Jody On Young Hickory of the Granite Hills

Franklin Pierce was born on November 23, 1804, in a log cabin in Hillsborough (now Hillsboro), New Hampshire. He was the first President to be born in the 19^th century. Pierce’s father, Benjamin Pierce, was a frontier farmer who became a Revolutionary War soldier, a state militia general and Governor of New Hampshire. His mother was Anna B. Kendrick. Both his parents came from families that had been in America since the early Puritan settlements of the 1620s.

Benjamin and Anna Pierce wanted their eight children to have a better education than their own. Franklin Pierce attended local school at Hillsborough Center until the age of 11. At the age of 12 he moved to Hancock Academy and transferred to Francestown Academy in the spring of 1820. Friends recalled that just after he entered the school, he became homesick and returned home barefoot. His father put him in a wagon, drove him halfway back to school and left him on the side of the road, never saying a word. Franklin walked the seven miles back to school. Later that year he transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy to prepare for college.

At the age of fifteen, Pierce entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he made many friends, including the young writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. He joined literary, political and debating clubs. At first Pierce enjoyed the social life at Bowdoin so much that school took second place. Before long he was last in his class. Gradually he began to apply himself to his school work and by graduation in 1824 he was ranked fifth in his class. In 1826 he entered a law school in Northampton, Massachusetts. He studied under Governor Levi Woodbury and later under Judges Samuel Howe and Edmund Parker in Amherst, New Hampshire. Pierce was admitted to the bar and began a law practice in Concord, New Hampshire in 1827.

After graduating from college, Franklin Pierce entered politics and rose to a central position in New Hampshire. He became a member of the Concord regency leadership group. In 1829, two years after his father won election to the governorship, Pierce was elected to the state legislature. He was chosen Speaker of the House in 1831. Both Franklin and his father were strong supporters of Andrew Jackson and rejoiced when “Old Hickory” was elected President in 1828. In 1832, when Old Hickory won re-election, Franklin Pierce, not yet thirty years old, was elected to the United States House of Representatives. In the 1830s, Washington was an unpleasant place to live. Politicians lived in shabby boardinghouses without their families. Many politicians became bored and homesick. They more often than not found comfort in alcohol. Stories of Pierce’s partying and drinking were a staple of the capital grapevine.

In an attempt to settle down Pierce married Jane Means Appleton on November 19, 1834. Jane was the daughter of Reverend Jesse Appleton, who had been the second President of Bowdoin College. Franklin was almost 30 and Jane was 28. She was the polar opposite of her husband. Though Jane Pierce was petite, frail and very shy, she was a committed devotee of the temperance movement. Pierce stopped drinking and joined the temperance movement. Jane Pierce detested Washington and usually refused to live there even after Franklin became a U.S. Senator in 1837. The Pierces had three children, only one of whom survived early childhood. The last child who lived the longest was killed in a train wreck at the age of eleven witnessed by both parents.

As a Senator, Pierce’s legislative record was no more distinguished than when he had been a Representative. His only real passion was opposition to the abolitionist movement. Many of his friends in Washington were southerners and he sympathized with their proslavery views. The future Confederate president Jefferson Davis was his closest political ally. By 1841, the Pierces had enough of Washington and he resigned from the Senate, moving back to New Hampshire.

The Pierces made their new home in Concord, New Hampshire. He opened a law practice with his partner Asa Fowler. With the public speaking skills he had mastered at Bowdoin and in Congress, Pierce quickly gained local fame and had great success as a trial lawyer. In those days courts of law were a form of entertainment and Franklin Pierce was a star. People from all over New Hampshire lined up for a place in his courtrooms. He tried many high-profile cases and his fame spread. He also remained involved in politics managing James K. Polk’s successful run for the White House. The grateful new President offered him several positions, including the nomination for Governor of New Hampshire and Attorney General of the United States, both of which he refused.

The memory of his own father’s political successes and the effect his military service had on them caused Franklin Pierce to seize an opportunity when the Mexican-American War broke out. He helped enlist men into the New Hampshire Volunteers and enlisted himself as a private. He appealed to President Polk for a commission. By the time the American force sailed for the Mexican shores of Veracruz in 1847, Pierce was a brigadier general commanding over two thousand men. The American commander for the Veracruz invasion was General Winfield Scott. Pierce’s forces joined with General Scott’s. They were successful. Next they marched the 150 miles from Veracruz to Mexico City, frequently harassed by Mexican guerrillas. The inexperienced Brigadier General Pierce was injured at the Battle of Contreras when he was thrown from his horse, crushing his leg. He was able to ride again within a month but arrived too late to participate in the decisive victory at the Battle of Chapultec. Pierce returned home to New Hampshire when the war ended.

When Pierce returned home he became active in the New Hampshire Democratic Party and was soon its undisputed leader. By the election year of 1852, the issue of slavery in the territories divided the nation. Southerners insisted that they should be able to take their slaves into any new territory. Northerners were committed to free soil without the competition of slaves. The Democratic Nominating Convention deadlocked for 48 ballots. On the 49^th ballot Franklin Pierce won the nomination. Pierce was seen as a good blend of northern principles with southern sensibilities. Pierce’s opponent was the Whig Party’s candidate General Winfield Scott. The two platforms were almost indistinguishable. It became a contest between the two personalities. Pierce’s affable personality and lack of strongly held positions helped him win the presidency. The 1852 election was the last presidential contest in which the Whigs fielded a candidate.

After the gruesome death of their last child, Benjamin, two months before Pierce’s inauguration, Jane Pierce was overcome with melancholia and distanced herself from her husband’s presidency. She became known as “the shadow of the White House”. She was deeply religious and blamed the death of Benjamin on God’s anger at her husband’s political life. President Pierce made many divisive decisions that were widely criticized. His popularity in the North declined when he came out in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and renewed the debate over expanding slavery in the West. The Kansas-Nebraska Act set the nation on its path to civil war. President Pierce’s credibility was further damaged when several of his diplomats issued the Ostend Manifesto, which discredited Manifest Destiny as a political doctrine. The nation was in turmoil and it required forceful leadership that was sensitive to issues both of change and continuity instead of Pierce’s traditional style of leadership. He was not re-nominated to run in the 1856 presidential election.

Franklin Pierce retired and traveled with his wife overseas. They returned to the U.S. in 1859 in time for him to comment on the growing sectional crisis between the North and the South. In 1860 many Democrats once again viewed Pierce as a compromise candidate who could unite the Northern and Southern wings of the party. Pierce declined to run. His reputation was destroyed during the American Civil War when he declared support for the Confederacy. In 1864, his friends yet again put his name in play for the Democratic nomination. In a letter, which he read out loud to the delegates, he declined to run. He retired to Concord, New Hampshire, where he died in 1869 from cirrhosis