Franklin Pierce became President
at a time of apparent tranquility. 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the storm stemmed from the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri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.