James Buchanan is the answer to the only trivia question most people can attach to him, which is “who was the worst president?” He is the man who sat in the White House during the secession winter of 1860 and 1861 and watched, with the energy of a man watching paint dry, as seven states walked out of the Union and started assembling the machinery of a war that would kill three quarters of a million Americans. He did, by his own elaborate legal reasoning, essentially nothing, and he handed the wreckage to Abraham Lincoln with what looked a great deal like relief. The verdict has held for a century and a half: last place, the floor, the bottom of every ranking, the president against whom all other failures are measured and found comparatively acceptable.
But the verdict has buried two stories, and they are both more interesting than the cliché. The first is the full and specific shape of the failure, which was not mere passivity but a long series of active, deliberate choices to side with the slaveholding South, to rig a Supreme Court decision, and to force a fraudulent constitution on a territory that did not want it. The second is the man himself, and here is where the standard account goes quiet and careful and changes the subject. Buchanan was the only president in American history who never married. The most important and enduring relationship of his life was with another man, Senator William Rufus King of Alabama, with whom he lived for the better part of fifteen years, whom Washington gossip openly called his “wife,” and whose correspondence with Buchanan was deliberately burned by their families after both men were dead. The Bachelor President is a figure history has worked hard to flatten in two directions at once, softening the catastrophe and erasing the love, and the actual man is hiding in the gap between the two. This is an attempt to find him.
The Most Qualified Man in America
Here is the cruelest irony of the whole story: on paper, James Buchanan was arguably the most qualified man ever elected to the presidency, and he was the worst. Born in 1791 in a log cabin in the Pennsylvania backcountry, he built one of the most formidable résumés in American political history, the kind of curriculum vitae that looks, from a distance, like an unbroken ladder to greatness. He was a brilliant and wealthy Lancaster lawyer, a five-term congressman, Minister to Russia under Andrew Jackson, a United States senator, Secretary of State under James Polk during the years the country grew by a third and stretched to the Pacific, and finally Minister to Great Britain. He had spent decades inside the machinery of national power, and there was almost no office of consequence he had not held or mastered.
He was, in other words, the consummate insider, the careerist who had climbed every rung of the hierarchy with patience and cunning, and the Democrats nominated him in 1856 precisely because of it, and precisely because he had spent the bruising Kansas-Nebraska years safely abroad in London and thus carried fewer fresh wounds than his rivals. His experience also pointed in an ominous direction. As Minister to Britain he had co-authored the Ostend Manifesto of 1854, a document urging the United States to buy or, failing that, simply seize Cuba from Spain, partly to add another slave state and partly out of a frank belief in American expansion; it was the era of the filibusters, private armies of adventurers invading Latin American countries to plant slaveholding republics, and Buchanan’s sympathies ran in that direction. He arrived in the White House the safe, seasoned, experienced hand, the grown-up the frightened country had hired to manage the crisis, and 2026, which periodically reaches for the same reassurance, should note carefully what came of it. Experience is not courage, and a résumé is not a spine.
Solitary and Alone
To understand the Bachelor President, you have to go back to 1819 and to the one engagement of his life. As a rising young lawyer of twenty-eight, Buchanan became engaged to Ann Coleman, the daughter of one of the wealthiest iron manufacturers in Pennsylvania, and the courtship went wrong in ways the surviving record only half explains. Her family disapproved, suspecting the ambitious lawyer was after the family fortune, though Buchanan was already wealthy in his own right. Gossip reached Ann that he was paying attention to another woman. Distraught, she wrote to break off the engagement, and within days she was dead, having gone to Philadelphia where she died suddenly at the age of twenty-three. Rumors that she had taken her own life circulated immediately and have never been confirmed; the cause was left ambiguous, hushed, and unresolved, and it is treated here with the care it deserves rather than the certainty it cannot bear.
What is documented is the aftermath. The Coleman family blamed Buchanan completely, and when he asked to attend the funeral, they returned his letter unopened and barred him from it. He was shattered, writing that he had lost the only earthly object of his affection and that his happiness would be buried with her. And then he made the vow that would define the rest of his life and earn him his unique place in the catalog of presidents: he swore he would never marry, and he never did. For the next half century he carried on the genial flirtations expected of a Washington bachelor and formed no serious attachment to any woman ever again. Whatever the true tangle of grief, guilt, ambition, and inclination behind that vow, the practical result was the same. James Buchanan would go to the White House as the first and only Bachelor President, and the absence at the center of his domestic life would become, after his death, the single most argued-over fact about him. Historians have spent two centuries trying to read that vow, treating it variously as the lifelong wound of a heartbroken man, a convenient cover for inclinations the age would not name, or some private knot of the two that he carried, sealed, to the grave. The one thing it was not was incidental.
Mr. Buchanan and Colonel King
The companion of Buchanan’s life was William Rufus King, a courtly, elegant senator from Alabama who was no minor figure himself; he had helped found the city of Selma, served decades in the Senate, and would briefly become vice president of the United States under Franklin Pierce before his early death in 1853. For well over a decade in the 1830s and 1840s, the two men were very nearly inseparable. They shared lodgings in a Washington boardinghouse so dominated by unmarried men that it was nicknamed the Bachelor’s Mess, and as the other residents married off or lost their seats the household dwindled until it was just the two of them, keeping house together in the capital, walking to the Senate together, attending functions together as a unit, regarded by the city as a settled pair whose habits and tempers everyone knew. King called the bond between them a “communion.” Their political enemies were less reverent and a great deal more pointed: Andrew Jackson sneered at King as “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy,” both period slang for a homosexual man, and the Democratic operative Aaron Brown, in a letter to Mrs. Polk, referred to King flatly as Buchanan’s “wife” and his “better half,” and described him got up in his finery as “Aunt Fancy.” Julia Gardiner Tyler, the young wife of an earlier president, remembered the two of them as “the Siamese twins.” The catty nicknames were, in their cruelty, also a kind of testimony: everyone in Washington could see that these two men were a couple in every functional sense the word then carried.
The most quoted piece of evidence is a letter Buchanan wrote in 1844, after King left to serve as Minister to France and the shared house fell silent. He confessed to a friend that he was now “solitary and alone,” with no companion in the house, and that he had “gone a-wooing to several gentlemen” without success, a line that has launched a thousand arguments. King, for his part, wrote to Buchanan that he hoped his friend would fail to find any new associate who might make him forget their separation. And then, after both men were dead, the most telling thing of all happened: their nieces went through the correspondence and destroyed it, burning the letters the two men had exchanged across the decades, an act that, as the Smithsonian’s careful history of the question records, did more to fuel speculation than any letter could have, because people do not burn the evidence of nothing. Historians genuinely disagree about what the relationship was. Some, like James Loewen, are convinced the two men were lovers; others caution that the nineteenth century had its own conventions of intense, fervent, even bed-sharing “romantic friendship” between men that a modern eye misreads, and that the categories we reach for did not exist in the same way then. The honest answer is that we cannot know, that the most direct evidence was turned to ash on purpose, and that the very act of erasure is the part of the story we can be sure of. What is not in dispute is that the deepest companionship of the Bachelor President’s life was with a man, that their contemporaries saw it and gossiped about it exactly as they would about any couple, and that two families later decided the record should not survive. Buchanan turns up in every serious discussion of the first gay president for reasons that are documented, not invented, and he deserves to be discussed as a whole person rather than a sanitized blank.
The Democratic Queen
A bachelor in the White House still needed someone to run its social life, and Buchanan had been raising the person for the job for decades. His orphaned niece, Harriet Lane, whom he had taken in as a child and educated with real devotion, served as his hostess and de facto First Lady, and she was a sensation. Young, poised, blond, and stylish, she set fashions, charmed diplomats, defused tensions at the dinner table, and became one of the most popular public women in the country, celebrated in song and called by admirers the Democratic Queen; the very phrase “first lady” gained currency in connection with her. She was, in effect, the warmth and grace the cold, formal Bachelor President could not supply himself, the family he had assembled around the vow he made in 1819.
The administration even had its bright technological moment, and it belonged to this household. In the summer of 1858, the first transatlantic telegraph cable was completed, a genuine moonshot of nineteenth-century engineering that briefly connected the continents, and Buchanan exchanged celebratory messages with Queen Victoria across the ocean, the nation erupting in fireworks and parades over a piece of infrastructure that seemed to shrink the world overnight. The cable failed within weeks, its signal fading and dying, which turned out to be an apt little omen for the whole presidency: a dazzling promise that went dark almost as soon as it was lit. Harriet Lane and the telegraph were the pleasant surface of the Buchanan years. Underneath, the country was coming apart, and the man at the top was making it worse on purpose.
The Old Public Functionary
Buchanan won the election of 1856 as the safe Democrat in a three-way scramble, defeating the brand-new Republican Party’s first nominee, the dashing explorer John Frémont, and the nativist Know-Nothing candidate, former president Millard Fillmore. It was an election fought under the open threat that the South would leave the Union if the antislavery Republicans won, and Buchanan rode that fear to a victory in which he took a minority of the popular vote, carried to office as much by dread of disunion as by any enthusiasm for the man himself. He took office in March 1857 a pompous, cautious, intensely self-regarding man who once referred to himself, with no apparent irony, as the “Old Public Functionary,” a phrase so perfectly bloodless that his enemies seized it instantly and wore it out as a mockery, shortening it to the initials O.P.F. and deploying it whenever the president needed deflating, which was often. He was a doughface, the contemporary term for a Northern man with Southern principles, a Pennsylvanian whose every sympathy and instinct ran toward the slaveholding interest, and he had surrounded himself with a Cabinet thick with Southerners and slaveholders who had his ear and his trust to a degree the country would come to regret.
The temperament was the problem. Buchanan was a legalist and a literalist, a man who believed that every question had a correct constitutional answer that a sufficiently learned gentleman could locate, and that once located it settled the matter regardless of who it enraged. He had no feel for the moral temperature of the country, no instinct for the fact that the slavery question was not a puzzle to be solved by clever men in robes but a moral abyss that half the nation could no longer be talked out of seeing. He came into office genuinely believing he could make the whole agonizing argument simply stop, that he could quiet the abolitionists and the free-soilers and the enraged North with the right authoritative ruling, and within two days of taking the oath he made the first and most catastrophic of the moves designed to accomplish it. He did not calm the country. He poured accelerant on it, and called the accelerant a fire extinguisher.
Two Days Before
In his inaugural address on March 4, 1857, Buchanan piously informed the nation that the vexed question of slavery in the territories was about to be settled, permanently and authoritatively, by the Supreme Court, and that all good citizens should cheerfully accept whatever the justices decided, whatever it might be, and move on to more practical concerns. He delivered this with the serene neutrality of a man with no idea what the ruling would say. It was a performance. He knew exactly what it would say, because he had helped arrange it. Behind the scenes, the president-elect had improperly leaned on Justice Robert Grier, a fellow Pennsylvanian, pressing him to join the Southern majority so that the decision would be broad, sweeping, and bipartisan-looking rather than a narrow sectional split, quietly reaching into the one branch of government a president is never supposed to touch to engineer the outcome he wanted.
Two days later, on March 6, the Court handed down the Dred Scott decision, and it was every bit as broad as Buchanan had hoped and infinitely more disastrous than he had imagined. Chief Justice Taney’s ruling declared that Black Americans, free or enslaved, were not and could never be citizens of the United States, that they possessed no rights a white man was bound to respect, and that Congress had no power to ban slavery in the territories, striking down the Missouri Compromise and theoretically opening all the territories to slavery. It is among the most morally monstrous decisions in the Court’s history, and Buchanan had not merely welcomed it but secretly rigged its composition, corrupting the separation of powers to obtain it. He had wanted a verdict that would end the argument. Instead he had handed the rising Republican Party its central cause, convinced millions of Northerners that a “Slave Power” conspiracy now controlled the government and the courts, and guaranteed that the argument would never end until it was settled in blood. For 2026, watching its own arguments about whether and how presidents lean on the judiciary, the lesson is not subtle: the Bachelor President got the ruling he wanted, and it helped destroy the country.
Bleeding Kansas
If Dred Scott was the first accelerant, Kansas was the second. The territory had become a battleground where pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers were quite literally killing each other, and the central question was which kind of state Kansas would become. The pro-slavery faction, a minority of the actual population, produced the Lecompton Constitution, a fraudulent document drafted to make Kansas a slave state in defiance of the clear anti-slavery majority of its settlers, and Buchanan, faithful to the Southern interest he served against the wishes of the people on the ground, threw the full weight of his administration behind it. He demanded that Congress admit Kansas under Lecompton, knowing the constitution was a sham, because his Southern allies wanted it and because his rigid mind had decided it was the path of least resistance.
It was a calamity even by his standards. The fraud was so blatant that Stephen Douglas, the most powerful Democrat in the Senate and the great champion of the popular-sovereignty doctrine that the people of a territory should decide for themselves, broke with the president of his own party in open revolt rather than swallow it. The fight split the Democratic Party down the sectional middle, North against South, and the wound never healed; the historian Kenneth Stampp called Buchanan’s insistence on Lecompton one of the most tragic miscalculations any president ever made. Kansas voters rejected the sham constitution decisively. The Democratic Party, fractured beyond repair, would walk into the election of 1860 divided into Northern and Southern wings that ran separate candidates, splitting their vote and handing the presidency to Lincoln. The Bachelor President had managed, in pursuit of a slave state nobody in Kansas wanted, to break the only national party still capable of holding the Union together. It is genuinely difficult to design a more thorough self-sabotage on purpose.
The House Dividing
The rest of the term was the sound of a country coming apart while its government flailed. The Panic of 1857, touched off by railroad speculation and a wobble in the international economy, threw the nation into a sharp depression, and Buchanan, the strict constitutionalist, concluded that the federal government had no business doing much of anything about a financial collapse rippling through the banks and markets, and so it didn’t, leaving the wreckage of the credit system to sort itself out while workers went hungry. Out West, he picked a needless fight with the Mormon settlers of the Utah Territory, who had built a self-governing religious commonwealth under Brigham Young and were resisting federal authority, and dispatched an expensive military expedition of twenty-five hundred troops to subdue them in what became known as the Utah War, a bungled and largely bloodless campaign whose chief accomplishment was to drain the treasury and distract from the catastrophe building back East.
And the catastrophe was building. In 1859 the abolitionist John Brown raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in a doomed attempt to ignite a slave uprising, and the raid detonated the Southern imagination, convincing the slaveholding states that the North harbored armies of secret insurrectionists plotting their throats, while the North turned Brown into a martyr. The country was sorting itself into two armed and terrified camps, and the president did essentially nothing to lower the temperature, partly because he could not imagine that the temperature would actually boil over, and partly because his every sympathy lay with the South, whose grievances he found more legitimate than the North’s principles. There was, somewhere in all of this, a man with the experience to see what was coming. There was not, anywhere in all of this, a man with the will to act on it. The house was dividing, exactly as Lincoln had said it would, and the Bachelor President watched it split.
The Secession Winter
Then came the test that fixed his reputation forever, and he failed it as completely as any president has ever failed anything. Lincoln won the election of November 1860, and the slaveholding South, which had promised for years to leave if a Republican ever took the White House, began to make good on the threat. South Carolina seceded in December, and over the following weeks six more states followed it out, seizing federal forts and arsenals and arming themselves, and in February 1861 they assembled in Montgomery to declare themselves a new and separate nation, the Confederate States of America. All of this happened while James Buchanan was still president, during the long lame-duck months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, and Buchanan’s response was a masterpiece of self-cancelling paralysis. He declared that secession was unconstitutional and illegal. He also declared that the federal government had no constitutional power to do anything to stop it. Senator William Seward summarized the doctrine with deadly precision: the president believed that no state had the right to leave the Union, and that the government was obliged to save the Union, unless somebody actually tried to leave, in which case nothing could be done.
The general-in-chief, Winfield Scott, begged him to reinforce the federal forts before they could be seized. Buchanan dithered. His Southern Cabinet members resigned and went home to the Confederacy, some of them having spent their final weeks in office helping the South prepare. The remaining Unionists in his Cabinet eventually stiffened his spine just enough to refuse to surrender Fort Sumter outright, but the gesture was minimal, and the standoff at Sumter that would open the war was already smoldering when he left. He treated the dissolution of the country as a fascinating constitutional riddle rather than a five-alarm fire, and he handed Lincoln a nation already half gone, its forts seized, its treasury drained, its government infiltrated, its very existence as a single country now an open question. For a 2026 that worries about institutions freezing at the exact moment they are most needed, about the machinery of government discovering it has no idea what to do when someone simply refuses to play by the rules, the secession winter is the original and definitive case study. The Bachelor President had a theory for why he was powerless, and he clung to it while the country burned. It is, as the National Constitution Center’s assessment of his ruined legacy lays out, the single greatest reason he sits at the bottom of every ranking historians have ever compiled: not that the crisis was unsolvable, but that the one man constitutionally positioned to meet it spent its decisive months explaining, with lawyerly precision, why meeting it was not his job.
I Am Glad to Be Out of the Scrape
On inauguration day in March 1861, riding to the Capitol beside the tall, grim man who was about to inherit his catastrophe, Buchanan reportedly told Lincoln that if the incoming president was as happy to be entering the White House as he, Buchanan, was to be leaving it, then Lincoln was a very fortunate man. A political cartoon of the moment drew Buchanan slipping away with devil’s horns, exclaiming his relief at being out of the scrape. The relief was real and it was, in its way, the final indictment: the man had treated the presidency, at the supreme crisis of the Republic, as a scrape to escape rather than a duty to discharge. He retired to Wheatland, his comfortable estate near Lancaster, and spent his last years doing the thing he was best at, which was constructing an elaborate legal argument for why none of it had been his fault.
The result was a self-justifying memoir, published in 1866, in which he blamed the war on the abolitionists and the Republicans and the fanatics of the North, laundering his own record into a tale of a prudent statesman betrayed by extremists, and it persuaded almost no one. He died in 1868, reportedly confident that history would vindicate him, and history did exactly the opposite, planting him at the very bottom of the rankings and leaving him there. His contemporaries had already reached the verdict the historians would only confirm: that his appeasement of the South, his rigging of the Court, his fraud in Kansas, and above all his paralysis in the secession winter were not the misfortunes of a well-meaning man but the choices of a man who, given every chance and every qualification to act, chose again and again not to. He spent his retirement insisting he had done his duty. The duty was to hold the Union together, and he had handed it over in pieces, glad to be out of the scrape.
What 2026 Owes the Bachelor President
The conventional account files Buchanan in last place and considers the matter closed, and the running catalog of presidencies that became case studies in the strangeness of the office needs him for exactly that reason, because he is the great proof that the worst failures are usually active choices dressed up as helplessness. Buchanan was not a weak man who could not figure out what to do. He was a capable, experienced, intelligent man who knew precisely what he was doing and did it anyway: he sided with slavery at every fork, corrupted the Court to entrench it, forced a fraud on Kansas to extend it, and then, when the bill came due, declared himself constitutionally powerless to collect it. The paralysis was a decision. The helplessness was a posture. The most qualified man in America failed not because he lacked the tools but because he lacked the will, and that distinction is the one worth carrying into any era that mistakes a glittering résumé for a guarantee of courage.
But the Bachelor President leaves a second inheritance, quieter and in its way more human, and it has nothing to do with rankings. He is the reminder that the official record is curated, that the families and the early biographers and the staid keepers of reputation decide what survives, and that the most intimate truth of a public life can be deliberately burned by the people who inherit the letters. Whatever the precise nature of what passed between James Buchanan and William Rufus King, two men who kept house together for fifteen years and called their bond a communion and were mourned, separately, by families who then made sure the evidence would not last, the relationship was real, it was central, and it was erased. A more honest history does not pretend to certainty it cannot have, but it also refuses to participate in the erasure, refuses to change the subject the way the textbooks did for a century. The Bachelor President was the worst president the country ever had, and he was also a whole and complicated person whose deepest attachment was scrubbed from the record by people who found it inconvenient. He earned the first verdict. He did not earn the second erasure. The least history can do, having gotten the failure right, is to stop burning the rest.