President Franklin Pierce

6 Key excerpts on "President Franklin Pierce"

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  Presidential Ambition

  Gaining Power At Any Cost

  • Richard Shenkman(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Harper Perennial

    (Publisher)

  A likable man from youth, Pierce remained likable throughout his presidency. Likable, he aroused little hatred. If anything, because of the tragic death of little Bennie, Americans seemed to feel real warmth for him. Few presidents had ever seemed so human, so vulnerable.

  But as the country’s troubles over slavery began to accumulate and grow more intense—these were the years, after all, when Kansas began to bleed, as pro-and antislavery factions came to blows—Pierce came to be regarded as a man who was ill suited for the high office to which he had been elected. As the slavery crisis grew worse, Americans looked forward to the day when Pierce would leave.

  So, too, did Jane. Pierce—over Jane’s objections—made a pathetic attempt to win a second term, but was, of course, unsuccessful.

  No one in the United States was happier at that than his wife. At last they would be through with politics. Not because he wanted to be through with it, but because the politicians and the people were through with him.

  * Cass, a native of New Hampshire, had been a hero in the War of 1812. Later he was appointed governor of the Territory of Michigan. He was by this time serving as secretary of war under Andrew Jackson.

  * Pierce had helped prepare the instructions that would guide the duelists; the duel ended in the death of his friend and fellow Bowdoin classmate, Maine representative Jonathan Cilley, Whig editor of accepting bribes from the Bank of the United States.

  * From the start the war had been most popular in the South and the West. New Englanders were suspicious that it had been foisted on the country by slaveholders eager to expand the “peculiar institution” westward.

  * 21The Free-Soil Party, organized in 1848, opposed the extension of slavery. Its platform declared bluntly, “[N]o more slave states and no more slave territories.”

  * The Compromise of 1850 provided for the admission of California as a free state and abolished the slave trade in Washington, D.C., but Southerners enthusiastically backed the deal because it required Northerners to return fugitive slaves.

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  Star-Spangled Men

  America's Ten Worst Presidents

  • Nathan Miller(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Scribner

    (Publisher)

  On first glance, Pierce seemed a highly engaging figure. At forty-eight he was the youngest man to become president until then. He had chiseled features, a proud bearing, and a great sweep of curly, dark hair, all of which made him one of the handsomest men ever to hold the office. Always conscious of his appearance, Pierce dressed richly even when working in his White House office, sometimes wearing a dazzling dressing gown lined with cherry-colored silk. People liked him—until they realized that nothing was behind the backslapping and the casual invitations to lunch and dinner except a careless goodwill.

  The tragedy of Pierce’s presidency is that it was the last chance to prevent the breakup of the Union before the nation was engulfed by the Civil War. Swept into office by the largest Electoral College majority since James Monroe and backed by big majorities in Congress, Pierce had the best opportunity of any president of the period to resolve the disruptive slavery question. If the storm that climaxed in war is likened to a hurricane, he came to the White House within its eye. To many Americans, the Compromise of 1850 seemed to have settled the major differences between North and South. Indeed, when Charles Sumner of Massachusetts arrived in the Senate in 1851, he was told, “You have come upon the scene too late, sir. There is nothing left to settle except petty, sectional disturbances over slavery.”11

  In reality, the political system of the founding fathers was unravelling. The president was supposed to represent all the people, but the fight over slavery was destroying the basis for national consensus—and Pierce crossed the line to become an open supporter of the South. Had he been more imaginative, he might have made a Jacksonian appeal to the common man by supporting a homestead act to provide cheap land to small farmers, a bill to create land-grant colleges open to all, and tariff reduction. Franklin Pierce lacked the character, the broad vision, and the political skills to meet this challenge. The blame does not rest solely upon his diffident shoulders. It partially belongs to a volatile political situation that made it impossible to elect candidates in 1852 and again in 1856 who were qualified to deal with the crisis. Only nonentities who angered no one could attract enough votes to win.

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  Presidents from Taylor through Grant, 1849-1877

  Debating the Issues in Pro and Con Primary Documents

  • Jeffrey W. Coker(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  The result of this divide among Northerners was a landslide victory for Pierce—the final electoral tally was 254 for Pierce to only 24 for Scott. Revealingly, the popular vote was close and less than 50,000 votes Page 59 separated Pierce and all other opponents combined. The Whigs had lost their national cohesion and would collapse completely before the next presidential election. Meanwhile, the somewhat stunned Pierce faced the daunting task of leading the nation during these difficult times. His primary task, maintaining sectional unity, challenged and perhaps overwhelmed his political acumen. Pierce also faced other issues. As an ardent supporter of state political power, the issue of the federal government’s responsibilities came up time and again. To his credit, he was consistent in his policy of limited federal authority. To his discredit, however, Pierce was politically tonedeaf, failing to grasp the volatility of partisan politics during the 1850s and eschewing moderation and negotiation. Foreign policy also presented difficulties and placed his states’ rights views to the test by raising the question of the federal government’s role in territorial acquisition in the West. By most accounts, Pierce was less than impressive as the nation’s leader. On his watch, sectional disputes were blown open by the question of slavery in the Kansas and Nebraska territories. By the end of his term, violence in Kansas resembled a small war. Democrats might have been temporarily pleased with the collapse of the Whigs, but the party was losing its Northern base by failing to appease its supporters in that region. By 1856, the Democrats had come to view Pierce as a liability. His party had lost in almost every local and state election during his presidency, including those in his own state of New Hampshire.

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  Bad Presidents

  Failure in the White House

  • P. Abbott(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Four The Byronic President: Franklin Pierce If the tipping point in Fillmore’s badness is his support of the Compromise of 1850 and its enforcement, Pierce’s is his support of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its implementation.

  But these actions, however much they damn Pierce, do not necessarily fit with the assessments of Theodore Roosevelt and Truman who called Pierce a “servile tool” and a “fizzle,” respectively. Pierce was initially reluctant to support the measure, but then seemed to know what he wanted from the act and acted very aggressively to make it the signature legislation of the Democratic Party and ensure its successful implementation. Like Fillmore, the question is whether Pierce was bad like Richard II or as, Lincoln suggested, like Richard III. Of course, even Richard II had his moments of forcefulness, such as when he seized the estate of the Bolingbroke. But the primary image of his reign is one of his ineptitude and unfitness for office. Were Pierce’s confrontations with antislavery forces in the territory like this pattern of fitful self-assertion?

  It is interesting that one of the central and reoccurring motifs used to support Pierce’s badness is his looks. Two assessment of Pierce, over 60 years apart, illustrate this motif. In 1942, Allan Nevins described Pierce as a “one of the most gracefully attractive” of presidents. He was “gay, loquacious, bubbling over with kindness and beguilingly demonstrative.” But although Pierce was a “highly engaging person,” his supporters soon discovered these “effervescent boyish traits” were all he had to offer. Pierce’s vanity (he was “conscious of his handsome head and fine bearing” and wore clothing “more striking than dignified”) fit well with the ceremonial aspects of the office. He, like Richard II, took “obvious delight” in his new position. Otherwise, Pierce was “on the whole a man of shallow nature”: “No depth of conviction, no powerful force of will, underlay his bright surface qualities.”1

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  The Executive Branch of Federal Government

  People, Process, and Politics

  • Brian R. Dirck(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Pierce was THE DOUGHFACE GENERATION 93 a Yankee with southern friends (includ- ing Jefferson Davis, who would serve in Pierce’s Cabinet as a very able secretary of war) and a get-along-to-go-along ap- proach to governing that struck some as admirably restrained but others as indi- cating a lack of presidential moxie. Peo- ple might well have wondered whether his modesty was all that false when he stated that “no heart but my own can know the personal regret and bitter sor- row over which I have been borne to a position so suitable for others rather than desirable for myself.” Where the slavery troubles were concerned, he referred to the Compromise of 1850—a complex piece of legislation that tried to solve the many differences between North and South concerning slavery and the west- ern territories—and rather wistfully de- clared, “I fervently hope that the ques- tion is at rest, and that no sectional or ambitious or fanatical excitement may again threaten the durability of our insti- tutions or obscure the light of our pros- perity” (www.yale.edu/lawweb/ avalon). 94 THE ROLE OF THE PRESIDENCY IN AMERICAN POLITICS A group portrait eulogizes the statesmen involved with the Compromise of 1850 and the efforts to preserve the Union. In the front row (from left to right) are the primary figures in the debate: Winfield Scott (in uniform), Lewis Cass, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun (standing in center), Daniel Webster, and Millard Fillmore (holding a shield). Calhoun and Webster stand with their hands resting on the Constitution with a bust of George Washington between them. (Library of Congress) Try as he might, Pierce could not sim- ply wish away the signs of growing sec- tional strife.

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  Lincoln's Pathfinder

  John C. Fremont and the Violent Election of 1856

  • John Bicknell, John Bicknell(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Chicago Review Press

    (Publisher)

  2 }

  “A Fugitive from Freedom”

  E verything seemed to come easy for Franklin Pierce.

  The boy wonder of New Hampshire politics, son of a Revolutionary War hero who survived Valley Forge, Pierce had run off a string of “firsts” unmatched in his lifetime. He was elected to the statehouse in his twenties, as Speaker in his last term; to the US House in 1833; and to the Senate in 1837, at age thirty-two the youngest ever to enter the body at that point. He turned down an offer to become attorney general under President James K. Polk in 1845, citing the ill health of his wife, Jane, who hated Washington. But there was one appointment Pierce could not refuse. His service in the Mexican War was not particularly distinguished, but unlike many a political general, at least he did not make a fool of himself or get his men slaughtered.

  Pierce was a likable fellow and counted among his college chums the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and the education reformer Calvin Stowe, husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1852 Pierce became the youngest man elected president to that time, losing only four states. He carried with him two-to-one Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. And, by general consensus, he was the handsomest man ever to hold the office. Pierce had led a charmed life, one that carried this amiable man with a sonorous voice and a great memory for names and faces to the pinnacle of American life.

  Now he faced a problem that backslapping and glad-handing couldn’t solve. The Kansas-Nebraska trap laid by Stephen A. Douglas into which Pierce had stepped in 1854 was about to slam shut on him.

  At the insistence of David Atchison and the Kansas territorial legislature, Pierce had recalled the territory’s governor, Andrew Reeder, in July 1855, after thirteen months in office, on trumped-up charges of land speculation. Reeder had indeed engaged in some shady practices, but so had pretty much everyone else in the territory—much of the dispute over slavery had its roots in disputed land claims between immigrants from free states and those from slave states. But “no one believed at the time that Reeder was removed for the cause alleged,” the National Era

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