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There were two bachelor Presidents. Grover Cleveland and James Buchanan. One, John Tyler, was widowed and married for a second time while in office.
The First Lady's job as official hostess for the nation is a pretty big one. Just running the White House is big. While I don't think a First Lady has to be a wife to do the job, I think the White House always needs a hostess-in-charge. Cleveland selected his sister Rose for the job. 2 years into his first term he married his wife Frances, who was quite a beauty and much younger than he. It was an unusual marriage, even by today's standards. Cleveland was the executor of Frances' father's estate, and supervised her upbringing after her father's death. She was a college student when they married.
Cleveland was the only President to serve 2 terms non-consecutively. He is the only President who is always counted twice in the list of Presidents.
Buchanan was the one-term President who served before Lincoln, and was the reason Lincoln left the Whig party and joined the Republican party. Buchanan was a Democrat, and defeated the first Whig candidate, John C. Fremont, 4 years before Lincoln decided to run.
Sex and politics is nothing new. Cleveland was the heaviest President ever, weighing in at around 300 pounds, but his weight never held him back; he was a Sheriff, a Mayor, and the Governor of New York before becoming President, and was well known as a lady's man. He fathered a child out of wedlock, a charge that was used against him in his first campaign, and while he never married the mother, paid child support for the child's lifetime.
The election of 1884 had sexual and morality charges flung at both candidates. Cleveland was a Democrat. The Republican, James Blaine, had a reputation for doing shady deals and was widely seen as being a corrupt crook. Sort of like the Romney video, during the campaign a letter turned up exposing Blaine's back door dealings with a couple of railroad barons. The last line of the letter read "Burn this letter!"
At his stump speeches, Blaine's opponents would all yell in unison "Burn this letter!" and in the end, the voters chose the skirt-chaser over the inside dealer.
James Buchanan was alcoholic and is widely believed to have been homosexual. His closest companion was a man, William Rufus King. They shared the Presidential quarters in the White House during his term, while his niece Harriet Lane filled the hostess duties. King was widely called "Mrs. Buchanan" all over Washington at the time, and the White House staff's letters from the time claim he was often a cross-dresser during after hours while living in the White House. King was nicknamed 'Aunt Fancy', another term that was heard all over Washington.
Buchanan's reputation is the worst of any President. He's widely condemned for fanning the divisions that led to the south's secession, which began in his last weeks as President. During his single term, he declared war on the Utah territory and the Kansas border war broke out. A national panic, the term for a financial depression, also occurred in his term. All escalated the already deep devisions in Congress.
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