A look at King County's original (ex) namesake He was a U.S. vice president from Alabama, slave owner

Oregon's Territorial Legislature named the county after Vice President-elect William Rufus Devane King, likely to curry favor with the administration. Oregon's Territorial Legislature named the county after Vice President-elect William Rufus Devane King, likely to curry favor with the administration. Photo: P-I FILE Photo: P-I FILE Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close A look at King County's original (ex) namesake 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

William Rufus Devane, we hardly knew ye.

The 13th vice president of the United States, William Rufus Devane King, ranks among the more obscure of the many obscurities who have held that office.

In fact, he never actually served as vice president at all: Inaugurated in March 1853 in Cuba, under a special dispensation from Congress, he barely made it back to the United States and never got out of Alabama before dying the next month.

But for more than 150 years, thanks to an accident of historical timing, W.R.D. King was the namesake of King County.

Last year, the Legislature gave legal sanction to a 1986 County Council resolution redesignating the county in honor of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

But last month, W.R.D. King swam briefly back into public consciousness when the council voted to change the county logo from a graphic representation of a crown to an image of M.L. King.

Most local discussions of Vice President King dismiss him with a single epithet: slaveholder.

He owned a plantation, King's Bend, in the cotton-growing area of Alabama. Somewhat ironically, he named the neighboring town of Selma, where the other King would famously fight for racial equality more than 100 years later.

But the 19th-century King was more than the "gentle slave-monger" John Quincy Adams called him: He was a congressman, a longtime senator from Alabama and an ambassador to France.

In this century, historians have skirmished over a question concerning not King's public life, but his private one: Was he gay?

Sol Barzman seems to think so. In his 1974 book, "Madmen and Geniuses: The Vice Presidents of the United States," he wrote of King, "There had long been whispers about his personal life."

King was the nation's only bachelor vice president. For many years, he enjoyed a close personal relationship with the man who would become the nation's only bachelor president, James Buchanan. The two lodged together in Washington, D.C.

A biographer of James Knox Polk, Barzman said, wrote that King's "fastidious habits and conspicuous intimacy with the bachelor Buchanan gave rise to some cruel jibes."

Among them, Barzman reported, was Andrew Jackson's reference to King as "Miss Nancy," as well as a description by Tennessee politician Aaron Brown of King as Buchanan's "better half," an " 'Aunt Fancy...triged (sic) out in her best clothes....' "

But Lewis Saum, emeritus professor of history at the University of Washington, took issue with Barzman and the sniggering claque in a 2001 article in Pacific Northwest Quarterly (perhaps counterproductively, Saum took his title from a Shakespearean passage about the value of reputation: "Who Steals My Purse" ).

Customs and expressions were different in the mid-1800s than they are today, Saum wrote.

"Miss Nancy" was "a fairly common designation for people who wore clean clothes and had good manners," Saum said. As for Aaron Brown, he was King's political enemy.

King was a highly respected senator, Saum wrote, renowned for his probity and moderation. He was elected by his colleagues as president pro tem of the Senate and next in line to the White House when Vice President Millard Fillmore ascended to the presidency on the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850.

In any event, King, then 66, was nominated by the Democrats for the vice presidency in 1852, geographically balancing Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire at the top of the ticket. They easily won election in November.

A month later, the Oregon Territorial Legislature created four counties in the Puget Sound region: King, Pierce, Jefferson and Island.

Naming two of the counties after the president- and vice president-elect likely was designed to curry favor with the far-away national administration, UW history professor John Findlay said last week.

Two days before leaving office, on March 2, 1853, Fillmore signed the act splitting off the Territory of Washington, including the four counties, from the Oregon Territory.

By that time, King was in Cuba, hoping the tropical climate would aid his struggle against the pneumonia that would soon kill him.

He became the only president or vice president to take the oath of office in a foreign country.

The renaming and logo-altering efforts had everything to do with honoring Martin Luther King and nothing to do with dissing the other King, said County Councilman Larry Gossett, D-Seattle, who lobbied the Legislature to make the name change official in 2005 and sponsored the logo measure.

Phasing in the new logo on signs, vehicles, law enforcement officers' uniforms and elsewhere is expected to cost about $500,000 over five years.

"I don't denigrate or talk about (Vice President) King," Gossett said.

He was willing to accept a Republican suggestion to drop the slaveholder reference from the logo proposal, but his Democratic colleagues overruled him, he said.

Equally irrelevant is the earlier King's sexual orientation, said Gossett, sponsor of a current proposal to expand protection for gays in the county. "Very few people know that he perhaps was gay," Gossett said.

During a 1999 push to change the logo, Seattle lawyer Jason Kelly, who is gay, urged the council to remember W.R.D. King as a victim of oppression, even if it honored M.L. King -- an idea Kelly said he supported.

But this time around, that sentiment didn't surface.

"In Seattle and King County, I don't think there are many gay men and women looking back to Rufus King's career," Seattle Gay News publisher George Bakan said last week.

Dan Savage, the gay columnist for The Stranger alternative newsweekly, said, "I think 'out' gay people are embarrassed by bad gay people.

"And anybody in the 19th century who owned slaves when they should have known better is by definition a bad gay person."

Homosexuality was not tolerated in W.R.D. King's day, Seattle gay activist Bill Dubay said.

"The man had to stay totally closeted," he said.

"Because of that, he probably contributed nothing other than the foundation of the rumor about his sexual orientation.

"Look at the contribution Martin Luther King Jr. made to the world.

There's hardly a comparison."