Video: ‘William R. King Top # 5 Facts’

(Friday, April 7, 1786) — William R. King, the 13th vice president of the United States for 45 days during the administration of President Franklin Pierce, was born William Rufus DeVane King today in Sampson County, North Carolina.

A Democrat, King was a Unionist and his contemporaries considered him to be a moderate on the issues of sectionalism, slavery, and westward expansion, which contributed to the American Civil War. He helped draft the Compromise of 1850.

King was elected the 13th vice president of the United Sattes in 1852, but because he was ill with tuberculosis and had traveled to Cuba in an effort to regain his health, he was not able to be in Washington to take his oath of office on March 4, 1853.

By a special Act of Congress passed on March 2, 1853, he was allowed to take the oath outside the United States, and was sworn in on March 24, 1853, near Matanzas, by the U.S. consul to Cuba, William L. Sharkey. King is the first and, to date, only vice president or president of the United States to take the oath of office on foreign soil.

Shortly afterward, King made the journey to return to Chestnut Hill, his large cotton plantation in Alabama, based on slave labor. He died within two days of his arrival on April 18, 1853, aged 67, of tuberculosis.

Following King’s death, the office of vice president remained vacant until John C. Breckinridge was inaugurated with President James Buchanan in March 1857.