Remembering a Forgotten President—

The Lesson of Franklin Pierce

 

Jennifer Budd

Jennifer Budd is radio reporter working in the NYC/NJ area.

It is said history is written by the winners, which may explain how some events and people are somehow forgotten in time, “cultural amnesia” as someone I know calls it. 2004 marks the Bicentennial of Franklin Pierce; the 14th President of the United States, and no one seems to care.

OK, I am being facetious. There is a Bicentennial celebration taking place in Pierce’s home state of New Hampshire. Among those involved--The Franklin Pierce Law Center, The Hillsborough Historic Society, and The Pierce Brigade--an organization of mostly New Hampshire folks who are interested in the historical preservation and life of their state’s only president. But outside of the Granite State, who cares?

Well, for starters--me! This New Jerseyan has been a Franklin Pierce fanatic for a few years. It all started when I read a book called Star Spangled Men . . . America’s Ten Worst Presidents, by Nathan Miller. He ranked Pierce at number four (ouch!) From that point on, I was hooked. There was something in his story that drew me to want to know more about the president I never learned about in High School. Although I have found, in general, when historians and politicos alike rank the accomplishments of our Commanders-in-Chief, Pierce usually ends up close to the bottom of the list, I wonder, is this any reason to toss him into historic obscurity?

“As a nation, we cannot afford to exile Pierce to oblivion,” according to Jayme H. Simoes, Chairman of the Franklin Pierce Bicentennial. Nor can we “heap blame on him for the problems that we need to face as a society.” Simoes believes a discussion of Pierce’s life is necessary to understand who he was, how he reflected his times, and most importantly, to “see how we (Americans) got to be where we are today.”

So let’s start by taking a look at Franklin Pierce’s America.

The mid-1800s were a tense and unstable time in American history with the key issue being slavery. The United States had grown in size with the acquisition of more land resulting from the Mexican War. As new territories applied for statehood, they would have to declare themselves as slave or free states. How would this be determined? The Compromise of 1850 seemed to provide a solution. It honored the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which designated states north of the 36 degress 30 minutes North latitude as free, and those states south of it as slave. In addition, it brought California into the Union as a free state, let the territories of Utah and New Mexico decide the slavery issue by popular vote, and instituted the Fugitive Slave Law. This controversial part of the act required the federal government, and even governments of free states, to return runaway slaves to their owners. Now all that was needed was a President who would not stir the pot. Enter Franklin Pierce.

Franklin Pierce was born in Hillsborough, New Hampshire on November 23, 1804. He served in the New Hampshire state legislature and represented the state as a Congressman and Senator before retiring from politics in 1842 and going into private law practice. In 1852, Democrats were in a bind as to whom they would nominate as their presidential candidate. They needed a candidate who would appease the Southern voters and their pro-slavery stance, and one who would appeal to the Northern voters, many of whom opposed the expansion of slavery. After an exhausting 49 ballots, the Democratic convention overwhelmingly chose Pierce as their candidate.

On the surface Pierce was the perfect candidate. He was genial, well liked, had no known enemies and had a strikingly handsome appearance. He was also what was termed as a “doughface,” a northerner with southern sympathies. Pierce firmly believed that slavery was constitutional and supported the Fugitive Slave Law--which made him popular with southern voters. Pierce easily won the 1852 election.

Unfortunately, the next four years would prove the Pierce Presidency to be quite unsuccessful. His support for the Fugitive Slave Law and the disastrous Kansas Nebraska Act (which basically repealed the Missouri Compromise and let slavery be determined by popular sovereignty, leading to immense fighting and bloodshed in the then territory of Kansas) made him very unpopular, especially in the North. When the election of 1856 arrived, figuring Pierce was too controversial to take a chance on, Democrats chose James Buchanan as their candidate. Pierce spent the remaining years of his life traveling to Europe, expressing his disgust of Lincoln's conduct during the Civil War (among other things, Pierce criticized Lincoln’s suspensions of habeas corpus) and making occasional public speeches. He died on October 8th, 1869 at his home in Hillsboro New Hampshire in near oblivion.

Near oblivion.

It is hard to find a fate worse than to be cast to “near oblivion.” As if you never existed. Not worth knowing. Forgettable. So how did Pierce meet this fate? The answer may be the first line of this article, history is written by the winners.

“With the Civil War, The Republican Party became the dominant political party in the U.S.” says Peter Wallner, author of the recent biography Franklin Pierce-New Hampshire’s Favorite Son.

They excoriated the politicians who came before them and continually reminded voters long after the Civil War that it was the Democrats who brought on the war.

Pretty soon, even the Democrats did not want to claim Pierce or Buchanan. So Pierce is guilty by association. It sure helps to be on the side that’s winning.

Some of Pierce’s obscurity may also be a severe lack of knowledge about Pierce himself.

Even on the most superficial and trivial level, less is generally known about Pierce than any other President,

according to David Holzel, writer and one of the creators of the tongue-in-cheek website “The Franklin Pierce Pages.” He’s right. Buchanan was the only bachelor president, Wm. H. Harrison served the shortest term (one month,) and Millard Fillmore is, allegedly, the “Father of the White House Bathtub.” What about Franklin Pierce? Not that there are no trivial facts that can be attributed to Pierce. He put the first Christmas tree in the White House. He is also the only President to “affirm” not “swear” the oath of office (for religious reasons.) And, as Wallner points out, the Pierce administration is the “only one from 1849 to the 20th century that was free of scandal and corruption.”

Finally, genealogy also may play a part in Pierce’s obscurity. Franklin Pierce has no direct descendants. His three sons died before reaching adulthood, most notably Bennie, who died at the age of eleven in a horrific train accident just two months before Pierce was inaugurated. Without someone to carry on the family name and memory, it makes it that much easier to slip into oblivion.

Trying to bring the memory of Franklin Pierce into current awareness will not be an easy task. When Pierce was in the White House, the President was seen as a more ceremonial position, mostly concerned with foreign affairs and military preparation. The modern day view of an American President is one who is up on all foreign and domestic issues, with opinions on all current topics.

His (Pierce’s) concept of the office is so foreign to us that he is simply viewed as weak or incompetent by his seeming lack of action in domestic issues,

according to Wallner. But a reexamination of Pierce and his presidential years would do us all some good. For starters, it might change how we view this “weak” and “incompetent” man who is historically blamed for helping to bring on the Civil War. “War over slavery was inevitable,” says Simoes.

But he held the [country] together long enough to remodel the Army and Navy, making it easier for the North to win.

(It is worth noting at this point that Pierce’s Secretary of War was Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederate States of America.)

One would also discover upon reading about Pierce that he was a talented New Hampshire trial attorney and member of some very successful law partnerships at the time. Professor Christopher M. Johnson of the Franklin Pierce Law Center says Pierce was not only brilliant in his ability to read a witness but had “a personal grace and a winning eloquence that moved juries to adopt his view of the case.” More can be learned about Pierce’s lawyer years in an upcoming book by the American Bar Association Museum of Law entitled America’s Lawyer-Presidents.

In fact, new evidence has come to light that may credit Pierce with starting a political practice that is still in use today. A story on New Hampshire Public Radio in November 2003 reported that New Hampshire’s Secretary of State Bill Gardner uncovered evidence that shows Pierce engineered the first political nominating convention and helped bring it to a national scale during Andrew Jackson’s bid for re-election. For the full story, go to: http://www.nhpr.org/view_content/5430.

The point of reexamining Franklin Pierce is not to suddenly convince people that he was great Commander-in-Chief. A leader who has been misunderstood throughout history and deserves a break. Whatever conclusion one reaches about Pierce, positive or negative, is an irrelevant matter. The point is to get the dialogue started and there can be no better time than now, the bicentennial of his birth, to begin the conversation.     *

“Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry--whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?” --Thomas Sowell