The Journal of the Civil War Era

James Buchanan is having a moment. As current events threaten to displace him from his habitual ranking as the worst-ever president, scholars are paying renewed attention to his political career and to his personal life. In Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, Thomas J. Balcerski argues that the personal and the political are inextricable in Buchanan’s biography, while the contributors to a new edited collection, The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens: Place, Personality, and Politics in the Civil War Era, have mixed opinions about the significance of personality within politics. Both books promise in their titles to situate Buchanan within a broader cast of characters; however, Buchanan hogs the limelight, whether because the political significance of his (terrible) presidential administration overshadows King’s and Stevens’s political careers or because of his own inherent interest as a person.

Balcerski describes his work as a “dual biography” (14), and following biographical convention he narrates Buchanan’s and King’s lives from cradle to grave. Both men were born in the first generation following the American Revolution, King in North Carolina in 1786 and Buchanan in Pennsylvania in 1791. Their lives followed parallel tracks, each raised in families privileged enough to provide them with a college education, each entering politics while still young, and neither marrying as expected. It’s that final commonality that brings them together as paired subjects in Bosom Friends. When King and Buchanan were both serving in public office in Washington, D.C., during the 1830s, they boarded together in the so-called bachelor’s mess and formed an intimate connection. The nature of that connection was the topic of sexual gossip during the antebellum era and has been the subject of historical speculation ever since. Balcerski intervenes in this innuendo-rich but evidence-light tradition by providing the first extensive study of Buchanan and King’s relationship, focusing on the period from 1834, shortly before they began boarding together, until 1853, when King died from tuberculosis. Balcerski’s research is prodigious. The book draws on manuscript collections in archives from [End Page 108] twenty-one states, the District of Columbia, and the United Kingdom. In all that evidence, Balcerski reports, he has found scant evidence to support the claim that Buchanan and King were anything other than friends. He situates Bosom Friends within a tradition of scholarship on homosocial friendships, exemplified by Richard Godbeer’s The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (2009), which highlights the importance of platonic bonds between men in the early nineteenth century and dismisses as anachronistic the sexual interpretations applied by contemporary scholars to historic expressions of same-sex affection. When Buchanan wrote to King that he wished to have “taken you by the hand” (111), he was using a conventional formulation of the period. The important point, according to Balcerski, is not that Buchanan and King were lovers, but that they were both bachelors who leveraged male friendships to serve their political aspirations. Judging from the evidence, they weren’t even that close.

The problem of evidence is central to queer history. Historical conventions of speech that silenced talk of same-sex sexuality, the posthumous burning of letters by relatives with an eye to posterity, and the pruning of archives by official memory keepers have all resulted in the erasure of LGBTQ people from the past, a fact that has inspired queer historians to...