Thomas J. Balcerski. Bosom Friends

The title undersells Thomas Balcerski’s ambitious book Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King. Much of the book is a nuanced analysis of the relationship between James Buchanan and William Rufus King, two powerful Democratic politicians in the decades before the Civil War who were also close friends and lifelong bachelors. Since the 1980s, historians have speculated about the nature of their relationship, and Balcerski does the best job to date of weighing the evidence and placing it in the proper historical context. Balcerski, though, uses the story of Buchanan and King’s relationship to explore larger historical questions, like the role of friendships in politics and why the cross-sectional Democratic Party broke down in the decades before the Civil War. Balcerski impressively balances the personal and the worldly to produce an original and engaging study both of two men and of the wider antebellum world which they lived in and helped shape.

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