BUCHANAN, 15th, 1857-61

Due to an eye defect, James Buchanan had the peculiarity of carrying his head slightly forward and sideways, like a poll-parrot, giving the impression of exceptional courtesy and sensitivity to others. His enemies said it was due to having tried to hang himself years earlier.

At the time of Buchanan's inauguration, in the city of Washington, people emptied slops and refuse in the gutters, threw dead domestic animals in the canal and every day the carts of night soil trundled out to the commons ten blocks north of the White House.

Buchanan was a gentle, diplomatic person, religiously fatalistic in his approach to life. He stood six feet tall and was a heavy man. Buchanan "sometimes acts like an old maid," said James Polk.

Buchanan enjoyed a 20-year intimate friendship with Senator William Rufus de Vane King. They shared quarters in Washington, DC for sixteen years. When King died in 1853, Buchanan wrote, "I am now 'solitary and alone,' having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them."

He referred to King as "Aunt Nancy."

Buchanan was the only bachelor President and the last to wear a stock.

In 1866, Buchanan published the first Presidential memoir.

On the day before his death, he said, "History will vindicate my memory."

d. June 1, 1868 (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) at 77 of respiratory failure.