William Rufus de Vane King

• Vice President to:       Franklin Pierce - Democrat, from New Hampshire.
  
  
  • General Franklin Pierce served 1853 - 1857. He died in 1869, at the age of 65.
    
    
• Dates Served: King served as Vice President from March - April of 1853.
  
• Political Party: King was a Democrat, from Alabama.
  
• Born: 1786.
  
• Died: 1853, while in office, 4 weeks after inauguration, at the age of 67.
  
• The presidential opponent during the 1852 campaign was:
  
  
  • General Winfield Scott - Whig - Army General from New Jersey
    
    (Winfield Scott was the last Whig candidate to run for President, before the Whig party morphed into the modern Republican party in the mid 1850's.
    
    
• Campaign issues in 1852:
  
  
  • Slavery was the issue of the day, to the exclusion of almost anything else. The Whigs were conflicted over the Slavery issue, with some openly opposing Slavery with others simply opposing it's expansion into the Territories, leaving it alone in the South. Scott took the middle-of-the-road approach and was supported by many anti-Slavery members who hoped, once elected, he would somehow suddenly take a firmer stand against Southern special interests. The Democrats had no trouble figuring out their platform and ran Pierce as a candidate who respected States' rights. He also went after the immigrant vote by promising relaxed rules for citizenship. The usual mud-slinging occured with charges of drunkeness being thrown at each candidate, but Pierce managed to gain business-support from under the Whig's noses and won the election by a large margin.
    
    
  
  
• Notable Facts about William King:
  
  
  • Religious affiliation: Unknown. King's religious views were as mysterious as his sexual orientation.
    
    
  • William King was a lawyer, and began his political career as a member of the North Carolina Legislature. He represented North Carolina in the US House of Representatives from 1811 - 1816, at which point he resigned his seat to to serve as Secretary of the US Legation in Russia from 1816 - 1818, under President Monroe.
    
    
  • When he returned to the US he moved to the new state of Alabama to become one of its first two Senators, serving for almost 30 years, from 1819 - 1844, then again from 1848 - 1852, serving as President Pro Tem from 1850 - 1852.
    
    
  • During 1844 - 1846 he served as US Minister to France, under President Polk. During this time Texas was being considered for admition into the Union, and the French were opposed to its annexation, since part of the Texas territory had at one time been under French control. William King convinced the irked French to drop their protest.
    
    
  • There were many rumors during King's life that he might have been a closet homosexual. He liked to dress a bit like Liberace, which was why Andrew Jackson liked to call him "Miss Nancy". He never married and he was room-mates for many years with future-president James Buchanan, another life-long bachelor. Supposedly for a while they both planned to run for President and Vice President as a dynamic duo, but it never panned out.
    
    While he was stationed in France, King wrote many long letters to Buchanan where he expressed his longing for his presence, but Buchanan apparently didn't return his affection sufficiently, leading to King going into a deep depression. Buchanan did get engaged once, but his fiance committed suicide shortly before their wedding date and her family banned him from attending the funeral. Letters that Buchanan asked to be opened after his death, which he claimed would explain the reason for his fiance's suicide, were burned instead (at his own request), deepening the mystery surrounding the rumors.
    
    
  • William Rufus King was nominated for Vice President while in the Senate, becoming the first sitting Senator to be nominated for the post, since he was then currently representing Alabama. However, King ended up serving as Vice President for a grand total of 4 weeks. He never assumed any formal VP-ish duties.
    
    When he was nominated he was suffering from tuberculosis and alcoholism, and decided to go to Havana, Cuba - away from the cold winter in Washington - to try and recover. By the time of inauguration day he was too weak to travel to Washington, or even to stand up, so he was sworn in from Cuba, propped up by two aids, becoming the only US national politician to be sworn in on foreign soil. He then went home to Alabama 4 weeks later and died.
    
    
  • While campaigning, one of the Democratic slogans was "We Polked you in 1844 and we'll Pierce you in 1852!".
    

Notable events:      (during Pierce's term, but without any VP, since King had bought the farm)

• President Pierce's son was killed in a train accident in 1853, 2 months prior to his inauguration. Pierce became convinced that God was punishing him for his lack of faith, and a result he began keeping the Sabbath so literally that he refused to read even his mail on Sundays.
  
  
• Shortly after taking office in 1853, President Pierce was riding a horse one day and accidentally ran over an old woman. He was arrested and charged, but the charges were eventually dropped due to lack of evidence.
  
  
• Gadsden Purchase in 1853, which purchased 45,000 miles of land from Mexico for $10 million, for the purpose of building a southern transcontinental railroad. It formed the final, modern south-west boundary of the US map.
  
  
• The infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which tried to allow for the expansion of Slavery outside of the South, which went against the earlier Missouri Compromise in 1820. It split the Nebraska territory into two, Nebraska and Kansas, and let them decide whether or not to become slave states. It produced the "Bleeding Kansas" Civil War, in which pro-Slavery settlers from Nebraska attacked "free-soil" settlers in Kansas to try and establish Kansas as a slave state. (They eventually failed, and Kansas was admitted into the Union as a free state in 1861). Due to the ensuing chaos the Democratic party refused to re-nominate Pierce for a second term.
  
  
• Opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act from the Whig party caused the party to collapse. Remnants of the party, along with members of the Free-Soil party formed a new party in 1854, the Republican party, which was opposed to the expansion of Slavery outside of the South (but not to the total abolition of Slavery - just its containment). This wasn't entirely for altruistic reasons: Western farmers were worried about competition from slave-run farms and Eastern businessmen were concerned about a Southern majority in Congress which would block their legislation. Within a year the new party was active in all the Western states and most of the North, but nowhere in the South.
  
  Many former Whigs who didn't join the new Republican party ended up joining the Know-Nothing party, which was opposed to immigration and Catholics.
  
  
• The Ostend Manifesto in 1854, in which President Pierce offered to buy Cuba from Spain for $120 million. If Spain refused he threatened to go to war in order to grab Cuba and add it to the US. It was supposed to be a secret offer, but it was leaked to the Press and was popularly interpreted as a shameless plot to extend Slavery, and was eventually withdrawn.
  
  
• The accordian is invented, by Anthony Faas in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who patents the contraption on January 13, 1854. Music will never be the same again.
  
  
• The creation of Nicaragua in 1855 by Southern good-ol'-boys. William Walker, a pro-Slavery "soldier of fortune", led a bunch of Southern mercenaries to Central America to stir up a rebellion, originally intending to annex it to the United States. It worked, and the new nation of Nicaragua was created, but not part of the United States, with Walker as its first President. President Pierce recognized the new country the following year.
  
  
• Pierce's Secretary of War was none other than Jefferson Davis, later to become President of the Confederate States. During his term under Pierce he built up the very army that he would fight against 10 years later in the Civil War.
  
  
• President Pierce had the first furnace installed in the White House.
  
  
• Pierce also had the first bathtub installed in the White House, despite protests that bathing regularly was unhealthy and could cause disease.