VI.

Later Years

By 1856 it was obvious that Pierce could not hope to be renominated. The Democrats instead nominated James Buchanan, and with his election the Pierces returned to New Hampshire. However, Pierce's outspoken condemnation of the New England Emigrant Aid Company and his bitter diatribes against abolitionists, especially abolitionist clergymen, had so outraged his home state that Concord refused him a public reception on his return.

In the winter of 1857 the Pierces left for Madeira and then continued on to Europe, where they remained for almost two years. Before he left, however, Pierce declared that the best man to run for president in the election of 1860 was Jefferson Davis.

With the election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. president in 1860 and the outbreak of the Civil War shortly thereafter, Pierce became a bitter and outspoken opponent of both the Lincoln administration and the war. He spoke of the war as the “butchery of white men” for the sake of “inflicting” emancipation on slaves who did not want it. His last public speech was a diatribe against Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in Confederate-controlled regions. Pierce spoke on the day in July 1863 when his audience was being swept by news of a great Union victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. With that speech, Pierce lost the last vestige of public esteem and his last friend but Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In December 1863 Mrs. Pierce died, and only Hawthorne came to be with Pierce in his bereavement. In the spring of 1864 Hawthorne died and Pierce was completely alone. For a time he succumbed to alcoholism, but he reformed during the last three years of his life. He died on October 8, 1869, at his home in Concord. President Ulysses S. Grant declared a period of national mourning, as if in death, Pierce had finally won a pardon from the Union he had worked zealously, if misguidedly, to preserve.