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Franklin Pierce (1853-1857)

Franklin Pierce, a Representative and a Senator from New Hampshire and 14th President of the United States; born in Hillsborough, NH, November 23, 1804. His father was Benjamin Pierce was a farmer, local militia leader, and politician who later served two terms as governor. He also operated a tavern in the house that became the social center of Hillsborough.

Between 1820 and 1827, Pierce was often away attending Bowdoin College and studying law. In 1827, he returned home and established a law practice in a remodeled shed across the road from the homestead. At the age of 24, he entered the New Hampshire legislature and later became its speaker. During the 1830s, he went to Washington, first as a member of the United States House of Representatives, then as a senator. In 1834, he married Jane Means and purchased his own home in Hillsboro. They had three sons, none of whom lived to adulthood. In 1838, the family moved permanently to Concord, New Hampshire.

Pierce was a brigadier general in the Mexican War (1846–48) who commanded troops under General Winfield Scott in the campaign around Mexico City. Pierce was a political general, appointed by President James K. Polk, and served directly under Polk’s close friend General Gideon Pillow, while maintaining a relatively apolitical stance toward the Whig General Scott. He wrote in his diary that as a general he was responsible for prosecuting the war since “such a course would more speedily lead to peace.”

The remainder of Pierce’s time in Mexico was more controversial. On August 19, during the Battle of Contreras, Pierce was thrown from his horse, which landed on his knee. Though visibly suffering from his injuries, Pierce insisted on participating in the Battle of Churubusco the next day. At one point, he had to dismount his horse to lead it across a stream, and the pain in his knee caused him to faint. This became a campaign issue in the 1852 presidential election when the “fainting General” charge was leveled against Pierce as an indication that he was a coward.

After serving in the Mexican War, Pierce continued to be active in State politics, opposing the abolition movement, which he thought was dividing the country, and supporting the Compromise of 1850. When the Democrats met to select their nominee for the 1852 presidential election, the party agreed easily enough upon a platform pledging undeviating support of the Compromise of 1850 and hostility to any efforts to agitate the slavery question. However, they balloted 48 times and eliminated all the well-known candidates before nominating Pierce, a true “darkhorse” candidate. The vast majority of Mexican War officers, however, supported the Democratic contender Pierce in 1852 against their former commanding general Winfield Scott, the Whig candidate. Among those who supported Pierce were volunteer officers including Jefferson Davis. Also supporting Pierce were professional officers such as Robert E. Lee, George B. McClellan, and P.G.T.Beauregard. It is unlikely that such men would have supported a candidate guilty of military cowardice.

He won the election by a wide margin, but tragedy marred the triumph. Not long before assuming office, Pierce and his family were in a train wreck; the parents survived but their last living child, an 11-year-old son, died in the accident. Pierce entered the presidency in a state of grief and nervous exhaustion, and his wife was unable to attend the inauguration.

Northerners heavily criticized Pierce for his pro-southern policies. They also denounced his expansionism in foreign affairs as an attempt to extend slavery by means of territorial acquisition. His attempts to purchase Cuba from Spain failed. In 1854, the contents of a document known as the Ostend Manifesto became public. In it, American diplomats in Europe advocated the use of force if necessary to take over Cuba, stressing its importance as a base to revive slavery. Although the administration renounced the document, the leak was a political embarrassment. Pierce’s sponsorship of the Gadsden Purchase, which bought a small strip of land on the Mexican border to build a southern transcontinental railway, further enraged northerners.

It was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which President Pierce vigorously promoted, that ended the temporary truce of the Compromise of 1850 and raised sectional passions to a new pitch. The measure divided the relatively unsettled central portion of the Louisiana Purchase into Kansas and Nebraska Territories. It provided that the settlers in the new territories should decide their position on slavery by popular vote. The Kansas-Nebraska Act raised the sectional controversy over slavery to a level that precluded reconciliation. Most controversial was the provision for a principle of government called “popular sovereignty,” which provided that settlers in the new territories could decide the issue of slavery for themselves. Not only did President Franklin Pierce lend his support to the provocative measure, he also declared his support for the South. Naturally timid, and plagued by alcoholism, Pierce yielded power over his administration’s policies to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and other Southern leaders.

A storm of protest greeted the Compromise in the North, because it effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by permitting slavery in areas prohibited from having slaves since 1820. Pierce hoped for the admittance of Kansas to the Union as a slave State and Nebraska as a free State, thus mollifying both sides. No one doubted that Nebraska would be a free state, but pro and anti-slavery settlers poured into Kansas hoping to influence the outcome. Sporadic guerrilla warfare soon broke out along with often fraudulently decided and violently disputed elections. The confrontation culminated in John Brown’s brutal massacre of five pro-slavery men near Pottawatomie Creek. The nation moved another step closer to the Civil War.

Pierce created a temporary peace when he sent Federal troops into Kansas Territory and appointed a new governor late in 1856, but too much damage had already been done. Many antislavery men deserted the Democratic Party, creating a new northern party, the Republicans, specifically to oppose the extension of slavery. The Democratic convention repudiated Pierce and nominated the less controversial James Buchanan.

Pierce returned to New Hampshire a bitter man, still convinced that his policies were the right ones. On the 4th of July 1863, Pierce, in an oration delivered to the citizens of his own state, at Concord, New Hampshire, while he had not one word to say against the sectionalism which had raised its arm against the nation, denounced the war for the Union as sectional and parricidal. “Nor is that all,” said he; “for in those states which are exempt from the actual ravages of war, in which the roar of the cannon, and the rattle of the musketry, and the groans of the dying are heard but as a faint echo from other lands, even here in the loyal states the mailed hand of military usurpation strikes down the liberties of the people, and its foot tramples on a desecrated Constitution.”

The chief grievance of which he complained was that it was “made criminal for that noble martyr of free speech, Mr. Vallandigham, to discuss public affairs in Ohio.” And for this speech Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire, will go down to history hand in hand with Vallandigham.

During the Civil War, his denunciation of the Emancipation Proclamation and outspoken criticism of Lincoln's policies brought him condemnation in his own state and community. This, combined with ill health, the death of his wife in 1863, and that of his lifelong friend, author Nathaniel Hawthorne, in 1864, brought on a deep depression. Franklin Pierce died in 1869 at the age of 64 in Concord. He was buried there in the Old North Cemetery.