franklin pierce
Fourteenth President of the United States
interesting fact
On religious grounds, former Senator and Congressman Franklin Pierce chose "to affirm" rather than "to swear" the executive oath of office. He was the only President to use the choice offered by the Constitution.
quotation
He spoke of the war as the "butchery of white men" for the sake of "inflicting" emancipation on slaves who did not want it.
biography
Franklin Pierce, 14th President, was born in 1804 of pioneer stock. Pierce was educated at the local Hillsborough school until the age of 12 and prepared for college at academies in Hancock and Francestown, New Hampshire. In 1826 he transferred to a law school in Northampton, Massachusetts, and completed his studies with Judge Edmund Parker at Amherst, New Hampshire. Pierce proved to have a keen aptitude for the law. In 1827, Franklin's father, Benjamin Pierce ran for governor of New Hampshire - he was successful. In 1829, when his father ran, for a second time for governor of New Hampshire, Pierce was elected to the New Hampshire legislature. He was twice reelected and was speaker of the house in 1831 and 1832. In 1833, at the age of 29, he was elected to the Congress of the United States as representative from Hillsborough.
Pierce, politically held the ideals of Jefferson's agrarian United States. Then the party of Andrew Jackson, Pierce joined the Jacksonians in Congress in their fight against a national bank and established himself as an unswerving party supporter.
On November 19, 1834, Pierce met and married Jane Means Appleton of Amherst, Massachusetts. Although he loved his wife very much, the marriage was mismatched. Mrs. Pierce was shy and quiet, not accustomed to the rough and noisy politcal life. In addition, Pierce had a tendency toward alcoholism that his wife could neither understand nor help him to fight. Thus, the wife of the future president hated both the career he had chosen and the problem he fought valiantly all his life.
After his first term in the House, Pierce returned to Hillsborough to establish a law practice. In 1837 Pierce was elected to the U.S. Senate (the upper chamber of Congress) from New Hampshire. At 33, he was the Senate's youngest member. His career in the Senate was undistinguished. For the most part he followed the direction of the party leaders. Pierce was content throughout his Senate years to be the protégé of older senators, chiefly Southerners, whose kindness to him increased his sympathy for the Southern point of view.
During his years in the Senate, the Pierces had two sons, Franklin and Benjamin, who became their father's chief delight. He moved his family to the New Hampshire state capital at Concord, where he formed a law partnership that was immediately successful. Pierce greatly pleased his wife by resigning his Senate seat in February 1842 and devoting himself to his family and law practice. In 1843, however, a typhus epidemic swept Concord, and both of Pierce's sons became ill. The older boy, Franklin, died.
Pierce, after serving in the Mexican War, was proposed by New Hampshire friends for the Presidential nomination in 1852. At
the Democratic Convention, the delegates agreed easily enough upon a platform pledging undeviating support of the
Compromise of 1850 and hostility to any efforts to agitate the slavery question. But they balloted 48 times and eliminated all the
well-known candidates before nominating Pierce, a true "dark horse." (an unknown candidate).
Because the Whigs had nominated General Winfield Scott, a popular war hero, the Democrats presented Pierce as the heir to Andrew Jackson. The Whigs countered by starting a whispering campaign branding Pierce a coward, a charge easy to disprove but impossible to silence. Nevertheless, in November 1852, Pierce won a narrow popular victory over Scott and was elected the 14th president of the United States.
Pierce was a president in the height of Manifest Destiny a belief of territorial expansionism for the United States. He was eager to annex Hawaii and Alaska (he got neither). Manifest Destiny also heralded mass production in railroads which would soon stretch out to the Pacific Ocean. In order to do this, Pierce was forced to buy, under heavy public popularity in buying the a piece of northern land called the Gadsden Purchase. This land was necessary to build railroads on due to the fact of mountains in the way in northern lands. The purchase aroused bitter opposition from Northern congressmen, who feared that the area would become slave territory. However, Pierce managed to bring his party leaders into line, and in the spring of 1854 the treaty was proclaimed.
In the same year of the Gadsden Purchase, there occured the Ostend Manifesto. At the time, the south was getting very fearful of the north and the spread of free states. Thus, to allay these fears, the south wanted to buy land which they could turn into a slave state. The south tried unsuccessfully to purchase Cuba from Spain. This purchase had become desperately important to the South also because Cuba had slaves and uprisings had taken place there. The South feared that to avoid a successful slave revolution, such as the one Toussaint L'Ouverture had led in Haiti, Spain might free the Cuban slaves. Whether or not Soulé shared this fear, he made a high-handed move that turned out to be an appalling blunder. He met at Ostend, Belgium, with James Buchanan, who was diplomatic representative to Great Britain, and John Y. Mason, the diplomatic representative to France. They drafted a document known as the Ostend Manifesto, which declared that if Spain refused to sell Cuba to the United States, the United States would seize the island as its only defense against the threat of slave revolution or slave emancipation in Cuba. The document caused an uproar both at home and abroad, and Pierce was forced to disclaim it. However, the bungled diplomacy put an end to all hope of acquiring Cuba.
The Ostend Manifesto greatly damaged Pierce's public popularity. However, the Kansas Nebraska Act (which created the Republican Party) destroyed it. Senator Douglas introduced the bill, proposing the creation of the Kansas and Nebraska territories between the Missouri River and the Continental Divide. In each territory the slavery issue was to be decided by vote of the residents. Pierce was no friend to the Kansas Nebraska Act because of his belief that the inhibition of slavery was unconstitutional. Furthermore, in Kansas, many free-believers were causing riots and shooting sprees.
By the end of his administration, however, Pierce could claim "a peaceful condition of things in Kansas." But, to his disappointment, the Democrats refused to renominate him, turning to the less controversial Buchanan. Pierce returned to New Hampshire, leaving his successor to face the rising fury of the sectional whirlwind. He died in 1869.
