Memories of the Ford Administration (5 page)

A lonely walk. A bell about his neck in the forest. An Elysian landscape wherein one could declaim aloud to oneself and not be heard. When Hopkins’ preceptorship ended early in 1812, and Buchanan turned twenty-one, he went west, against his father’s advice, by horseback, to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to investigate a tract of land to which his father had a partial, disputed title. Had he stayed, would he have become a Clay, a Lincoln? Possibly, that summer, he encountered Thomas Lincoln, who, according to Klein (Buchanan’s autobiography says nothing of this excursion),
lived near Elizabethtown and was on the court docket for some land-title cases at this time
. Lincoln might very well have had in tow his three-year-old son, Abraham. When he himself was three, Buchanan very likely saw George Washington passing through Cove Gap on his way to squelch the Whiskey Rebellion. From President Washington to President Lincoln in one patriotic lifetime. The Elizabethtown land case had been in litigation since 1803, and Kentucky already had plenty of lawyers. Years later, Ben Hardin recalled Buchanan’s telling him
I went there full of the big impression I was to make—and whom do you suppose I met? There was Henry Clay! John Pope, John Allan, John Rowan, Felix Grundy—why, sir, they were giants, and I was only a pigmy. Next day I packed my trunk and came back to Lancaster—that was big enough for me
.

He was admitted to the Lancaster bar on November 17, 1812. He hung out his shingle on East King Street, advertising himself in the papers on February 20, 1813, as being available
two doors above Mr. Dutchman’s Inn, and nearly opposite to the Farmers Bank
. He was appointed, young as he was, prosecutor for Lebanon County, eliciting a letter from his overbearing father advising him to show
compassion & humanity for the poor creatures against whom you may be engaged
. In 1813 he made $938. In 1814 he made $1,096. He and
the town’s jovial 400-pound prothonotary, John Passmore
, bought the office building on East King Street, which included a tavern. Four hundred pounds: another giant. Giants were common in that miniature America—a trick of scale, perhaps. After Jackson, an irascible giant, they thinned out. Polk was “Little Hickory.” Douglas was “The Little Giant.” Lincoln obtained giant-hood but by taking giant woes upon himself; it was a gigantism of suffering, reinforced by chronic constipation, depression, and fits of noble prose. Buchanan was six feet tall, a goodly size but in human scale. In 1814, at a Fourth of July barbecue, he gave a rousing speech denouncing Madison’s bungling of the current war against the British. James Madison was a true giant, but physically too small for the fact to be universally recognized. Buchanan was the president of the local Washington Association, an organization for young Federalists; Madison was, of course, a Democratic-Republican, of the awkwardly named opposition party born of Jefferson’s resistance to what he felt were monarchical, unduly centralist, anti-democratic, anti-republican, and anti-French tendencies in the Washington Administration. Democratic-Republicans would rather make war on Great Britain than on Napoleon. The Federalists nominated Buchanan for state Assemblyman. The day after his nomination news arrived that the British had burned Washington. The young office-seeker’s first campaign duty, then, was to volunteer in the general mobilization and march to the defense of Baltimore. His company, calling itself the
“Lancaster County Dragoons,” was beseeched for volunteers for a secret mission; he volunteered, and their secret mission proved to be not fighting the British but stealing sixty horses from the residents of the countryside,
always preferring to take them from Quakers
, says Klein, not citing his source. The lowly mission was accomplished; the British withdrew from Baltimore, having inspired the lyrics for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The dragoons were disbanded; Buchanan came home and was elected Assemblyman. In Lancaster the Federalists always won but their fortunes, sagging lately, were restored by anti-war sentiments. Buchanan’s full-of-advice father wrote him:
Perhaps your going to the Legislature may be to your advantage & it may be otherwise
. If his father had been less advisory, would Buchanan have been a stronger man, leaning less on others? Would he have been less secretive? He hid his thoughts from even his Cabinet, it was said of his time in the White House. Parents do pry. Our first lies are to them. Buchanan did his duties in Harrisburg.
A tall, broad-shouldered young man with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and fine features
(Klein), he gave his maiden speech on February 1, 1815, against conscription and Philadelphia’s privileged set, championing the West against the East and the poor against the rich. He was told he should become a Democrat. A friendly Democrat, William Beale, state Senator from Mifflin County,
called upon me, and urged me strongly during this session to change my party name, and be called a Democrat, stating that I would have no occasion to change my principles. In that event, he said he would venture to predict that, should I live, I would become President of the United States
. To demonstrate his Federalism Buchanan gave another Fourth of July speech in Lancaster, attacking the Democrats as
demagogues
and
factionaries
and
friends of the French
, possessed by
blackest ingratitude
and
diabolic passions
. He got re-elected but the speech
created an enmity among the Jeffersonians that lasted all his political life. Even his
rabidly pro-Federalist father thought his attack was too severe
, and Buchanan allowed,
There are many sentiments in this oration which I regret
, but goes on in his memoir to quote cherished bits, such as this of the citizens aroused by the British invasion:
They rushed upon their enemies with a hallowed fury which the hireling soldiers of Britain could never feel. They taught our foe that the soil of freedom would always be the grave of its invaders
.

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.

Buchanan, having overcome his customary reluctance to exchange the security of his heaped desk for the uncertainties of the wider world, had departed his office on East King Street—two doors down from the Dutchman’s Inn, where he had found lodgings when first arrived in Lancaster nearly ten years ago—and had called for Ann at the Coleman town house in the next block, at the corner of Christian Street. In this latitude, at this hour of five o’clock, as Ann looked up toward the steady, gentle, finicking, rather high-pitched voice emanating from her escort, she saw the sun—its daily arc levelling
toward the equinox above the roofs, shingled in slate or split cedar—blocked by his large head. A chill gripped her heart at this eclipse, with the reflection that this imposing man, who had taken her eye when, at the age of thirteen, herself newly moved to Lancaster, she had watched him from the upstairs parlor windows, a long-legged youth with a dutiful, obedient, ambitious hurry to him, striding to the Court House in Centre Square in the service of James Hopkins, his preceptor at law—that this man was truly a shadow, an opaque phantom looming abruptly large in her life. Two seasons ago, he had been a mere name, a dim figure in the gossip of her friends, the Jenkinses and Jacobses, spoken of with warmth and respect and yet a hint of sly amusement, whether layable to some eccentricity of Buchanan’s person or to the inferiority of his self-made, hard-fisted father’s antecedents was not clear. Though a legal and political eminence, he lacked, in Lancaster County terms, real wealth or status. Now it seemed she had conjured this shadow up, in something like three dimensions, through a weakness of her will, a crack in her self-esteem. Since childhood Ann had battled waves of obscurely caused distemper—a pettishness, a sense of unjust confinement, a nagging disorientation sometimes severe enough to keep her in bed. The reality around her, like a bread lacking the ingredient needed to make it rise, did not seem real enough, though other people appeared to be fully, even passionately engaged in its show of reward and punishment, failure and success.