman musical Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, described by The New York Times as “likely to remain a true reflection of these United States for many years to come.”

There’s a world of difference in these two worldviews, also shaped, to no mean extent, by two generations’ diametrically opposed perceptions of Jackson’s treatment of slaves and Native Americans. But they are united on one point, something that the unfortunate Mr. Dickinson (did I mention that AJ’s shot killed him?) would readily agree with: Jackson would fight.

There are people in this world who are too cocky for their own good, and I’m afraid Dickinson was one of them. Put together youth (25 years old), good looks, a decent legal practice (a letter of recommendation by his teacher, John Marshall, didn’t hurt), an agreeable wife and the aforesaid deadly aim (one that had gotten him through a number of duels already), and Dickinson thought he could survive anything.

He should have known better than to mess with Jackson. Not yet 40 years old, Old Hickory was already inspiring stories about his ferocious temper, his ability to take a devastating blow, and his capacity to strike back.

A few incidents (recounted briefly but with brio) in Jon Meacham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the President, American Lion, will suffice:

* Recalling wrestling matches in their youth on the frontier, an acquaintance remarked: “I could throw him three times out of four, but he would never stay throwed.”

* Captured along with his brother Robert during the American Revolution, the 14-year-old Jackson was ordered by a British officer to clean his boots. Jackson refused, claiming that he was a prisoner of war and should be treated as such. The redcoat swung his sword, leaving scars on Jackson’s skull and fingers—and hatred for a foreign force that so mistreated Robert in captivity that he died shortly after release.

* While riding circuit in 1798 as a justice of the Tennessee Superior Court, Jackson came face to face with Russell Bean, indicted for “cutting off the ears of his infant child in a drunken frolic.” Bean scared out of his wits the local sheriff, then, armed with a knife and pistols, proceeded to taunt a local posse sent to bring him to court. Jackson, however, made the astonished Bean drop his guns and surrender. It was not simply Jackson‘s blunt order (“Now surrender, you infernal villain, this very instant, or I’ll blow you through”), but his look, Bean confessed later, that did the trick. When Bean looked into the eyes of the sheriff and townspeople, he said, he saw, “No shoot”; when he looked into Jackson's, he read, “Shoot.” That meant, Bean concluded (in a phrase I can't help but love), it was time for him to “sing small.”

Surely Dickinson knew all this. He had to—there weren’t many lawyers out on the frontier, and he and Jackson were often rivals at the bar. The wonder is not really that he got into trouble with Old Hickory, but why he didn’t do so sooner than he did.

Dickinson, you see, touched on the most sensitive point in Jackson’s life: the origin of his marriage to his dear wife Rachel. The two had wed as soon as her first husband, Lewis Robards, obtained a divorce, in 1791--or so they thought. But, it turned out, Robards had only filed for divorce, and his petition wasn’t granted for another two years. As soon as the pair learned this, they went through the ceremony again to formalize things, though they already thought of themselves as man and wife.

Nevertheless, this meant that, technically, Andrew and Rachel had been living together unmarried, in an adulterous, bigamous relationship, for two years.

Meacham writes that Jackson’s marital situation caused such a scandal during the 1828 Presidential campaign because the nation’s mores had grown more conservative than those of Jackson’s frontier environment of the early 1790s. But even by the turn of the century, on the frontier, tongues were wagging.

One of these was Dickinson’s. The first time Jackson heard about this, he requested via Dickinson’s father-in-law, Col. Joseph Erwin, an apology. Jackson accepted Dickinson’s explanation—that he only started talking after too much to drink, and didn’t mean anything by it.

Over time, something of a myth has grown up around Jackson, to the effect that once you were on his bad side, not even God could get you off it. Not so: Seven years after the Dickinson imbroglio, Jackson became involved in another duel, with Thomas Hart Benton; received a bullet from that encounter; but later, in Washington, became an ally and diehard friend of Benton, by now a U.S. Senator from Missouri.

Unlike Benton, Dickinson wouldn’t live either to old age or into Jackson’s good graces. With the matter over Rachel seemingly taken care of, a dispute arose between the two over their shared passion for horseracing. Dickinson, exasperated by a forfeit and outright loss by a horse owned by Col. Erwin to one owned by Jackson, had one drink too many again, and again he made insinuations about Jackson and Rachel.

By this time, Jackson had also gotten wind of a rumor that some of Dickinson’s statements were about to make their way into print. Among Dickinson’s assertions: that Jackson was cowardly. Representatives from Jackson reached Dickinson before he could leave the state for Maryland (his birthplace and home of his ancestors) and demanded immediate satisfaction from the rash attorney. The meeting was set for May 30.

Jackson and his "second" for the duel were certain he couldn’t outdraw Dickinson, and determined that his best chance was somehow to withstand Dickinson’s shot before getting off one of his own. At this point, they hit upon a simple but (within the terms of the elaborate Code Duello formulated in Ireland in 1777) acceptable means of doing so: wear a loose coat that would provide a more elusive target for Dickinson.

All of this was unbeknownst to Dickinson, who was feeling even more confident (if that could be possible) on the way to the encounter, when, just for practice, he aimed at a string supporting an apple and cut the cord in two. Then, once he got to the site of the encounter and got the word to pace off, he turned almost immediately and fired.

The bullet scraped Jackson’s breastbone and broke some ribs—but more important, it didn’t touch his heart. Dickinson didn’t even know this much—all he could see was that Jackson stood as erect as ever. “Great God! Have I missed him?” Dickinson exclaimed, immediately sensing his own jeopardy—because now, by the Code Duello, Jackson could get off a clear shot at him.

Jackson pointed his pistol, aimed—and nothing happened: His pistol was at half-lock. At this point, by settled practice, Jackson, with his honor clearly established by his willingness not just to meet his opponent but to endure a shot from him, could have simply aimed at the trees, fired a worthless shot, called it a day, and let cooler heads smooth things over once again with his opponent.

But Jackson was reading the Code Duello very literally, and knew that an empty click technically didn’t count as a shot at all. This time when he aimed, he got his shot off, and it struck Dickinson in the abdomen. The latter was taken to a nearby house, where he bled to death from the wound.

Jackson and his second were 20 miles away when they noticed that Jackson was bleeding into his shoes. Some observers thought that Jackson didn’t seek immediate attention because he didn’t want Dickinson to have the satisfaction that he had struck him at all.

The Dickinson duel would return to haunt Jackson two decades later, when supporters of John Quincy Adams not only cited it as an example of the general’s intemperate nature, but also pointed to his decision to fire at Dickinson as a cold-blooded murder. It didn’t matter: unlike the disputed election of 1824, which ended up with Jackson losing the election in the House of Representatives despite winning the popular vote, this time he won walking away.

Dickinson was hardly the last person to underestimate Jackson’s fierce will. Nearly 30 years later, Jackson became the first President to suffer an assassination attempt, while he was leaving the Capitol as part of the funeral procession for a congressman. This time, by the standards of the day, the 67-year-old Jackson really was Old Hickory. But he reacted just the way he would have 30 years before.

After the assailant, named Richard Lawrence, attempted to fire at him, Jackson and the crowd rushed him. Lawrence, now with a second gun (and, by some accounts, close enough to touch Jackson’s coat), pulled the trigger again. Even with the different weapon, the gun misfired.

Now Jackson turned upon him, and Lawrence—like Bean and Dickinson before him—knew genuine fear, as Jackson, employing a trick he’d learned long ago on the frontier, swung his cane at the assailant’s stomach and brought him to heel.

Andrew Jackson was a hugely controversial figure, even for a position that seems to attract (or create) such types. His encounter with Dickinson illustrates one of the great faults of his personality: a propensity to enlarge a quarrel unto it became an unnecessary matter of life or death.

It also demonstrates, as certainly as his later near-death experience with Lawrence three decades later, one of his virtues: a physical fearlessness so absolute as to make men confident in themselves simply because they were associated with Old Hickory.

This Day in Literary History (Birth of William Faulkner’s Wild Great-Grandfather)

July 6, 1825—William Clark Falkner, the original of one of the major characters in the fiction of great-grandson William Faulkner, was born in Tennessee. 

Whatever commotion he might have caused after emerging from the womb, it was nothing compared with the swashbuckling path he forged in his violence-filled and –shortened life.

(Note: Though some scholars give 1826 as the year of birth, I’m following here the lead of Faulkner biographer Jay Parini, who assigns it to 1825.)

When Malcolm Cowley was editing The Portable Faulkner, the novelist helpfully created a genealogical and chronological chart to help keep his Yoknapatawpha County characters straight. 

At points, the chart becomes not merely helpful but remarkable (Faulkner revealed the fate of some characters—something he had not done in his teeming fiction in some cases), and not merely for critics but, in one instance, for biographers.

What Cowley really wanted was for Faulkner to reveal more details about himself—like what he did in World War I. 

Not biting (unlike Ernest Hemingway, who, as I indicated in a prior post, had exaggerated the circumstances surrounding his very real and credit-worthy war wound), Faulkner put him off by reciting the heroics of someone he regarded as considerably more fascinating: his great-grandfather, the man for whom he was named:

“He was prototype for John Sartoris: raised, organized, paid the expenses of and commanded the 2nd Mississippi Infantry, 1861-2, etc. Was a part of Stonewall Jackson’s left at 1st Manassas that afternoon; we have a citation in James Longstreet’s hand as his corps commander after 2nd Manassas. He built the first railroad in our county, wrote a few books, made grand-European tour of his time, died in a duel and the country raised a marble effigy which still stands in Tippah county.”

The image accompanying this post—from a statue of Col. Falkner (the Nobel laureate added the “u” years later)—comes nowhere near to matching the dark, burning eyes in the photo of the Faulkner family patriarch in Parini’s biography, One Matchless Time. That showed a man who let nothing stand in the way of an acquisitive streak more deathless than he was.

William Faulkner’s description to Cowley is correct, as far as it goes. But, probably because his ancestor’s life was too filled with incidents, he didn’t mention other items, which I first heard about in the late great Carl Hovde’s American Literature class at Columbia University (and which Parini elaborates on):

* At age 15, WC (or, as his descendants often referred to him, the “Old Colonel”) got into such a bad fight with his brother that he nearly killed him. With undoubted wisdom, he decided that a change of scenery, farther south, might be appropriate.

* In his travels, WC came across an uncle in prison on a murder charge. Perhaps negatively inspired by his example (surely there were a lot of potential land-grabbers who got into fights in this region, all of whom would eventually require legal counsel), he became a lawyer, even though he had no formal education.

* At age 21, WC got into another set-to, this time over a woman. He lost three fingers for his pains, along with his position in a state volunteer regiment.

* Here’s the fight I heard about in college that made my eyes pop: At age 24, WC found himself going mano a mano with a fellow who was sure the young lawyer had opposed his entrance into the local Knights of Temperance. (Let me get this straight: fighting over the Knights of Temperance?) This fellow had an intemperate reaction to rejection, taking it so personally that he pulled out a pistol and shot at WC at point-blank range. As Professor Hovde explained it, guns in those days had this swell habit of not always going off, and WC was an immediate beneficiary of this failure of firepower. He decided to turn the tables on his attacker with a weapon incapable of misfiring: a knife that he plunged into the other party. Yes, there was some trouble, but the jury bought his story of self-defense.

* He fought in the Civil War, in the manner described above by his great-grandson—only a bit more was involved. He developed a reputation for putting men's lives at risk that was remarkable even for many commanders in that war. He was voted out of the regiment he had helped raise, though he retained his rank of colonel.

* He made so much money from developing a railroad, as well as other business ventures, that by 1879 he’d earned $50,000—a nifty bit of change in those days.

* The Old Colonel also cut what passed for a literary career, including an 1880 novel called The White Rose of Memphis.

* In 1889, after a lifetime of constant motion, all things came to an end for WC when a business partner mortally wounded him in a duel, thus ending a remarkable life all too symbolic of the Deep South’s Gothic violence. WC's son decided against pursuing the matter because the murderer had plenty of friends who could make trouble for the younger Falkner in the business world. In any case, his great-grandson would give him a different kind of immortality in his third novel, originally called Flags in the Dust, then cut by an editor and reshaped into Sartoris.

This Day in Literary History

February 10, 1837 – Alexander Pushkin—poet, dramatist, fiction writer, the Russian equivalent of England’s Shakespeare and Germany’s Goethe—died two days after being fatally wounded in a duel with a French émigré officer who paid inordinate attention to the writer’s beautiful younger wife.

Dueling—a stupid way to die that also claimed the lives, closer to home to us here in America, of Alexander Hamilton and War of 1812 naval hero Stephen Decatur. It was a particular crime in that we’ll never know how much more might have been achieved by Pushkin had he lived.

I first became aware of the Russian through the work of an American: The Golden Gate, by Vikram Seth, a novel in verse that takes as its form the tetrameter sonnets used by Pushkin in his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin. (For examples of Seth’s mastery of this form, click here; for Puskkin’s, here.)

A good place to start in learning about Pushkin’s life is the 2003 T.J. Binyon biography. I emphasize “life” because you won’t get much critical analysis here of his lyric verse, short stories, the historical tragedy Boris Godunov, or Eugene Onegin.

What you will find is an understanding of the world that made the writer: country houses, salons, theater, gentlemen’s clubs, and brothels. From Pushkin’s correspondence – especially enormous given that he never reached his 40th birthday—as well as a continual pattern of love affairs, gambling debts and stormy quarrels, Binyon justifiably concludes, I think, that Pushkin may have suffered from manic depression.