Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan & William Rufus King by Thomas J. Balcerski (review)

The rise of the new social history in the 1960s and 1970s focused much attention on the intimate lives of political figures. In 1974, Fawn Brodie resurrected long-buried rumors of Thomas Jefferson's relationship to Sally Hemings, initiating a conversation that resulted in seismic shifts in both scholarly and public interpretations of Jefferson. In 1976, Jonathan Ned Katz suggested that the "communion" that William Rufus King claimed with James Buchanan deserved similar attention. Not until Thomas Balcerski's Bosom Friends has anyone truly taken up that challenge. The result is probably not what Katz expected.¹

"To riff on the familiar proverb," writes Balcerski, "politics makes not only for strange bedfellows, but for intimate ones as well" (18). Over the past quarter century, the search for the personal amidst the political has been a central, if often unspoken, theme in scholarship on the political culture of the early American republic. In The Overflowing of Friendship, Richard Godbeer demonstrated the importance of male-to-male friendships to the development of a more brotherly republic. In Affairs of Honor, Joanne Freeman examined how honor, as a relationship between men, situated its practitioners to know, and manipulate, other men's reputations, resulting in occasional interpersonal violence that had important political implications. Honor, she concluded, stabilized life in "the barely controlled chaos of national public life." In Field of Blood, Freeman traced how, after the 1820s, actions once deemed honorable ironically contributed to greater disorder in national public life and the decline of intimacy among politicians.²

As an analysis of the entangled relationships that formed between public men—personal friendships rooted in intimacy, political friendships that advanced common interests—Balcerski offers the best study to date. He argues convincingly that Buchanan and King's relationship "conformed to an observable pattern of intimate male friendships prevalent in the first half of the nineteenth century" (12) and that their friendship tempered their political differences, situating Buchanan, as a politically conservative northerner, to consent to southern demands and King, as a moderate southerner, to seek compromise even as fellow southern politicians pushed more reactionary visions of sectionalism. Buchanan and King "embodied both the political benefit and the moral difficulties of cross-sectional collaboration" (14).

The first two chapters describe Buchanan's and King's membership in the second generation of U.S. citizens, their rise in Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party (including King's defense of his honor through the code duello), and their youthfully awkward attempts at romance—Buchanan's with Ann Coleman, who broke off their engagement, and King's flirtations with Princess Charlotte of Prussia. Balcerski then turns, in chapters 3 and 4, to the "bachelor's mess," the Washington boardinghouse that single Democratic politicians shared and in which Buchanan and King's friendship blossomed. Washington was full of bachelor politicians, and over the 1830s, such living arrangements reinforced the personal intimacies and political ideas of all residents. In the early 1840s, as the Democratic Party's fortunes waned, so too did membership in the boardinghouse and the friendships created therein. The later three chapters trace Buchanan's and King's political fortunes, from their roles in James K. Polk's administration to King's vice-presidency under Franklin Pierce, and Buchanan's presidency. Balcerski demonstrates how, even as political aspirations physically separated them, Buchanan and King sustained their intimate friendship, although not to King's satisfaction at times. Throughout the book, Balcerski demonstrates how bachelorhood framed politics at different stages of the men's lives. As political and social history, Bosom Friends is an impressive study and should be read by anyone who wants to understand how the personal and political interacted in the early-nineteenth-century United States.

A reader coming to Bosom Friends to find an answer to the persistent question of Buchanan's and King...