Pierce, Franklin

• Author: Jeffrey Lehman, Shirelle Phelps

Page 444

Franklin Pierce served as the fourteenth president of the United States from 1853 to 1857. He was the youngest person to be elected president up to that time. A northern Democrat who sought to preserve southern SLAVERY, Pierce's administration proved a failure because he antagonized the growing abolitionist movement by signing the KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT of 1854, which gave the two new territories the option of whether to permit slavery. Pierce was unable to win renomination for a second term.

Pierce was born on November 23, 1804, in Hillsboro, New Hampshire. His parents were Benjamin and Anna Kendrick Pierce. Pierce graduated from Bowdoin College in 1824 and returned home to take over his father's duties as postmaster, after his father entered politics. Pierce studied law with a local attorney and was admitted to the New Hampshire bar in 1827. In that same year his father was elected governor of New Hampshire, which proved helpful to Pierce's own nascent political ambitions.

Pierce was elected as a Democrat to the New Hampshire legislature in 1829 and in 1832 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. A strong supporter of President ANDREW JACKSON, Pierce also became associated with the cause of slavery. In 1835 he attacked the flood of abolitionist petitions addressed to the House, which contained the signatures of more than two million people. He joined southern Democrats in imposing a "gag rule" that prevented the House from receiving or debating these petitions.

In 1837 Pierce was elected to the U.S. Senate. He resigned in 1842 for personal reasons and returned to Concord, New Hampshire, to become the federal district attorney. Except for a brief tour of duty as an Army officer during the Mexican War (1846?48), Pierce remained out of the political arena until the DEMOCRATIC PARTY national convention in 1852. The three leading candidates for the presidential nomination, Lewis Cass, STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, and JAMES BUCHANAN, failed to win the necessary votes after forty-eight ballots. The convention turned to Pierce on the forty-ninth ballot as a compromise candidate who, though virtually unknown nationally, enjoyed support from northern and southern Democrats. He easily defeated General Winfield Scott, the WHIG PARTY candidate, in November 1852.

"A REPUBLIC WITHOUT PARTIES IS A COMPLETE ANOMALY. THE HISTORY OF ALL POPULAR GOVERNMENTS SHOW HOW ABSURD IS THE IDEA OF THEIR ATTEMPTING TO EXIST WITHOUT...