Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth President of the United States, was a talented orator with a sugary voice. Over six feet tall with an attractive and animated face, he had a sincere manner about him which inspired trust. A troubled personal life and a wife prone to homesickness forced him to turn down many of the opportunities that were offered to him early in his career. When he came to the Democratic Convention of 1852, few people outside of his home state of New Hampshire had ever heard of him. His northern origins and pro-slavery stance, however, made him the perfect compromise to the deadlock that existed between the leading nominees. On the forty-ninth ballot he received the Democratic nomination for President of the United States and was elected to office on a platform that called for strict adherence to the Compromise of 1850. Tensions between the North and South escalated during his Presidency, and his solutions to the crisis at hand were not always sound. His passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 led to the first major outbreak of violence between abolitionists and pro-slavery factions. The atrocities committed on both sides earned the Kansas Territory the nickname of "Bleeding Kansas."
Franklin Pierce was born on November 23, 1804 in Hillsboro, New Hampshire. He was the sixth child of eight born to Anna and Benjamin Pierce. Benjamin Pierce had been a general in the Revolutionary War and was to become governor of New Hampshire during Franklin's early career. Franklin received his elementary education from well regarded private schools. At the age of fifteen, he enrolled in Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine where he established a long-time friendship with classmate, Nathaniel Hawthorne. An overactive social life almost caused Franklin Pierce to fail out of school during his first few years at Bowdoin, but he pulled his grades up in subsequent terms and graduated third in his class in 1824. He returned home to study law under Governor Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire. He finished his legal studies under Judge Samuel Howe and Judge Edmund Parker. Franklin Pierce passed the New Hampshire bar in 1827.
Franklin Pierce was elected to the New Hampshire legislature in 1829 and served while his father was governor of New Hampshire. In the New Hampshire legislature, Franklin Pierce rose to the position of Speaker of the House.
In 1833 Franklin Pierce was elected to the United States House of Representatives where he became a strong supporter of the Jackson Administration. He was elected to a second term, but retired his seat when he was appointed to the United States Senate in 1836. Franklin Pierce retired from the Senate in 1842 and returned home to New Hampshire to contend with his alcohol problem. In the years following his bout with drinking, his law practice thrived.
Franklin Pierce married Jane Means Appleton on November 10, 1834. The couple had three sons, two of whom died as infants, and the other was killed in a train wreck near Andover, Massachusetts a few weeks before Pierce took office. Jane Pierce went into a severe depression after the death of her son and remained in her room during the first two years of the Pierce Administration. The role of White House Hostess during this time was filled by Jane's Aunt, Mrs. Abbey Kent Means. Jane Pierce died on December 2, 1863 while living with her husband in retirement at their home in Concord, New Hampshire.
President Polk appointed Franklin Pierce United States district attorney for New Hampshire. While serving as district attorney, he was elected chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party.
Pierce was appointed to the United States Senate in 1845, but turned the appointment down when his wife refused to move from New Hampshire. He was offered the position of U.S. Attorney General by President Polk in 1846, but turned it down for the same reason.
During the war between United States and Mexico, Franklin Pierce took a commission as colonel in the United States Army and began recruiting a regiment. Before his troops left for Mexico, Pierce was promoted to brigadier-general. General Pierce and his troops set sail for Mexico in May of 1847. In Mexico, Pierce contracted a severe illness, and then was injured when his horse fell into a ravine. He was laid up for the entire five and half month excursion in Mexico and did not participate in any real battles, but was welcomed home to Concord as a hero in January of 1848 anyway.
The Democratic National Convention of 1852 was deadlocked between Lewis Cass, William Marcy, Stephen A. Douglas, and James Buchanan. On the thirty-fifth ballot it was suggested that Franklin Pierce be nominated. Franklin Pierce was a northerner with policies that strongly favored southern interests. Though he was completely unknown outside of his state when he was first nominated, his clear and firm stance on a strict enforcement of the Compromise of 1850 and a policy of expansionism was a platform that Democrats found they could stand behind. The Democratic Party nominated Franklin Pierce for President by an overwhelming majority on the forty-ninth ballot.
Pierce did not go on the campaign trail. Instead, he stayed at home in New Hampshire while his fellow Democrats went out and campaigned for him. In spite of his lack of involvement in his own campaign, Franklin Pierce beat the Whig candidate General Winfield Scott and became the fourteenth President of the United States on March 4, 1853.
In his inaugural address, Franklin Pierce declared that slavery was Constitutionally legal. He promised to uphold the Compromise of 1850, and declared that every state had the right to decide for itself whether it wanted to be slave or free.
During President Pierce's four years in office, an economic boom enabled the federal government to lower revenue tariffs on all forms of trade, and the reduction stimulated trade even further. Also at this time, the United States purchased the land south of the Gila River from Mexico (this land would later become the states of Arizona and New Mexico) and the Gadsden Purchase settled the border dispute between the United States and Mexico once and for all. Furthermore, Commodore Matthew Perry signed a treaty with Japan that opened up two ports to U.S. trade. Unfortunately, all of these positive accomplishments by the Pierce Administration were overshadowed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act was introduced to Congress by Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Douglas wanted to organize the Nebraska Territory and free it of Native Americans so that a transcontinental railroad, connecting Chicago with the South, could be built. Southerners rejected the bill on the grounds that Nebraska would have to enter the Union as a free state because of the Missouri Compromise which prohibited slavery north of 36 30'. In order to get his bill ratified, Douglas included in his proposal a statement declaring that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and should be nullified. Douglas held that the two new states which his bill created, Nebraska and Kansas, had a right to decide for themselves whether they wanted to be slave or free. President Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law in May of 1854, and in doing so, he nullified the Missouri Compromise and declared open season on the largely unsettled states of Kansas and Nebraska. Northern abolitionists rushed into Kansas and began to organize a state government while pro-slavery southerners retaliated by doing the same. By New Years Day 1856, there were two governments claiming jurisdiction over Kansas. President Pierce promptly recognized the one that was pro-slavery. Believing that they were in their rights as the official governing power, pro-slavery forces, looking to rid the state of the abolitionists, attacked the town of Lawrence which had a large abolitionist population. A radical abolitionist named John Brown took revenge for the attack on Lawrence by leading a small group into the pro-slavery settlement of Pottawatomie Creek. One night in May 1856, John Brown and his men entered Pottawatomie Creek where they pulled five men from their beds and murdered them. The period of violence that followed Brown's attack earned Kansas the nickname "Bleeding Kansas."
The Kansas crisis was political death for all those who had supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and President Pierce was no exception. The Democratic Party nominated James Buchanan for President in 1856, largely because he had been out of the country when the Kansas Crisis took place. President Franklin Pierce left office on March 4,1857. He toured Europe for a few years before settling down at his home in Concord, New Hampshire, where he died on October 8, 1869.
