Franklin Pierce

Pierce, Franklin (1804–69), 14th president of the United States. Pierce, the dark-horse candidate of a badly divided Democratic Party, served during a period of sectional strife that eventually led to the Civil War. Inexperienced and poorly prepared for the burdens of national office, Pierce was unable to cope with the bitter conflict over slavery in the territories. He left office a discredited figure in his party and in much of the nation.

Early life

After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1824, Franklin Pierce studied law; in 1827, he opened a law office in Concord, N.H. In 1834, he married Jane Means Appleton.

Political career

In 1829, Pierce was elected to the state legislature, where he served until 1833. He then served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1833–37) and the U.S. Senate (1837–42). In 1842, he resigned and resumed his law practice. When the Mexican War broke out in 1846, Pierce saw active duty as a commissioned officer. After it ended, he returned to his law practice. At its 1852 national convention, the Democratic Party, deeply divided over slavery, could not nominate one of three favored candidates. Pierce was nominated on the 49th ballot. Fellow Northerners accepted him, and Southerners accepted him for his support of the Compromise of 1850. He and running mate William R.D. King defeated the Whig candidates, Winfield Scott and William A. Graham.

President

Pierce was a pliable and vacillating chief executive. He formed a Cabinet of inharmonious sectional spokesmen rather than a politically coherent team. Subservient to warring party managers, Pierce was conciliatory, bland, and yielding to all sides.

Pierce pledged loyalty to the Compromise of 1850 and expressed hope that the slavery issue could be removed from national politics. Partly to divert attention from domestic problems, he also promised an expansionist foreign policy. However, under Pierce, U.S. plans to annex Hawaii and to acquire Cuba from Spain failed.

On the domestic scene, Pierce encouraged development of the West. In 1853, his administration acquired the Gadsden Purchase—with its right-of-way for a southern route to the Pacific—from Mexico. Pierce was pressured into supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. It repealed the Missouri Compromise (which had prohibited slavery in the region), leaving the question of allowing slavery in the territories to be decided by the settlers. The Kansas-Nebraska Act upset the careful balance between North and South, reopened the bitter slavery controversy, and wrecked Pierce's administration. The bitter divisions would deepen until they erupted into the Civil War in 1861.

Pierce's handling of the slavery issue made him unacceptable for renomination at the 1856 Democratic convention; it nominated James Buchanan instead.

Retirement

After leaving office, Pierce traveled abroad for several years. An outspoken critic of President Lincoln's conduct in the Civil War, he became more disliked than ever in the North. He gradually withdrew from public life and died in virtual obscurity.