Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce: The Charming Man Who Lit the Fuse

Two months before his inauguration, the president-elect watched his last surviving child die in front of him when the family's railway carriage left the track. He was sworn in on 4 March 1853 with no inaugural ball and no wife present. Eighteen months later he signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and, in the Miller Center's summary, "that piece of legislation set the nation on its path to civil war."

Bowdoin, Last in the Class

Franklin Pierce was born on 23 November 1804 in rural New Hampshire, one of eight children of Benjamin Pierce, a Revolutionary War militia officer who went on to become governor of the state. Both parents came of early Puritan settler stock and both believed in schooling. Pierce attended local schools until he was twelve, then private academies, and entered Bowdoin College in Maine at fifteen, where he made a lifelong friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

He began badly, preferring company to study, and at one point stood last in his class. He then applied himself and graduated in 1824 ranked fifth — an early demonstration of the thing that would define him, which was capacity without direction.

The Fastest Rise in New Hampshire

What launched him was his voice. His skill as a public speaker carried him into the law and then straight into politics. He was elected to the New Hampshire legislature in 1829, two years after his father won the governorship, and was chosen Speaker of the House in 1831. He was an ardent Jacksonian. In 1832, aged twenty-eight, he went to the United States House of Representatives.

Washington did not suit him. The Miller Center describes him struggling with alcoholism amid the capital's "ill-smelling swamps and political intrigue." Elected to the Senate in 1837, he compiled no distinguished legislative record at all. What he did build were friendships with Southern politicians — among them Jefferson Davis — and a settled hostility to abolitionism. In 1841, sick of the place, he resigned.

Jane

In 1834 he had married Jane Means Appleton, the daughter of a former president of Bowdoin. It was not a happy match of temperaments. Jane was reserved, devoutly religious and a temperance advocate; her family were Whigs who despised Jackson; she loathed Washington and refused to live there. They had three children and only one lived past infancy. When she heard that her husband had been nominated for the presidency, she fainted.

Back in New Hampshire in his late thirties, Pierce gave up drinking, took up the temperance cause and got liquor outlawed in Concord. He built a thriving practice and became one of the most admired trial lawyers in the state through the 1840s, and in 1844 he ran James K. Polk's New Hampshire campaign to victory.

Fainting Frank

He wanted his father's military laurels. During the Mexican War he secured a commission and, with no military experience whatever, was made a brigadier general under Winfield Scott, commanding two thousand men. At Contreras on 19 August 1847 his horse stumbled and threw him against the saddle pommel, crushing his leg. He blacked out from the pain, and some of his troops broke ranks. His enemies never let him forget it: he was "Fainting Frank" for the rest of his career.

Nominated on the Forty-Ninth Ballot

By 1852 the Democrats needed a Northerner acceptable to the South. Their convention deadlocked through forty-eight ballots and settled on Pierce on the forty-ninth. He ran against Winfield Scott, his own former commanding officer, and won — less through his own campaign, the Miller Center notes, than through the Whigs' collapsing popularity and Scott's uninspiring speeches.

The Sixth of January, 1853

On 6 January 1853 the Pierces' railway carriage derailed. Their son Benjamin — "Bennie" — was killed in front of his parents. Neither of them recovered. The inauguration on 4 March took place without an inaugural ball and without Mrs. Pierce, who joined her husband later and never managed the social duties expected of her; one contemporary called her "a refined, extremely religious and well educated lady," but grief had closed her off. She carried Bennie's Bible with her when the couple later travelled abroad for her health. She died on 2 December 1863 and was buried near her son.

The Act That Made the Republican Party

Pierce's cabinet, the Miller Center records, "pleased almost no one." He appointed Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as Secretary of War, which "drew particular criticism from many antislavery supporters," and generally favoured politicians of extreme views over moderates.

Then came the great mistake. Stephen Douglas brought forward legislation applying popular sovereignty to the territories, letting local white settlers decide the status of slavery. Pierce would have preferred to leave the question to the Supreme Court; Douglas insisted on Congress. Pressed by Douglas and Davis, the president agreed to a provision explicitly repealing the Missouri Compromise's ban on slavery north of the 36°30' line. Congress passed it in May 1854.

The consequences were immediate and structural. In the Miller Center's account, "one party, the Whigs, was destroyed, while a new and strictly Northern party, the Republicans, came into being, soon to be led by a lawyer named Abraham Lincoln." Kansas became a battlefield. Pierce replaced the territorial governor Andrew Reeder with the more pro-slavery Wilson Shannon. In May 1856 pro-slavery men sacked Lawrence; John Brown answered by killing five pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie. Pierce sought renomination that summer. His party dropped him and took James Buchanan instead.

Why Franklin Is Called a Genius

He was not one, and the historians are united about it. Jean H. Baker, professor emerita of history at Goucher College, writes that "for most historians, Pierce is viewed as an inept chief executive whose traditional style of leadership failed in the face of the massive electoral divisions over slavery," and that "tumultuous events simply overwhelmed him." The Miller Center calls him flatly "a politician of limited ability." Baker's most damning line is also the most precise: "once pressured into backing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Pierce accelerated the course towards civil war." The operative word is *pressured*. He did not conceive the act; he was talked into strengthening it by Douglas and Davis, and the deference was fatal.

What he genuinely had was forensic and rhetorical talent. Pierce was a first-rate trial lawyer — one of the best in New Hampshire in the 1840s — and it was his gift for public speaking that took him from a country practice to the speakership of his state legislature by twenty-six and to Congress by twenty-eight. That is a real skill, and a narrow one: the ability to persuade a room. He also showed genuine self-command in beating his own drinking and then campaigning for temperance. But the qualities that make a great advocate — flexibility, the instinct to accommodate, the desire to be liked in the room — are precisely the ones that destroy a president facing men who want incompatible things. Pierce's charm was his ability and his undoing.

Legacy

He went home to New Hampshire and receded. He voiced support for the Northern cause at first, then publicly blamed Lincoln for the war, which cost him old friendships and most of his remaining standing. He returned to drink. When Lincoln was murdered in April 1865 an angry crowd gathered outside his house, and he talked them into going home. By the time he died in the autumn of 1869 he was, the Miller Center notes, all but forgotten; little was written about him. What he left behind was the Republican Party, created in opposition to the law he signed.

Achievements

• President of the United States (1853–1857)
• United States representative (1833–1837)
• United States senator (1837–1839)
• United States senator (1839–1841)
• Educated at Bowdoin College and Northampton Law School