FRANKLIN PIERCE | 1853-1857
Franklin Pierce became president at a time of apparent tranquillity. The United States, by virtue of the Compromise of 1850, seemed to have weathered its sectional storm. Pierce, a New Englander, hoped to prevent still another outbreak of that storm. But his policies, far from preserving calm, hastened the disruption of the Union.
Born in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, on November 23, 1804, Pierce attended Bowdoin College. He studied law, then entered politics. He became speaker of the New Hampshire legislature. In the 1830s he went to Washington, first as a representative, then as a senator. Pierce was proposed for the 1852 presidential nomination. At the Democratic Convention, the delegates agreed upon a platform pledging support of the Compromise of 1850 and hostility to any efforts to agitate the slavery question. They eliminated all the well-known candidates before nominating Pierce, a true "dark horse." He won with a narrow margin of popular votes. But with the sudden death of his only son, Pierce found little cause for celebration.
In his inaugural he proclaimed an era of peace and prosperity at home, and vigor in relations with other nations. Pierce had only to make gestures toward expansionism to excite the wrath of northerners, who accused him of acting as a cat's-paw of southerners eager to extend slavery into other areas. Therefore he aroused apprehension when he pressured Great Britain to relinquish its special interests along part of the Central American coast, and even more when he tried to persuade Spain to sell Cuba.
But the most violent renewal of the storm stemmed from the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and reopened the question of slavery in the West. This measure, the handiwork of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, grew in part out of his desire to promote a railroad from Chicago to California through Nebraska. Already, land that now compromises southern Arizona and New Mexico had been purchased for a southern transcontinental route. The proposal, to organize western territories through which a railroad might run, caused extreme trouble. Douglas provided in his bills that the residents of the new territories could decide the slavery question for themselves. The result was a rush into Kansas, as southerners and northerners vied for control of the territory. Shooting broke out, and "bleeding Kansas" became a prelude to the Civil War.
By the end of his administration, 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.
