Marry I will not, for my affections were buried in the grave.
— James Buchanan
Last month, C-SPAN—continuing a tradition inaugurated in 1948 by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.—again asked professional historians to rank America's presidents.
Once more, James Buchanan ranked as the worst.
Buchanan's presidency might never have happened had Ann Coleman learned 40 years earlier to ease her drug use.
Ann was a looker and—better still—an enormously wealthy one.
Critics of the survey charge the historians with presentism.
But it's hard to dispute a finding based on 142 respondents' answers, or the fact that Buchanan has wound up the biggest loser in nearly every survey since 1948.
Buchanan has consistently ranked at or near the bottom of the ranking survey because he hastened the American Civil War.
He left the presidency in 1861 with the nation already split in two, the pro-slavery Confederacy and anti-slavery Union.
Her father was among the richest citizens of the young Buchanan's hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and perhaps the richest man in the state.
A rising attorney, Buchanan zeroed in on the comely Ann, Lancaster's undisputed "catch" of 1819.
After a whirlwind courtship, the couple became engaged—despite Ann's father's objections—in the summer of that same year.
But, as it turned out, the greedy and ambitious Buchanan was a neglectful fiancé. He spent the evening hours working in his law office, left town for months at a time, and even failed to write when away.
He also had a wandering eye.
Ann was so pained by her fiancé's neglect—and the town gossip about him—that she broke off their engagement in December, moved to Philadelphia, and turned to quaffing laudanum, the 19th century's equivalent of OxyContin.
Within only days, she overdosed and died.
Her presiding physician, keen to quell any talk of suicide, attributed Ann's death to female hysteria.
Lancaster's gossips immediately began to call Buchanan a murderer and Ann's father refused his request to see her body or attend her funeral.
Buchanan became distraught, swore off ever marrying, and fled Lancaster for Washington, DC, where he devoted his life to politics—a devotion that led, 35 years later, to the White House.
He always told people Ann's death had left his life "a dreary blank," but gossips and political opponents claimed Buchanan—America's only bachelor president—was in fact gay.
The secretive Buchanan still possessed Ann Coleman's love letters when he died in 1868.
Per his will, the letters were burned by the executors of Buchanan's estate.
