Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

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.”

King had a beautiful dark-eyed way of gazing, on the edge of anger, like Ann Coleman in the old days, as if a fathomless pool was welling up, and like Ann a spacious and strikingly white forehead, hers the effect of general feminine pallor and his the product of the broad-brimmed planter’s hat faithfully worn against the Southern sun. That lustrous black gaze appeared to interrogate and then to confirm Buchanan as he informed the assembled Senate, “The object cannot be to operate upon the slaveholders; because the Abolitionists must know, every person within the sound of my voice knows”—the crucial paradoxical point, the justification for the path of moderation and patient forbearance — “that their interference with this question has bound the slaveholding interest together as one man against abolishing slavery in their respective States.”

One man: King himself had often told his roommate how his views, barely distinguishable, when he was a youth in North Carolina, from those of a Pennsylvanian, favoring gradual emancipation followed by African resettlement in Liberia (of which hopeful young nation Buchanan’s cousin Thomas was presently Governor), had hardened in Alabama, as cotton plantations overspread the state, to an adamant patriotic defense of the peculiar institution from the assaults of those who, not living with the negro, quite fail to comprehend him — his limitations, uses, and needs. Buchanan yearned to protect King and his fellow Southerners from the slanders of the North much as he had unavailingly sought to shelter Ann from those sarcasms of her unfeeling parents and brothers which had crowded and blighted the space their tender union had required for proper ripening, for arranging its mutual sustenances with delicacy and patience. Giddiness at the chasm of time that memory opened under him threatened to weaken Buchanan at his very moment of pronouncing an incontrovertible fact: “Before this unfortunate agitation commenced, a very large and growing party existed in several of the slave States in favor of the gradual abolition of slavery; and now not a voice is heard there in support of such a measure. The Abolitionists have postponed the emancipation of the slaves in three or four States of this Union for at least half a century.”