Franklin Pierce (1804 - 1869) was an American politician, lawyer and army officer who served as the 14th president of the United States from 1853 to 1857. [1] A northern Democrat sympathetic to southern positions on slavery, he signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and provoked open conflict in the Kansas Territory. [2] He was denied renomination by his own party and left office deeply unpopular.
Early life and education
Franklin Pierce was born on 23 November 1804 in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, the son of Benjamin Pierce, a Revolutionary War veteran and later governor of the state. [1] He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Bowdoin College in Maine, where his contemporaries included Nathaniel Hawthorne, a lifelong friend, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He studied law at Northampton and joined the New Hampshire bar in 1827.
Political and military career
Pierce entered the New Hampshire legislature at twenty-four and became its speaker, then served two terms in the United States House of Representatives and was elected to the Senate in 1837, the youngest member of that body at the time. [3] He resigned in 1842 at the urging of his wife Jane, who disliked Washington, and returned to a successful law practice in Concord while remaining a powerful figure in state Democratic politics.
On the outbreak of the Mexican-American War he enlisted, rose to brigadier general and commanded a brigade in Winfield Scott's march on Mexico City. He was injured when his horse fell at the Battle of Contreras, an episode his political opponents later used against him. [1]
Election of 1852
The Democratic national convention of 1852 deadlocked among its leading contenders and turned on the forty-ninth ballot to Pierce, who had not been a declared candidate. [2] He campaigned as a unionist committed to the Compromise of 1850 and defeated the Whig nominee, his former commander Winfield Scott, by a wide margin. Two months before the inauguration the Pierces' only surviving child, eleven-year-old Benjamin, was killed in a railway accident in front of his parents, and the family entered the White House in mourning.
Presidency
Pierce pursued an expansionist foreign policy, completing the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico and securing the commercial treaty with Japan that followed Commodore Perry's expedition. An attempt to acquire Cuba produced the Ostend Manifesto of 1854, a confidential memorandum arguing that the United States would be justified in seizing the island if Spain refused to sell; its disclosure outraged antislavery opinion. [3]
The defining act of his administration was his endorsement of Senator Stephen A. Douglas's bill to organise the Kansas and Nebraska territories on the principle of popular sovereignty, repealing the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery north of a fixed line. [2] Signed in May 1854, the law shattered the existing party system, gave rise to the Republican Party, and led to years of guerrilla violence in Kansas between proslavery and free-state settlers. Pierce recognised the proslavery territorial government and used federal power against its free-state rival.
Later life and legacy
The Democratic convention of 1856 passed him over for James Buchanan, making Pierce the only elected president denied renomination by his party. [1] He returned to New Hampshire, where he publicly opposed the Lincoln administration's conduct of the Civil War and criticised the Emancipation Proclamation, positions that destroyed what remained of his reputation. He died in Concord on 8 October 1869.
Historians consistently rank Pierce among the least successful American presidents, principally because the Kansas-Nebraska Act removed the compromise that had contained the slavery dispute for a generation. [3]
