The Mercurial Relationship Between Buchanan & Stevens Story.

It was an ordinary day.  Reading about the relationship between James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens.  In a speech before Congress in January 1862, Lancaster's U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens characterized his relationship with fellow Lancaster resident and former President James Buchanan.  "Mr. Buchanan is a constituent of mine," Stevens said, "and until he attempted to make Kansas a slave State, and uphold the doctrines of slavery in his messages, he and I were on intimate terms.  Since then we have never spoken to each other."  Before the disagreement over Buchanan's pro-slavery stance, the two men had been on relatively friendly terms since at least 1827, when the two 30-something lawyers worked together on a case being tried in York, PA.  At that time, as related by Hans Trefousse in his biography of Stevens, the two men walked down a lane and sat on a fence while waiting for the jury's verdict.  Buchanan told Stevens he should join the Jacksonian Democrats if he wanted to succeed in politics.  Stevens reportedly said he would not abandon his convictions for sucesss.  Buchanan remained a Democrat.  Stevens became an original Republican in the 1850s, just before Buchanan was elected President.  Their politics increasingly separated them, but apparently they remained on speaking terms.  However, there is slim documented evidence of interaction between the two men following that 1827 meeting.  There's an old story that one of the two crossed a Lancaster street to avoid meeting the other.  There is no documentation for that story.  They both had their hair cut by the same barber, Thaddeus S. Henry.  There is no record of Buchanan and Stevens meeting in the barber shop.  In the summer of 1850, Buchanan wrote to Stevens asking for his support in obtaining appointment to West Point Military Academy for Buchanan's nephew, James B. Henry.  Another candidate was appointed before Stevens could get involved.  As the 1850s and the long political slog toward the Civil War progressed, Stevens became more radical as an opponent of slavery and Buchanan continued his lifelong tilt toward the South's embrace of slavery.  Nevertheless, following Buchanan's presidency and throughout the Civil War, the two men met clandestinely several times at each other's homes in Lancaster, according to a paper read by W. Frank Gorrecht before the Lancaster County Historial Society in 1933.  Gorrecht said he personally knew about one such meeting.  These sessions were secret, Gorrecht said, because "had it been known generally that these two met in conference the adherents of both would have denounced them as false to their respective  causes."  Buchanan and Stevens might have greeted each other at the July 1866 wedding of Lancaster Dr. Henry Carpenter, physician to both men.  They just missed, as Carpenter later related.  "Mr. Stevens was in the parlor when Mr. Buchanan entered," the doctor wrote.  "The latter walked across the room, and Mr. Stevens, thinking he was advancing toward him, made a motion as if to speak.  But, Mr. Buchanan, who, as is well known, had one near and one far-sighted eye and held his head to one side, failed to see Mr. Stevens."  As Buchanan lay dying in the spring of 1868, Dr. Carpenter said Stevens expressed interest in seeing Buchanan and reconciling any differences.  Buchanan told the doctor that he would be happy to greet Stevens.  But, it never happened.  After Buchanan died that June, Stevens attempted to prod the House into passing a resolution praising the former President's "private character and personal history."  Another congressman killed the resolution.  Stevens died in August.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.