History

Buchanan had a close relationship with William Rufus King, which became a popular target of gossip. King, like Buchanan, never married. King was an Alabama politician who briefly served as vice president under Franklin Pierce. Buchanan and King lived together in a Washington boardinghouse and attended social functions together from 1834 until 1844. Such a living arrangement was then common, though Buchanan once referred to the relationship as a "communion". Andrew Jackson mockingly called them "Miss Nancy" and "Aunt Fancy", the former being a 19th-century euphemism for an effeminate man. Buchanan's Postmaster General, Aaron V. Brown, also referred to King as "Aunt Fancy", as well as Buchanan's "better half", and "wife". King died of tuberculosis shortly after Pierce's inauguration, four years before Buchanan became president. Buchanan described him as "among the best, the purest and most consistent public men I have known". Biographer Jean H. Baker opines that both men's nieces may have destroyed correspondence between the two men. However, she believes that their surviving letters illustrate only "the affection of a special friendship"