Franklin Pierce by David W. Blight - In Pursuit

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Franklin Pierce by David W. Blight<br>Misreading the moral direction of the nation can turn political caution into historical catastrophe

In Pursuit<br>May 19, 2026

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Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.“Seldom was a President so out of touch with public opinion,” the biographer Larry Gara wrote of Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth American to hold the office of chief executive. He failed to recognize the national mood shifting even as the country’s political party system unraveled, the Union teetered on the brink of disaster, and slavery increasingly drove Americans to fear and despise each other, North and South. We expect those in power to do more than heedlessly follow the vox populi, but Pierce’s underwhelming presidency reinforces that leaders who misread the moral direction of the nation can turn political caution into historical catastrophe.<br>At first blush, Pierce appeared as prepared for the presidency as anyone in the antebellum era. He was born in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, in 1804, the son of a Revolutionary War general turned governor of New Hampshire. Intelligent, good looking, socially pleasing—often called “courtly and polished”—Pierce had a rapid rise. He graduated from Bowdoin College, and at 22 was already practicing law. He was a state legislator at 24, the assembly’s speaker at 26, a U.S. Congressman at 29, and a U.S. senator at 33.<br>Pierce married Jane Meyer Appleton, the daughter of Bowdoin’s president, but their domestic life was unhappy and tragic. Washington political life was awash in alcohol, and Pierce became a permanent victim of its drinking culture. Jane hated politics and public life in general and remained deeply religious and withdrawn.

Detail of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, Franklin Pierce. Quarter-plate daguerreotype, c. 1852. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.<br>In 1842, Pierce tried to give up politics altogether and returned to New Hampshire to practice law. When the Mexican War broke out in 1846, Pierce joined the army and quickly rose from private to brigadier general. In a battle, amidst exploding shells, his horse bucked and threw him. Pierce sustained a torn knee and internal injuries, which caused him to faint from pain, but he stayed with his troops through the campaign to take Mexico City. Even after he became president, people would refer to him as “general.”<br>As the question of slavery’s expansion exploded in the wake of the Mexican War and the nation’s new territorial acquisitions, the New Englander maintained close ties to Southerners in his party. He believed firmly in states’ rights and in restraining federal power, and openly supported slaveholders’ rights to their “property” in people. Pierce wholeheartedly embraced the Compromise of 1850, especially the Fugitive Slave Act—hated in the North—as a means of sustaining the Union. Even as resistance to the Compromise began to unravel the Whig party and caused terrible fissures in his own Democratic party, Pierce remained a believer that the Union would hold firm against agitation. Indeed, Pierce had only contempt for abolitionists, who he thought were fanatics and religious zealots.<br>By the early 1850s Pierce saw slavery as a question that the Constitution and American institutions would contain and solve, if only the fanatics could be thwarted. He advocated a muscular American expansionism, within North America and beyond, but never fully grasped how nearly every step in the nation’s geographical growth invited a struggle over the future of slavery. Along with Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Pierce believed that the vastness of the North American continent could absorb, even resolve, a divisive problem like slavery.<br>Pierce was an improbable, dark-horse candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1852. When several likelier candidates deadlocked at the national convention, the party’s powerbrokers sought a compromise candidate. Pierce showed no open enthusiasm for the nod, but his supporters—including his good friend and Bowdoin classmate, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne—pushed hard for him. Pierce was nominated on the forty-ninth ballot, receiving the news with “no thrill of joy, but a sadness.” His wife Jane fainted.<br>Reluctant, but with politics still in his blood, Pierce ran against General Winfield Scott, whom the Whigs ran as the “hero” of the Mexican War. By contrast, the Whigs missed no opportunity to portray Pierce as the “fainting general” and the “hero of many a well-fought bottle.” Despite or perhaps because of his efforts to be all things to all people, Pierce won the popular vote 1,601,017 to 1,385, 453, and decisively won the electoral college count by 254-42. The Free Soil Party candidate, abolitionist John P. Hale, an open enemy of Pierce’s in New Hampshire, received 155,825 votes.<br>Before the inauguration, tragedy struck....