 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. By pursuing the recommendations
of southern advisers, 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, in
1804, Pierce attended Bowdoin College. After graduation he studied law, then
entered politics. At 24 he was elected to the New Hampshire legislature; two
years later he became its Speaker. During the 1830's he went to Washington,
first as a Representative, then as a Senator.
Pierce, after serving in
the Mexican War, was proposed by New Hampshire friends for the Presidential
nomination in 1852. At the Democratic Convention, the delegates agreed easily
enough upon a platform pledging undeviating support of the Compromise of 1850
and hostility to any efforts to agitate the slavery question. But they balloted
48 times and eliminated all the well-known candidates before nominating Pierce,
a true "dark horse."
Probably because the Democrats stood more firmly
for the Compromise than the Whigs, and because Whig candidate Gen. Winfield
Scott was suspect in the South, Pierce won with a narrow margin of popular
votes.
Two months before he took office, he and his wife saw their
eleven-year-old son killed when their train was wrecked. Grief-stricken, Pierce
entered the Presidency nervously exhausted.
In his Inaugural he
proclaimed an era of peace and prosperity at home, and vigor in relations with
other nations. The United States might have to acquire additional possessions
for the sake of its own security, he pointed out, and would not be deterred by
"any timid forebodings of evil."
Pierce had only to make gestures
toward expansion 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renewal of the storm stemmed from the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the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 Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, advocate of a southern
transcontinental route, had persuaded Pierce to send James Gadsden to Mexico to
buy land for a southern railroad. He purchased the area now comprising southern
Arizona and part of southern New Mexico for $10,000,000.
Douglas's
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.
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