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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 accountsa 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