Franklin Pierce

Politics arrived at Pierce like weather. His father had fought in the Revolution and come home to run New Hampshire, and the house filled with men who wanted something. At Bowdoin the son sank to the bottom of his class, decided that was intolerable, and climbed to fifth out of 14 by 1824, collecting on the way a friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne that outlasted almost everything else in his life. He passed the bar in 1827 and had a seat in the legislature at 24. Then in 1834 he married Jane Means Appleton — daughter of a former Bowdoin president, devout, tubercular, a temperance woman, and possessed of a settled loathing for Washington and everyone in it.

He was a dark horse taken on the 49th ballot in 1852 and won 27 of the 31 states. Four years later his own party refused to renominate him, which no elected president had endured before or has since. Between those two facts sit the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, the Gadsden Purchase and the Ostend Manifesto, and BriefHistory lays them out in order. The question this page takes up is what a man was doing in that chair at all while his wife sat upstairs writing letters to a dead child.

Two sons were gone before the third. Franklin Jr. lived three days in 1836. Frank Robert died of typhus at four in 1843. The drinking had started earlier and never really stopped — he left the Senate in 1842 partly to get clear of it, took a pledge for Jane, and broke it. In Mexico his horse shied during the fighting at Contreras and drove him groin-first into the saddle, then fell and pinned his knee. He passed out on the field. A soldier called him a damned coward, the Whigs reprinted it through the 1852 campaign, and Ulysses Grant, who was there, wrote years later that Pierce was a gentleman and a man of courage.

He got worse after Washington. On July 4, 1863, with Vicksburg falling and Gettysburg fresh, he stood on the New Hampshire State House lawn and told a large crowd that the war could not fail to be fruitless and that meddling northerners had caused it. Jane died that December. Hawthorne dedicated his last book to him against his publisher's pleading and lost sales for it, then died the following May at an inn in the White Mountains with Pierce in the next room. Pierce died of cirrhosis in October 1869. Republican veterans in his own state blocked a statue of him for decades. New Hampshire finally put one up in 1914.

Franklin Pierce's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Gadsden Purchase other
  Bought a strip of northern Mexico to clear a southern railroad route 1853
• Convention of Kanagawa other
  Perry's squadron opened Japanese ports during Pierce's first year 1854
• Kansas-Nebraska Act law
  He signed it and it took the Missouri Compromise apart 1854
• Veto of the Bill for the Benefit of the Indigent Insane law
  He killed Dorothea Dix's land grant for state asylums on constitutional grounds 1854
• Ostend Manifesto other
  A secret memorandum urging the seizure of Cuba that leaked and humiliated him 1854

• 1824 aged ~20 Graduates fifth in a class of 14 at Bowdoin after starting last
• November 19, 1834 aged 29 Marries Jane Means Appleton, who hated Washington
• August 19, 1847 aged 42 His horse falls on him at Contreras and he passes out on the field A soldier called him a coward. Grant, who was present, later said otherwise.
• June 5, 1852 aged 47 Nominated for president on the 49th ballot
• January 6, 1853 aged 48 His last surviving son, Benjamin, is killed in a train wreck near Andover He was 11. The inauguration was eight weeks away.
• 1856 aged ~52 His party denies him renomination No elected president had been refused by his own convention before.
• July 4, 1863 aged 58 Denounces the war from the New Hampshire State House lawn Vicksburg surrendered the same day.
• May 19, 1864 aged 59 Hawthorne dies in a New Hampshire inn with Pierce a room away
• October 8, 1869 aged 64 Dies of cirrhosis of the liver in Concord at 64

• Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804–1864
  Novelist whose The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables explored Puritan guilt and sin. lifelong friend
• Jefferson Davis 1808–1889
  President of the Confederacy whose defense of slavery and secession made him central to the Civil War and its memory. appointed
• Winfield Scott 1786–1866
  Commanding general whose long career, Mexico City campaign, and Anaconda Plan shaped nineteenth-century U.S. military strategy. defeated
• Stephen A. Douglas 1813–1861
  Illinois senator whose popular-sovereignty doctrine and debates with Lincoln framed the crisis over slavery. allied with
• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. defended by
• Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811–1896
  Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin whose novel galvanized the abolitionist movement. opposed by