American Scoundrel by Thomas Keneally Read Free Book Online

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    James Buchanan’s lack of a spouse had been, since his early manhood, a source of gossip. His closest relationship had been with Senator William Rufus King, a courtly Democrat from Alabama who was in the Senate when Buchanan arrived there in 1834. Buchanan the Pennsylvanian and King the Southerner roomed together and for over twenty years attended Washington events as a team, until Senator King’s death. People referred to King as “Old Buck’s wife” and “Mrs. Buchanan,” and to the two of them as “the Siamese twins.” In 1852, King had been offered the chance to serve as Vice President with Pierce, but, afflicted with tuberculosis, lacked the strength to do so.
    It could certainly be said that James Buchanan had had a lot of bad luck with women. The fiancée of his Pennsylvania youth had suddenly called off their engagement, separated herself from him, and soon thereafter died. For such a solid and levelheaded man, he grieved excessively then and later, and perhaps in some way he thought he had provoked her grief and the death that followed it. The conclusion some came to was that the fiancée had discovered or been fed information about Buchanan’s liking for other men, and that the news had undermined her. Then, in the 1830s, he was confidently expecting to marry Mary Kittera Snyder, a prominent Philadelphia woman who spent much time in Washington, but when he went to Philadelphia to pay court to her, she snubbed him by going to Baltimore.
    Rufus King had died just a few months before Pierce offered Buchanan the State Department’s most senior diplomatic post, minister to the Court of St. James’s. 1
    Accepting the post, Buchanan asked a famous journalist friend, Colonel John W. Forney, whether he could recruit a suitable Democrat to serve as first secretary to the American legation in London. On the lookout, Forney had to go to New York, and at a dinner, as he described it, “met a gentleman whose talents and address seemed to fit him for the post.” The gentleman, of course, was Dan Sickles, a so-called Hardshell Democrat like James Buchanan, and a man of great promise within theNew York party machine. But a problem had arisen. When Dan asked Forney what his pay would be, Forney answered that the post paid $2,500 a year. At this, Dan explained that his annual income was more than fifteen times that amount. “I could not think of such a sacrifice,” he told the illustrious Forney.
    Later in the day, Dan thought again. Perhaps his income was not really the sumptuous $37,500 or more per annum of which he had boasted. Perhaps various friends also pointed out how well this federal appointment would look on his
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, and what an enriching and vigorous new challenge it might be to convey to the British government the policy of the United States on the freedom of the seas and on American claims to Central America and the Caribbean. Under the previous President, the Whig Millard Fillmore, the foreign policy of the United States had become, in both Dan’s and Buchanan’s eyes, too lenient toward Britain. So Buchanan and his secretary of legation would have a new agenda to pursue in London. If Dan went, he would be serving under a minister who in 1812 had worn the uniform of the United States, and the prospect of overcoming British diplomatic suspicions of American ambitions toward Cuba in the same spirit as the British had been militarily overcome by Andrew Jackson at New Orleans was something Dan savored.
    The day after meeting Forney, Dan boarded a train to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and took a carriage out to Buchanan’s country estate, Wheatland. Buchanan was delighted to have the energetic young New Yorker come to his house. Forney said Buchanan knew of Dan as a brilliant lawyer and politician, a man of the world who had an army of friends and a counterbalancing army of enemies, “like all men of force and originality.” During the meeting at the large though austere house at