James Findlay Shunk was born on April 18, 1836, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Francis Rawn Shunk and Jane Findlay. His father was a Democratic politician who served as governor of Pennsylvania from 1845 to 1848; he resigned on July 9, 1848, and died of tuberculosis eleven days later. Growing up, James studied at Harrisburg Academy before enrolling at the University of Virginia in 1854. He spent the next year studying law and modern languages.

Shunk returned to Pennsylvania after leaving UVA, and in 1857 Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black appointed him to a clerkship in his office. Newspapers at the time declared him a “young man of extraordinary promise” who was already “one of the best writers in Pennsylvania.” On March 10, 1858, Shunk married Black’s daughter Rebecca in Washington, D.C. She gave birth to their only child, Jane Findlay Shunk, on December 31, 1859, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. By then, Shunk was serving as Black’s private secretary, and in 1860 the Attorney General sent him to California to prosecute land-grant fraud.

In September 1862, Confederate General Robert E. Lee marched into Maryland in order to resupply his army and damage northern morale before the fall elections. In response, the governors of Maryland and Pennsylvania called for short-term volunteers to help resist the invasion. On September 12, 1862, Shunk enlisted as a private in Gibson’s Infantry Company, a home guard unit assigned from York County, Pennsylvania. After the Battle of Antietam on September 17, Lee and his army withdrew to Virginia. Shunk mustered out of service a week later on September 24 without ever seeing combat.

In September 1863, Shunk spoke at a “monster mass meeting” in Philadelphia to celebrate the adoption of the Constitution. He denounced emancipation and accused President Abraham Lincoln of violating Americans’ civil liberties. The “mere will of the President,” he declared, “avails to strip the citizen of the securities for which his fathers paid the best blood of the world.” Shunk prayed that Democrats would regain control of Congress and the presidency, insisting that the “policy of our party saved the Union while it lasted—that policy only can restore it.” In 1864, he served as a delegate to Pennsylvania’s Democratic State Convention, which endorsed General George B. McClellan for president and passed resolutions calling for the “restoration of the Union under the Constitution.”

After the war, former president Buchanan hired Shunk to ghostwrite his autobiography. Shunk lived at Buchanan’s Wheatland estate for almost a year, but he never produced a manuscript. In 1869, he began editing the Argus, a Democratic newspaper in Easton, Pennsylvania. One biographer called Shunk “as brilliant a journalist as ever held a pen,” observing that he “wrote the raciest English that flowed from the pen of any writer for the press of Pennsylvania." Shunk remained a staunch Democrat, drafting speeches and articles denouncing Republicans as the “Party of Negro Emancipation” and calling Lincoln an irreligious and “unregenerate man.”

Shunk’s wife Rebecca edited the Children’s Argus, a monthly paper “devoted to the amusement and instruction of the young.” By 1870, the couple had amassed an estate of roughly $26,000. Shunk sold his interest in the Argus in 1872, but he remained a “constant contributor” to the state’s daily newspapers. He died of heart disease at a hotel in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on January 20, 1874.

Essay:

Proslavery Unionism: The Anti-Republican Politics of UVA's James Shunk