Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

The rules forbade running for Assemblyman a third time. He was out of politics. He thought of going to Philadelphia to practice and his father talked him out of it. He had a bilious fever; he was prone all his long life to illnesses of stress. Staying in Lancaster, he worked at the law. A local judge judged of him, He was cut out by nature for a great lawyer, and I think was spoiled by fortune when she made him a statesman . In the years 1816–18 he thrice successfully defended the Federalist-appointed judge Walter Franklin against impeachment charges brought by the Democratic legislature, arguing the case with what a witness called great ingenuity, eloquence, and address . He based his case on the United States Constitution and its separation of powers. He was always to take a lawyer’s careful approach to government, seeking shelter within the Constitution. That the Constitution, like the Judeo-Christian Deity, encompassed ambiguities and mysteries — invitations to men to improvise — was not borne in upon him. He was, we might imagine, in the infatuated stage of what was to be described, on the floor of the Cincinnati Convention in 1856, as a consummated marriage: Ever since James Buchanan was a marrying man, he has been wedded to the Constitution, and in Pennsylvania we do not allow bigamy!

His income rose from $2,246 in 1815 to $7,915 in 1818. He was a rising young man, still in his twenties, not only a Mason but a Junior Warden, and then a Worshipful Master. He achieved entry to Lancaster’s highest social circles. Candlelit balls in the great room of the White Swan Inn, starlit sleigh rides through the wooded farmland — harness bells jingling, horse flanks steaming, young faces tingling, hands entwining beneath the heaped furs and buffalo robes. The stars overhead in their frosted robe of eternity, a lit house and hot punch and mince cakes at their destination, one of the ironmasters’ stone mansions. Buchanan’s partner at law, Molton Rogers, son of the Governor of Delaware, began courting Eliza Jacobs, daughter of Cyrus Jacobs, the master of Pool Forge. Rogers suggested that Buck join them some evening as an escort for Ann Coleman, Eliza’s cousin. Their mothers were sisters, daughters of James Old of Reading. Jacobs and Robert Coleman had alike labored for Old and alike wooed a daughter. Jacobs fancied himself a rough-cut farmer and stayed on his Pool Forge acres, near Churchtown. Coleman had citified ambitions and had moved his large family, the same year young Jamie had begun his preceptorship with Hopkins, to an imposing brick town house within a half-block of Lancaster’s Centre Square. Coleman had been Old’s accountant, and had become an associate judge, a church warden, a trustee of Dickinson College. Marital ambition had no higher to climb, in this Pennsylvania countryside, than an ironmaster’s daughter. Klein, a considerable extrapolator, says of Ann, A willowy, black-haired girl with dark, lustrous eyes, she was by turns proud and self-willed, tender and affectionate, quiet and introspective, or giddy and wild . His “James Buchanan and Ann Coleman” ( Lancaster County Historical Society Journal , Vol. LIX, No. 1, 1955), in which he gives John Passmore’s weight as 450 pounds, expresses it thus: She was by all accounts a slim, black-haired beauty with dark, lustrous eyes in which one might read wonder, doubt, or haughtiness as the mood suited . Her portrait, which hangs now in the master bedroom at Wheatland, her frustrated lover’s restored home — a national shrine with costumed guides and postcards for sale — tells us little of this except the black hair. She has a long nose and lace collar and a stray ringlet on her forehead, and even in the stiff style of early-nineteenth-century portraiture she seems a little too alert-eyed and high-browed, a bit menacingly apprehensive beneath the high arch of her long brows; her shapely small mouth is poised as if on the cusp of a querulous remark. Klein goes on, in his high-stepping style, That she remained unmarried at twenty-three may have been because she was emotionally unstable, but more likely it was due to the stubborn insistence of her parents that she make an advantageous marriage . Her father was not only the richest man in Lancaster County but one of the richest in these young United States. Yet why would he or, by some accounts, her mother object to Buchanan, who was already a man of substance and reputation, as full of propriety and promise as a plum is full of juice?

Here we come to history’s outer darkness, where my book was to take on its peculiar life. For a long time, on the safe excuse of further research, I circled, fiddled, held fearfully back, until a deconstructionist arrived in the English department — a certain Brent Mueller, who while landlocked at some Midwestern teachers’ college had deconstructed Chaucer right down to the ground, and also left Langland with hardly a leg to stand on. Brent, a pleasant enough, rapid-speaking fellow with the clammy white skin of the library-bound and the stiff beige hair of a shaving brush, explained to me that all history consists simply of texts: there is no Platonically ideal history apart from texts, and texts are inevitably indefinite, self-contradictory, and doomed to a final aporia.

So why not my text, added to all the others? I leaped in. I began, I should say, to leap in, to overcome my mistaken reverence for the knowable actual versus supposition or fiction, my illusory distinction between fact and fancy. Here, dear NNEAAH and editors of Retrospect , in continuance of my faithful if prolonged answer to your inquiry, is a section of my text, composed under the benign overarch of the Ford Administration, and no doubt partaking of some of that Administration’s intellectual currents.

In the middle of September of 1819, under a late-summer sky of a powdery blue, in the rose-red little city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania — incorporated as a city just the previous year, and within the past decade the very capital of the commonwealth — a tall fair man and a thin dark woman shorter than he but tall for her sex could have been seen walking together along East King Street with all outward signs of affection and attachment. They moved — her face frequently upturned toward his, till instinctive decorum dictated she again lower her eyes, and his head somewhat curiously tilted and given to an occasional twitch, as if making a minor readjustment of perspective or as if better to hear the murmuring words of his vivacious and intense companion — past arrays of three- and four-story buildings built of brick or closely cut limestone, some heightened by dormers and decorated by wooden merchants’ signs carved and painted to simulate the forms of lions and stags, leopards and eagles, Indian chiefs and European kings and other such of the emblems that once haunted New World dreams. The gentleman wore a russet frock coat with claw-hammer tails and an ivory-colored silk waistcoat embroidered along the button-tape, a white shirt with upstanding collar, and a loosely but studiously tied linen cravat. His tight-fitting buckskin breeches descended into jockey boots of black leather, with downturned buff cuffs. The lady’s dress of dotted lawn was high-waisted in the Empire style, tied beneath her breasts with a tasselled pink gown-cord. Over it she wore a grape-colored cape of light cloth trimmed in black velvet. A gauzy frill wreathed her throat; a small cockleshell-shaped bonnet of close-woven straw, with a pleated taffeta ribbon, defended her face from the sun, here in this latitude but a half-degree north of the Mason-Dixon Line; in addition, she carried a lime-green parasol of moiré silk. This enviable couple were James Buchanan, one of Lancaster’s leading bachelors, an accomplished lawyer and experienced politician, and Ann Coleman, the city’s pre-eminent unmarried heiress. They had become engaged this summer, so their public appearance together was the opposite of scandalous. The parrot-bright signboards, the dimpled small window-lights of the basking brick housefronts, the subdued glisten of the slightly hazy day could be imagined to be smiling down upon them.