Interestingly, both men were separated by thousands of miles during the period of 1844–1853. King served as a minister to France, while Buchanan moved from the U.S. Senate to Secretary of State under President James Polk. The author makes an interesting observation concerning the reasoning behind their waning friendship in this period, mainly due to a lack of communication and their separate romantic pursuits. Both no longer consistently agreed on numerous important issues, especially dealing with foreign policy. Buchanan encouraged President Polk to gain new territory from Mexico and Cuba, while King was steadfast against the procurement of these lands. Distance and time permanently changed their relationship.
During the last years of their friendship, this political partnership reached new heights when King was elected Vice President under Franklin Pierce,
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and Buchanan elected president in 1856. Both were Democrats, and prior to running independently of each other they worked as running mates in 1852. In the end, their party failed to accept a “bachelor ticket.” Balcerski insightfully examines the reasons that these Bosom Friends were only able to advance one person at a time.
While this volume does not offer a definitive answer as to the intimacy of the relationship of Buchanan and King during the antebellum period, some excellent arguments and well-researched evidence answer many questions that historians have entertained since the nineteenth century.
David Marshall has been a high school American history teacher in the Miami-Dade School district for the past thirty-three years. A life-long Civil War enthusiast, David is president of the Miami Civil War Round Table Book Club.
Reviewed by Bill Hendrick
Gettysburg’s ghost tours are hugely popular. Same for Sharpsburg, also known as Antietam, where 3,650 soldiers in blue and gray were killed in the bloodiest one-day battle in American history. Indeed, ghost tours are often thronged, from Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery to the haunting battery at Charleston to the rugged fields of Shiloh.
Tours of the alleged haunts of spooks are ubiquitous across the country, because Americans seem to want to see them, and somehow feel the past in eerie graveyards like the one at Trinity Church in Manhattan, where Founding Father Alexander Hamilton was buried after Vice President Aaron Burr killed him in a duel in 1804.
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I once sat silent through the wee
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hours in a Boston cemetery, staring at crumbling, tilted tombstones adorned with skulls and crossbones….you know….just in case.
And that’s why Michelle L. Hamilton has written a book on Civil War ghost stories that’s fun to read, especially for people who don’t know a battalion from a brigade, because it is not a war book.
She’s studied microfilm of Civil War newspapers, both Northern and Southern, and discovered many published accounts of ghost stories, reflecting a keen interest in the unknown. Her little book is a delight because it not only prints out her findings in readable type, but also publishes headlines and fuzzy microfilm images she had to strain her eyes to read. One, on the front page of the Oct. 2, 1862, issue of the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News, is headlined “A GHOST” and relates at length how the citizens of Lynchburg, Va., had “been thrown into a fever of excitement by the appearance of a ghost in their midst.”
Civil War Ghosts is not a collection of ghost stories, but of actual articles about “sightings” published during the Civil War. The country was being torn apart at the time and these accounts documented chilling, terrifying tales of the paranormal that may have offered comfort to the millions in a time of massive death. People have always had difficulty dealing with the death of loved ones, which makes stories about ghosts—which would bolster a belief in an afterlife—very appealing, a balm for the soul. This explains why public interest in spiritualism surged during the
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period. Even Mary Todd Lincoln was a spiritualist who held séances in the White House.
The Richmond Enquirer reported that a New Jersey regiment, quartered in the Marshall House in Alexandria, Va.—whose proprietor James Jackson was killed by Union soldiers after he gunned down Elmer Ellsworth—claimed to have seen the hotelier’s ghost and “stampeded from the premises in great terror.”
The Holmes County Republican in Mellersburg, Ohio, reported that “Clevelanders are getting a good deal excited about a certain ghost which it is said has been seen by sundry individuals in various parts of the city.”
Still another paper, the Burlington (Iowa) Weekly Hawk- Eye, headlined a story “Ghost! Ghost!! Ghost!!!” “An apparition, robed in white, was seen by a number of persons last night about eleven o’clock,” it declared. And the Keokuk (Iowa) Constitution reported that twenty-five people saw the ghost and were left quite spooked.
It’s quite evident that people of that age took ghosts more seriously than most folks do today.
You don’t have to be a Civil War buff to get a kick out of Ms. Hamilton’s book. It’s not about fighting, but what people believed, or claimed they did.
Also, Civil War-era newspapers—in the days before large reporting staffs and wire services, when telegrams were very costly—had a hard time filling up enough space with “news” to justify the advertisements—the lifeblood of papers.
“My interest in the paranormal is a way to connect to the past through a unique angle,” the author says. “I have worked in museums since I was 15. My first job was at the Whaley House in San Diego, which is famous for its paranormal activity. I learned to connect with the visitors through highlighting and focusing on the history of the house by addressing their interest in the paranormal. They came for the ghosts but left learning about the history of the house. The reason I wrote the book was to answer my own questions about what people believed during the Civil War.”
Bill Hendrick of Atlanta has been a journalist for 45 years, including three decades at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and one with the Associated Press. He is currently writing a book with Steve Davis on how the Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, the city’s leading newspaper during the war, covered the conflict.