Author Interview--Thomas J. Balcerski (Bosom Friends)

H-CivWar Author Interview--Thomas J. Balcerski (Bosom Friends)

Discussion published by Niels Eichhorn on Thursday, September 12, 2019

Hello H-CivWar readers, today we feature Thomas J. Balcerski to talk about his bookBosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, which came out in 2019 with Oxford University Press.

Thomas Balcerski is Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Connecticut State University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He has published in Journal of the Civil War Era, Civil War History, Pennsylvania History, and the Journal of Social History.

To start the interview, Tom, could you give our readers a brief idea of how this book came about and what your argument is?

TJB: Bosom Friends began as the first chapter of my dissertation at Cornell University. One of my central research concerns since graduate school has been the role of bachelors, and more generally the unmarried, in U.S. politics before the Civil War. From bachelors, I came to the historical category of friendship, a topic which my recent article for Civil War History also considers. In the dissertation, I looked at several examples of intimate male friendships in the antebellum period, but for the book, I decided to dig deeper into the relationship of James Buchanan of Pennsylvania and William Rufus King of Alabama. Given that the focus had shifted from a range of actors to just two individuals, I decided to write the book as a dual biography.

In brief, my book argues that an intimate male friendship shaped the political and personal lives of James Buchanan of Pennsylvania and William Rufus King of Alabama. Famously, James Buchanan is our only bachelor president (or more properly, the only president never to marry, since Grover Cleveland was also elected as a bachelor in 1884). Less well known to history is William Rufus King, who was elected vice president under Franklin Pierce in 1852. The pair, Buchanan and King, served together in the U.S. Senate from 1834 to 1844, during which time they often lived together. From there, the bosom friends separated, but their correspondence increased, which reveals a portrait of two Democratic bachelor politicians striving to obtain power on the national level. While both men lived, they wanted nothing more than to unite the North and the South in a bachelor ticket; however, it did not come to pass.

You have some rather interesting, unknown facts in the book, but what is most intriguing is your approach to the source material. How comprehensive and useful was the correspondence between Buchanan and King? How did your reading of the sources differ from previous scholarship?

TJB: In writing about the relationship of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, I was entering into previously charted, though often speculative and ill-informed, territory. I found that most prior histories that mentioned the relationship had not fully engaged their extant correspondence nor had they placed it within the larger political story of the antebellum period. One new approach that I took to determine the extent of Buchanan’s letters to King (now missing) was to read Buchanan’s docket notes on the backside of King’s letters to Buchanan. I subsequently created a calendar of their

Citation: Niels Eichhorn. Author Interview--Thomas J. Balcerski (Bosom Friends). H-CivWar. 09-12-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/4113/discussions/4689931/author-interview-thomas-j-balcerski-bosom-friends Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-CivWar correspondence (and that of their nieces) and included it as an appendix in the book. Here I took inspiration from Jill Lepore’s similar calendar in Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (2013), and like her, I welcome anyone who can help fill in missing gaps.

Other discoveries followed from the availability of new materials posted to private autograph collections for sale on the web. I determined, in one significant example, that Buchanan later cut off King’s signature on an 1844 letter, full of emotional expressions on King’s part, and sent it along to an inquiring autograph collector in the 1860s. This new information helps to explain why the conclusion of this letter from King to Buchanan is now missing. But the survival of the remaining content of this juicy letter indicates that Buchanan did not find them to be particularly suspect. Indeed, both Buchanan and his niece, Harriet Lane Johnston, carefully filed the letter for inclusion among his papers, subsequently donated to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

I noticed that you also mentioned that both men burned letters, how much did that complicate your project or any project to understand the two men? It seems you also had to rethink language and how people interacted during this period. I am thinking here about things like “habits of intimacy,” “bosom friends,” and “Siamese twins.” How do modern assumptions of such terms and historic perceptions cloud our understanding of King and Buchanan's interactions?

TJB: The sporadic nature of their correspondence has made a complete understanding of their relationship quite difficult. Historians are fortunate that Buchanan kept nearly every letter that he received and made copies of several letters which he wrote. Moreover, a very thorough effort was made by Harriet Lane Johnston following her uncle’s death to retrieve his outgoing correspondence. The Buchanan Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania are, accordingly, elephantine. The papers of William Rufus King, the largest collection of which is held by the Alabama Department of Archives and History, is relatively small. Certainly, King was less careful about preserving his papers in his own lifetime, but the ravages of war and weather also took their toll. The disparity in their extant papers helps to explain why Buchanan has been much better understood to history than King, who is largely forgotten.

While all historians face difficulties in locating sources, I faced a double challenge in trying to decipher words for their coded sexual and gendered meanings. Certainly, “intimacy” is a key word for my book, and yet it has radically changed in meaning since the nineteenth century. Similarly, “Siamese twins” has become a politically incorrect phrase for conjoined twins, whereas for many years, it was used metaphorically, often about political partnerships. Likewise, “bosom friends” described the friendships of men between men and women with other women (never across genders). This last phrase was used less pejoratively and carried positive connotations about same-sex intimacy. Accordingly, I am glad that I chose it as my title as opposed to the more negative “Siamese twins.”

Intimacy is certainly a good term to use for this friendship. You talk about this both in the book and your article for Civil War History, these two men, with others, resided during the congressional session in a boardinghouse together and placed political career ahead of marriage—how much did the boardinghouse experience create an even closer-knit friendship?

TJB: Washington boardinghouse friendships are at the heart of my research. Often called a “mess,”

Citation: Niels Eichhorn. Author Interview--Thomas J. Balcerski (Bosom Friends). H-CivWar. 09-12-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/4113/discussions/4689931/author-interview-thomas-j-balcerski-bosom-friends Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-CivWar boardinghouses permitted politicians a domestic space in which to live and work, socialize, and relax. Much of the personal and political intimacy formed during congressional sessions was forged in these humble spaces. For bachelors, boardinghouses provided an especially important outlet for socializing with others, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the unmarried seemed to seek out one another to live together. In the 1830s, for example, Buchanan, King, and several other congressmen formed a “bachelor’s mess.”

However, I did observe that these boardinghouses tended to be partisan more often than not. The “F Street Mess” is a classic case from antebellum history. Long observed in great surveys of the period, the group has been properly recognized as among the most powerful bloc of southern Democrats in the 1850s. By comparison, the “bachelor’s mess” of the 1830s was a cross-sectional group, including Northerners and Southerners. I think the change from the “bachelor’s mess” to the “F Street Mess” bespeaks an increasingly sectional partisanship by the 1850s.

It is interesting to use King and Buchanan, as they age, to observe the changing political landscape in the United States, especially as the country drifts toward sectional conflict. Now you have with King a forgotten V-P who died early in his term and Buchanan as president. Most presidential rankings, many done by political scientists, rank Buchanan at the very bottom, with Andrew Johnson, Donald Trump, Warren G. Harding, and his contemporary Franklin Pierce, do you think your research into the relationship between King and Buchanan challenges such a negative perception of Buchanan? Was he a man out of step with his political time? Do we let unfairly the secession crisis and his disintegrating cabinet overshadow his presidency?

TJB: Even in their own time, Buchanan and King were associated with the “Old Fogies” of the Democratic Party. Yet the connection to the past, especially to Andrew Jackson, could also work to their advantage, as they held conservative bona fides among the wider populace. The threats posed by sectionalism demanded stability, many reasoned, and as we do today, Americans look to their elders for wisdom and guidance. The challenges posed by the next generation, dubbed “Young America,” could not ultimately push the nation to a new political course before the Civil War. Intergenerational conflict in politics, of course, is still relevant today.

Paul Boyer once quipped that John Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) was the “best thing that has happened to James Buchanan since 1856.” I cannot tell you the number of people who have said something similar to me, only about the presidency of Donald Trump: “Buchanan can only go up from here”; “James Buchanan, previously our worst president…until now”; “You must love Trump!” etc. Spurred by such comments, I have recently researched the history of presidential rankings and determined how Buchanan entered, and has stayed in, the basement of American history. He was not a man out of step with his time, no, and, yes, history has judged him harshly for his part played in the secession crisis. It’s an overly critical assessment, certainly, and for that reason alone, he should be ranked higher. Interestingly, the Buchanan-King relationship, rather than lowering his ranking, has brought him back into the public eye. A gay president? Tell me more!

While the political history of the 1850s is not my primary focus, even so, I do engage Buchanan and Lewis Cass with regard to diplomacy, it has long seemed to me that Buchanan has been harshly judged. However, you already posed my next question. You are silent on the subject in the book and it seems that the lack of evidence is the reason, but how did we come to the assumption that Buchanan

TJB: In an article that I wrote forSmithsonian Magazine, I trace the history of speculation about Buchanan’s bachelorhood, and I come to the conclusion, as I do to a lesser extent in my book, that such a view of Buchanan as a gay president is part of a search for a “usable queer past.” I pose the question of a gay president merely to suggest that such an inquiry excites a broad popular interest. I think there’s a greater case to be made about the sexuality of William Rufus King, though his general neglect in American history almost makes it beside the point.

To conclude, Tom, how do you hope your book will impact scholarship the most? Do you think we will see more scholarly work on Buchanan or a biography of King? Do you think your book will help change misconceptions about Buchanan? Where do you intend to go from here?

TJB: I am sure that I share the hope of many authors when I say that I wish my book to be read. I’ve tried to write in an accessible manner, providing substantial notes and appendices for the convenience of scholars. I believe that both Buchanan and King will receive more sustained treatments in the years ahead (I know of several historians working on both individuals in biographical capacities). In the case of Buchanan, especially, the good folks at LancasterHistory are working toward establishing an official presidential library at their wonderful research facility. Whatever may happen, I do think that my book will provide a roadmap of how to interpret this important relationship in the lives of both men.

As for what comes next, I am currently working on a history of the Democratic Party from its early origins in the Federalist era to its unraveling in the 1920s (and perhaps beyond). Tentatively titled “The Party of No: When the Democrats Were Conservative,” I want to understand the longer history of an important question that I am often asked, a version of which: “When did the Democratic Party and the Republican Party switch their politics?” I think a study, part biographical of party leaders and part political history of the period, would help to explain the events that preceded this change.

Tom, thank you for this enlightening conversation and for taking the time to share some aspects of your book with us here on H-CivWar.