Pierce

Pierce, FRANKLIN, fourteenth president of the United States, was born at Hillsborough, New Hampshire, November 23, 1804. His father, Benjamin Pierce, a farmer who had risen in the war of independence to the rank of major, in 1827 and 1829 became governor of New Hampshire. Franklin Pierce was educated at Bowdoin College, and was an officer in a college military company, in which his biographer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a private. He graduated in 1824, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1827. From 1829 to 1833 he was a member of the state legislature, and for two years was its speaker; he was then elected to congress, a Democrat of the school of Jackson. In 1837 he was elected to the United States senate, of which he was the youngest member. In 1842 he resigned his seat, and returned to the practice of law. He refused the Democratic nomination for governor, as well as an appointment to fill a vacancy in the senate; and he declined the office of attorney-general offered him by President Polk. He remained, however, among the leaders of his party, zealously advocated the annexation of Texas, with or without slavery, and, after his opponents, the Whigs and Free-soilers, had been victorious at the polls in 1846, volunteered as a private for the Mexican war. The president made him a brigadier-general, and in August 1847 he joined General Scott, and led his brigade in the battles of Contreras and Churubusco. In 1852, in consequence of the conflicting claims of the leaders of the Democratic party at the Baltimore Convention, he was nominated as a compromise candidate for the presidency, against General Scott, the Whig nominee, and received the votes of all but four states. President Pierce in his inaugural address defended, on constitutional grounds, slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law; and his cabinet, which was an eminently able one, included Jefferson Davis as secretary of war. Pierce's view as to slavery was that it was the price paid for the Union by the framers of the federal constitution, and that, therefore, in honesty it must be maintained. The principal events of his administration—in importance far before the treaty for reciprocity of trade with the British American colonies and the treaty with Japan, or the filibustering expeditions of Walker (q.v.) to Nicaragua and of others to Cuba, with the resultant abortive Ostend (q.v.) Manifesto—were the repeal of the Missouri Compromise (see MISSOURI) and the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (see KANSAS), which kindled a flame of civil war in the new territory that ultimately set the whole Union in a blaze. Pierce, with his rigid regard for constitutional obligations, was intensely hostile to the free-state settlers and to abolitionists in general. At the close of his term of office in 1857 he spent three years in Europe; and afterwards, having no sympathy with the party which subsequently came into power, he took no part in politics. He died at Concord, 8th October 1869. As a lawyer Pierce was an eminent and eloquent pleader; as a statesman his administration would have passed for skilful and successful had it not been for the slavery storm which rose and wrecked it; while as a man he was amiable and generous, and of spotless integrity. There are Lives by Hawthorne (1852) and D. W. Bartlett (1852), and a Review of his administration by A. E. Carroll (1856).