Franklin Pierce

President of the United States (1853–1857)

• Born: November 23, 1804
• Birthplace: Hillsborough, New Hampshire
• Died: October 8, 1869
• Place of death: Concord, New Hampshire

After service in his state’s legislature and in both houses of Congress, Pierce became the nation’s fourteenth president, serving during the turbulent mid-1850s. Though well liked by both northerners and southerners, he was irresolute on critical issues and did nothing to slow the movement toward civil war.

Early Life

Franklin Pierce was the son of Benjamin Pierce, an American Revolutionary War veteran and two-term governor of New Hampshire (1827-1828, 1829-1830). His mother, Anna Kendrick, was his father’s second wife. Frank, as family and friends called him, was the sixth of their eight children.

Frank attended local schools before enrolling in Bowdoin College. Overcoming homesickness and early academic nonchalance, he was graduated fifth in the class of 1824. Classmates there included John P. Hale, the 1852 Free-Soil Party’s presidential candidate; Calvin Stowe, the husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe; and writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne . Pierce became close friends with Hawthorne, and the novelist later penned his campaign biography. Pierce taught school during semester breaks, but his major interest during his college years seemed to be the college battalion, in which he served as an officer.

After graduation, Pierce studied in several law offices, including that of later US senator and Supreme Court justice Levi Woodbury of Portsmouth. He was admitted to the bar in 1827 and immediately assisted in his father’s successful bid for the governorship. When his father was reelected in 1829, he simultaneously gained a seat in the state legislature.

Life’s Work

His political rise was steady. When first elected to the legislature, Pierce was named chairman of the Committee on Education. Later he served as chairman of the Committee on Towns and Parishes. In 1831, Governor Samuel Dinsmoor named him his military aide with the rank of colonel, and that same year and the next he served as Speaker of the House. In March, 1833, though he was not yet thirty years old, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. By this time, his political course was already set. He had enjoyed rapid success because of his support for his father and the Democratic Party. From then on, he gave total loyalty to the party and to its experienced politicians.

Pierce served in the House from 1833 to 1837 before advancing to the Senate for one term (1837-1842). His service was undistinguished. He deferred to his elders (when he entered the Senate, he was its youngest member). He made no memorable speech and sponsored no key legislation. He served on several committees, eventually gaining the chairmanship of the Senate Pension Committee. He consistently accepted the southern view on slavery, and was strongly antiabolitionist, a staunch defender of the Democratic Party, and a strong opponent of the Whig program. For example, he supported the southern position on the Gag Rule and defended Andrew Jackson’s opposition to internal improvements.

It was during these years that Pierce made the political contacts and created the impression that would result in his later nomination and election to the presidency. He came to be known as an accommodating person, fun loving, and always anxious to please. He seemed perfectly content to follow party policy, and he gave proper respect to his elders. He was a New Englander whom southerners trusted. He formed a close friendship with Jefferson Davis during these years.

In 1834, Pierce married Jane Means Appleton, the daughter of a former Bowdoin College president and Congregational minister. Throughout their married life, she suffered from a variety of physical illnesses, anxiety, and depression; in addition, she held strict Calvinistic views on life. In contrast to her sociable husband, she felt uncomfortable in social settings and consequently stayed away from Washington, DC, as much as she could. Like many congressmen of that age, Pierce lived in a boardinghouse with several colleagues, and he joined them in drinking to try to compensate for the boredom of his existence. Pierce was no alcoholic, but he was incapable of holding any liquor. The smallest amount inebriated him. This problem, combined with his wife’s unhappiness, which was exacerbated by the death of a newborn child, convinced Pierce in 1842 that he should go back to New Hampshire. There he promised his wife that he would never drink again or return to Washington.

In New Hampshire, Pierce became a successful lawyer. He did not spend much time analyzing legal principles because he was easily able to ingratiate himself with juries and win his cases that way. He was of medium height and military bearing, dark, handsome, and an excellent dresser. People who met him at social and political gatherings liked him immediately.

During these years, Pierce also played an active role in New Hampshire’s Democratic politics. He was a driving force in most of the party’s campaigns, achieving good success, though he lost out to college classmate Hale in a party dispute over Texas annexation. President James K. Polk offered him the attorney generalship, and his party wanted to return him to the Senate. He declined both offers.

When the Mexican War broke out, Pierce’s long-held interest in military matters and his desire for more excitement than his Concord law practice provided caused him to volunteer as a private. Before he donned his uniform, he had gained the rank of brigadier general. He made many friends among the enlisted men, and General Winfield Scott named him one of the three commissioners who attempted to negotiate an unsuccessful truce. His combat record was much less sparkling. During his first combat in the Mexico City campaign, his horse stumbled, banging Pierce against the saddle horn and then falling on his leg. He fainted. Though still in pain when he was revived, he continued, only to twist his knee and faint again when he encountered the enemy. Later, he became bedridden with a severe case of diarrhea. He was happy when the conclusion of the war enabled him to return home.

Pierce resumed his legal and political pursuits. He supported the Compromise of 1850 and became president of the state constitutional convention. He helped rid the state party of an antislavery gubernatorial candidate and thereby improved his reputation in the South. When his former law tutor, Levi Woodbury, the state’s choice for the 1852 Democratic presidential nomination, died in September, 1851, Pierce became New Hampshire’s new favorite son. Remembering his promise to his wife, however, he said he would consider the nomination only in case the convention deadlocked. That was precisely what happened. None of the Democratic front-runners, James Buchanan, Lewis Cass, Stephen A. Douglas, and William L. Marcy, was able to obtain the necessary two-thirds of the convention ballots. On the thirty-fifth stalemated ballot, Pierce’s name was introduced. He was a northerner with southern principles and a person everyone seemed to like. These characteristics carried the day. On the forty-ninth ballot, he gained the nomination. When his wife learned the news, she fainted from shock.

The 1852 presidential campaign between Pierce, Whig candidate Winfield Scott, and Free-Soiler Hale was issueless. Pierce made no formal speeches; according to the custom of the time, he allowed his supporters to campaign for him. Hawthorne quickly wrote a laudatory biography, and others worked to overcome the accusation that Pierce was a drunkard, a coward, and an anti-Catholic. (The latter accusation came from an anti-Catholic provision remaining in the revised New Hampshire constitution.) In a Boston speech the previous year, he had called for the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law yet voiced his belief that it was inhuman, so he had to work hard to repair damage in the South from that remark. He never denied the statement but insisted he had been misrepresented, and this seemed to satisfy his critics. He won the general election 254 to 42 in electoral votes, although he had a popular margin of only forty-four thousand.

At first, Pierce made good progress in organizing his administration. Then tragedy struck. He, his wife, and their eleven-year-old son, Benjamin, were riding the train from Boston to Concord when, without warning, their car toppled off the embankment. Benjamin was killed. Neither Pierce nor his wife was ever able to recover from the shock. They vainly sought to find meaning in the freak accident. Pierce wondered if his son’s death was God’s punishment for his sins. Jane Pierce concluded that God had taken the boy so her husband could give his undivided attention to the presidency.

Pierce thus entered office in a state of turmoil. The feeling of insecurity that caused him to want to please others and follow his party’s line now received further reinforcement from the guilt and self-doubts resulting from his son’s death. The reaction of Pierce’s wife only added to his burdens. Quite by accident, she learned from a friend that her husband, far from not wanting to return to Washington as he had insisted, had actually worked hard to get the nomination. She had lost her son; now she learned that her husband had deceived her. She locked the bedroom door, seldom even appearing for public functions. Eventually she spent most of her time writing little notes to her dead son, apologizing for her lack of affection during his life.

Pierce became president determined to adhere to old-line Democratic policy, with a strong dose of expansionist ideas. However, everything he tried seemed to fail. He attempted to broaden the base of support for his administration by giving patronage to all segments of the party, but loyal supporters, especially southerners, became angry. He made decisions on what he considered to be principle but lost political support in the process. Most significantly, he did not seem to understand that slavery, especially its expansion into the territories, was a powder keg. He had always considered public opinion to be the stuff of demagogues, so he believed he could ignore the strong negative feelings about slavery that were gaining ground in the North.

Pierce seemed incapable of providing effective direction to his administration. His cabinet, the only one in history to remain intact for an entire term, was weak, but its members had to exert their authority since he did not. Jefferson Davis, the secretary of war, emerged as the most powerful of the group.

The tragedy of Franklin Pierce was that he was president during a time of major crisis and conflict. Pierce’s presidency was dominated by controversy and even violence: the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Sumner, the Ostend Manifesto, the Gadsden Purchase, the destruction of the Whig Party and the birth of the Republican Party. The nation cried out for leadership, for some kind of direction, but Pierce was unable to provide it. Events seemed to provide their own impetus, and he seemed incapable of directing them. His prosouthern and antiabolitionist attitudes, his desire to please, and his uncertainty about his own capabilities did not allow him to act effectively.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act demonstrated the problem quite clearly. Pierce believed that this law providing for popular sovereignty would effectively solve the controversy over slavery in the territories. He never understood why it resulted in violence instead. Increasingly, slavery was becoming a moral issue, but he continued to treat it as merely another solvable disagreement. He and the nation paid the price.

Despite the ever more obvious failure of his presidency, Pierce hoped for renomination, authoring his 1855 annual address as a campaign document. He excoriated the new Republican Party. He reminded Americans about the need for compromise and recognition of the concept of states’ rights. He claimed that despite the South’s longtime willingness to compromise, as, for example, in the Missouri Compromise, the North now refused to respond in kind. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was good legislation, Pierce argued, and it could solve the problem of slavery in the territories if it were allowed to; Republicans and other antislavery fanatics had to recognize that the South had rights, too. No one could arbitrarily limit slavery. Pierce believed that such fanaticism would result only in national disruption, and did anyone really want to destroy the interests of twenty-five million Americans for the benefit of a few Africans?

Pierce’s battle cry brought down a torrent of criticism. When the Democratic National Convention met in 1856, it chose James Buchanan as its candidate, snubbing Pierce and making him the only sitting president who wanted to run for reelection not to receive his party’s renomination for a second term. He was bitterly disappointed and went on a three-year tour of Europe. When the Civil War erupted, Pierce first supported the Union effort, but he quickly reverted to his prosouthern position. In a July 4, 1863, Concord speech, he blasted Lincoln’s policy on civil rights and emancipation and proclaimed the attempt to preserve the Union by force to be futile. While he spoke, word filtered through the crowd of the Union victory at Gettysburg. Once again events had passed Pierce by. He lived another six years, but he played no further public role. He died on October 8, 1869, in Concord, New Hampshire.

Significance

Franklin Pierce’s life was filled with contradiction. He was an outgoing man who married a recluse. He was a northerner, but he held southern attitudes on the major issue of the day, slavery. He gained the presidency because he seemed to be what the nation wanted: an amiable man whom neither northerners nor southerners found offensive. However, it was this appealing inoffensiveness, actually a lack of firm purposefulness, which doomed his presidency from the start. The nation’s problems needed determination and skill of the highest order; in Franklin Pierce, the nation gained an irresolute man, overcome with personal problems, who did not understand the crisis swirling around him and was carried along by events instead of directing them.

Bibliography

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