Franklin Pierce

Article Outline

Introduction; Early Life; Early Career; Election of 1852; President of the United States; Later Years

United States Senator

In 1837 Pierce was elected to the U.S. Senate (the upper chamber of Congress) from New Hampshire. At 33, he was the Senate's youngest member. His career in the Senate was undistinguished. For the most part he followed the direction of the party leaders. Pierce was content throughout his Senate years to be the protégé of older senators, chiefly Southerners, whose kindness to him increased his sympathy for the Southern point of view.

During his years in the Senate, the Pierces had two sons, Franklin and Benjamin, who became their father's chief delight. He moved his family to the New Hampshire state capital at Concord, where he formed a law partnership that was immediately successful. Pierce greatly pleased his wife by resigning his Senate seat in February 1842 and devoting himself to his family and law practice. In 1843, however, a typhus epidemic swept Concord, and both of Pierce's sons became ill. The older boy, Franklin, died.

Mexican War Service

With the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846, Pierce undertook to raise the two companies of men that were New Hampshire's quota. He enlisted as a private but in 1847 was appointed brigadier general of volunteers. In May of that year he sailed with an invasion force of about 2500 men for Veracruz, Mexico. Pierce and his army marched through 240 km (150 mi) of hostile country and suffered several attacks by Mexican guerrillas before arriving in Puebla to join the army of General Winfield Scott in a march to Mexico City. At the Battle of Contreras in August, Pierce was injured by a fall from his horse, and during his absence the men under his command panicked and broke ranks. This incident from the Mexican War was later raked up by the Whig Party and twisted into an unjust charge of cowardice against Pierce.

At the end of the war, Pierce returned home to his wife and six-year-old son. His law partnership had been dissolved, and he took a new partner. The new firm, like the old one, was highly successful.

Elder Statesman

Pierce was by nature a politician. Although still in his early forties, as a retired U.S. senator he became New Hampshire's elder statesman and head of a group of lawyer-politicians called the Concord Clique, or the Regency. The group controlled the state's Democratic Party. Pierce saw nothing wrong in political machines. On the contrary, he believed that a political party, like an army, could not be effective without discipline, organization, and a tight chain of command.

All of these were breaking down in the national Democratic Party. In 1848 the first split over the slavery issue appeared in the party's ranks. A group of antislavery Democrats left the party, formed the Free-Soil Party, and nominated Martin Van Buren for the presidency against the regular Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, and the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor. Pierce disapproved of party divisions in general and that of Free-Soil Democrats in particular.

Pierce's early and bafflingly consistent proslavery bias was in part a result of his belief that the U.S. Constitution sanctioned the existence of slavery. Pierce considered unconstitutional and therefore wrong any attempt on the part of the North to interfere with slavery or to limit its spread. The moral question involved in selling human beings into slavery seemed never to trouble him.

Election of 1852

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Presidential Nomination

Pierce's views were known to Democratic leaders by 1852, when the party was hopelessly split into factions. A deadlock was expected at the Democratic national presidential convention. The leading contenders for the Democratic nomination were Lewis Cass, former Secretary of State James Buchanan, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. None of them was expected to win sufficient strength from the hodgepodge of Southern Union Democrats, States-Rights Democrats, Free-Soil Democrats, and Compromise-of-1850 Democrats. Pierce belonged to the compromise group because the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California into the Union as a free state, also included a strong fugitive slave law. A letter from Pierce, which praised the compromise and defended the constitutional rights of the slave states, was passed around at the convention, held in Baltimore, Maryland.

Cass, Buchanan, and Douglas vied for the lead for the first 35 ballots. Former Secretary of War William L. Marcy of New York made his bid for lead on the next 10 ballots. On the 49th ballot the convention nominated Pierce as a Northern politician who was acceptable to the South. The convention chose William R. King of Alabama to be Pierce's running mate and drafted a platform pledging support of the Compromise of 1850 and an end to all further debate on the slavery issue. It was a promise that no president in the 1850s could have kept.

Campaign

Because the Whigs had nominated General Winfield Scott, a popular war hero, the Democrats presented Pierce as the heir to Andrew Jackson. The Whigs countered by starting a whispering campaign branding Pierce a coward, a charge easy to disprove but impossible to silence.

Nevertheless, in November 1852, Pierce won a narrow popular victory over Scott and was elected the 14th president of the United States.