Book Review: Franklin Pierce, by Michael F. Holt
POTUS #14: Not quite the most boring or incompetent President ever, but he might have been the handsomest.
Times Books, 2010, 176 pages
In my sequential read-through of presidential biographies, we're almost to the Civil War. Most of the presidents leading up to Lincoln are blamed, to various degrees, for causing the Civil War, even though I am increasingly convinced that none of them could have actually prevented it. This applies to the fourteenth president, Franklin Pierce, an anti-abolitionist Northerner whose Southern sympathies contributed in large part to the creation of the Republican Party, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the inevitable secession.
This short biography by Michael Holt was a bland summary of longer biographies. Holt writes clearly and concisely and only occasionally editorializes or interjects his own observations.
Pierce was a favorite son of New Hampshire. His father was the Governor of New Hampshire, a Jeffersonian Republican (or a Jeffersonian Democrat - in Jefferson's time, they were the "Democratic-Republicans"), and a Revolutionary War hero. Franklin Pierce wanted the glory and respect his father had. In school, he was known for being athletic, handsome, charming, and not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. He was best friends with novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote a campaign biography for Pierce when he ran for president.
Pierce served as a lawyer, then a state attorney general, and then went to Congress to represent New Hampshire, first as Congressman and then as a Senator. This is where he gained a reputation for being a Southern sympathizer; while Pierce never owned slaves himself, he considered slavery to be a states rights issue, and he despised abolitionists as self-righteous nags. He supported the Fugitive Slave Act (though there is some evidence he personally thought it was inhumane), and while he did not support the South's attempts to make a rule that Congress would categorically reject all abolitionist petitions, he did endorse the "Gag Rule" which basically tabled them without discussion.
This attitude got him called a "doughface," a term used for Northerners with Southern, pro-slavery sympathies, but which also implied cowardice. Pierce once clashed with John C. Calhoun on the Senate floor because Calhoun attacked New Hampshire by reading an abolitionist article from a New Hampshire newspaper that called Pierce a doughface.
Pierce was an unremarkable politician who largely got by on charm. He was only successful when he had no real opposition, and he quit his Senate term when his party became a minority.
His wife, Jane, never liked politics or Washington. Constantly sickly and anxious, the Pierces lost all three of their children young.
Franklin Pierce's father fought in the Revolutionary War and was a member of the Cincinnati Society. Franklin's brothers had fought in the War of 1812. So when the Mexican-American War broke out, he seized the chance to earn a few medals himself.
While Pierce was a competent commander, his performance at the time was not exactly inspiring. During a charge outside Mexico City, his horse spooked and slammed his groin against the saddle pommel so hard that he blacked out. He fell off the horse, and the horse then fell on his knee. To everyone else, it looked as if Pierce had fainted under enemy fire. One of his officers yelled, "Take command of the brigade. General Pierce is a damned coward!"
As they marched into the next battle, Pierce's injured knee gave out and he collapsed while his men marched past him. The battle after that, Pierce was laid up in the hospital tent with severe diarrhea.
As humiliating as this was, Pierce somehow emerged as a hero of the Mexican War. The Whig General Zachary Taylor was elected President in 1848, but after he died in office, the Whig party began to fall apart. Never a particularly stable alliance, the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act splintered Northern and Southern Whigs. Franklin Pierce's former commanding officer, General Winfield Scott, ran on the Whig ticket in 1850. Pierce was a dark horse candidate during the Democratic primary, and eventually won the party's nomination after 39 ballots. His wife Jane was not pleased; she didn't want to go back to Washington.
The election of 1852 was nasty but not exciting. Rumors of Pierce's cowardice during the war, as well as claims that he was "Hero of many a well-fought bottle" made for spicy attack ads, but Pierce still trounced the disorganized Whigs.
Following the election, but before Pierce's inauguration, he and his wife and their surviving son, 11-year-old Benjamin "Bennie" Pierce, were riding a train back from Boston when it derailed. Bennie was crushed and decapitated before his parents' eyes.
Pierce carried on, but he and his wife were obviously dramatically affected by this, and many historians believe that Pierce's poor performance as president, and subsequent alcoholism, were at least partly a result of this trauma.
Pierce was, all things considered, not a terrible president, he just wasn't a very good one at a critical time when the country really needed someone brilliant. The rift between North and South was growing, slavery was becoming an irreconcilable divide, and while Pierce was consistently on the side of slave-owning Southerners, he wanted to hold his party together first, and the country second.
His greatest blunder was supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened up Kansas and Nebraska to the slavery question, and effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise. The result of this was a series of armed conflicts known as "Bleeding Kansas," and Pierce's growing unpopularity in the North.
In the 1852 gubernatorial and congressional elections, the Democrats got slaughtered, largely because of Pierce's unpopularity. The disintegrating Whigs and Northern Democrats were splitting away and allying with former Know-Nothings to form the Republican Party. Nonetheless, Pierce wanted to run for reelection in 1856.
At this point, the author of this biography offers some of his rare editorial comments, where he points out that Pierce was delusional to think he had a chance. He had no hope of winning, as Southern Democrats were peeling away from the North in droves, and Pierce couldn't even get renominated by his own party. To this day, Franklin Pierce is the only incumbent President ever to be denied renomination by his own party. Instead, his former minister to the UK, James Buchanan, won the Democratic nomination and went on to become his successor and possibly the worst president ever.
Pierce and his wife did the usual ex-President thing, and went traveling, staying with some of their rich friends, and then took a tour of Europe. Jane's health continued to deteriorate, though she clearly did better in warm climates.
Pierce mostly stayed out of politics, though some of his allies floated his name for a possible presidential run again in 1860 and 1864. Pierce firmly rejected any such suggestions. During the Civil War, Pierce fell under some criticism for his Southern sympathies. A letter he had written to his former cabinet member and good friend Jefferson Davis was publicized, he openly criticized President Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, and he was at one point accused of being part of a Copperhead (pro-Confederacy) conspiracy. Pierce vehemently denied this and there is no evidence that it was true. Pierce supported the Union, albeit tepidly, and when Lincoln's own son died in the White House, Pierce sent the President a consoling letter. He later talked down a mob who was angry at him for not flying a flag in solidarity after Abraham Lincoln's assassination.
His wife Jane died in 1863. Pierce began hanging out with his old friend Nathaniel Hawthorne again, and Hawthorne died in 1864, literally in the next room, while the two of them were traveling together. Pierce began drinking more heavily (he had always been a hard drinker, though his wife had apparently gotten him to control it while she was alive). He donated money to Hawthorne's children and tried to help his old friend Jefferson Davis (who had been imprisoned after the war while the government decided whether or not to try him for treason). He bought some land.
In 1869, he died of cirrhosis of the liver. He was buried next to his wife and sons.
Franklin Pierce was not a terribly interesting president, though his administration was relatively scandal-free. His main failures were political; he tried to hard to keep the Democrats together and didn't do enough to keep the country together. He made the same mistakes many of his predecessors did, in thinking he could somehow take slavery off the table as a political issue. He was apparently an honest if not brilliant politician.
This biography was short, which was mostly what I was looking for since frankly I didn't have the heart to read another 500-page biography of a forgotten POTUS whose impact on American history was pretty minimal.
My complete list of book reviews.
Times Books, 2010, 176 pages
The genial but troubled New Englander whose single-minded partisan loyalties inflamed the nation's simmering battle over slavery.
Charming and handsome, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire was drafted to break the deadlock of the 1852 Democratic convention. Though he seized the White House in a landslide against the imploding Whig Party, he proved a dismal failure in office.
Michael F. Holt, a leading historian of nineteenth-century partisan politics, argues that in the wake of the Whig collapse, Pierce was consumed by an obsessive drive to unify his splintering party rather than the roiling country. He soon began to overreach. Word leaked that Pierce wanted Spain to sell the slave-owning island of Cuba to the United States, rousing sectional divisions. Then he supported repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which limited the expansion of slavery in the west. Violence broke out, and "Bleeding Kansas" spurred the formation of the Republican Party. By the end of his term, Pierce's beloved party had ruptured, and he lost the nomination to James Buchanan.
In this incisive account, Holt shows how a flawed leader, so dedicated to his party and ill-suited for the presidency, hastened the approach of the Civil War.
In my sequential read-through of presidential biographies, we're almost to the Civil War. Most of the presidents leading up to Lincoln are blamed, to various degrees, for causing the Civil War, even though I am increasingly convinced that none of them could have actually prevented it. This applies to the fourteenth president, Franklin Pierce, an anti-abolitionist Northerner whose Southern sympathies contributed in large part to the creation of the Republican Party, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the inevitable secession.
This short biography by Michael Holt was a bland summary of longer biographies. Holt writes clearly and concisely and only occasionally editorializes or interjects his own observations.
Pierce was a favorite son of New Hampshire. His father was the Governor of New Hampshire, a Jeffersonian Republican (or a Jeffersonian Democrat - in Jefferson's time, they were the "Democratic-Republicans"), and a Revolutionary War hero. Franklin Pierce wanted the glory and respect his father had. In school, he was known for being athletic, handsome, charming, and not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. He was best friends with novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote a campaign biography for Pierce when he ran for president.
Doughfaced Party Boy
Pierce served as a lawyer, then a state attorney general, and then went to Congress to represent New Hampshire, first as Congressman and then as a Senator. This is where he gained a reputation for being a Southern sympathizer; while Pierce never owned slaves himself, he considered slavery to be a states rights issue, and he despised abolitionists as self-righteous nags. He supported the Fugitive Slave Act (though there is some evidence he personally thought it was inhumane), and while he did not support the South's attempts to make a rule that Congress would categorically reject all abolitionist petitions, he did endorse the "Gag Rule" which basically tabled them without discussion.
This attitude got him called a "doughface," a term used for Northerners with Southern, pro-slavery sympathies, but which also implied cowardice. Pierce once clashed with John C. Calhoun on the Senate floor because Calhoun attacked New Hampshire by reading an abolitionist article from a New Hampshire newspaper that called Pierce a doughface.
Pierce was an unremarkable politician who largely got by on charm. He was only successful when he had no real opposition, and he quit his Senate term when his party became a minority.
His wife, Jane, never liked politics or Washington. Constantly sickly and anxious, the Pierces lost all three of their children young.
Generals run for president
Franklin Pierce's father fought in the Revolutionary War and was a member of the Cincinnati Society. Franklin's brothers had fought in the War of 1812. So when the Mexican-American War broke out, he seized the chance to earn a few medals himself.
While Pierce was a competent commander, his performance at the time was not exactly inspiring. During a charge outside Mexico City, his horse spooked and slammed his groin against the saddle pommel so hard that he blacked out. He fell off the horse, and the horse then fell on his knee. To everyone else, it looked as if Pierce had fainted under enemy fire. One of his officers yelled, "Take command of the brigade. General Pierce is a damned coward!"
As they marched into the next battle, Pierce's injured knee gave out and he collapsed while his men marched past him. The battle after that, Pierce was laid up in the hospital tent with severe diarrhea.
As humiliating as this was, Pierce somehow emerged as a hero of the Mexican War. The Whig General Zachary Taylor was elected President in 1848, but after he died in office, the Whig party began to fall apart. Never a particularly stable alliance, the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act splintered Northern and Southern Whigs. Franklin Pierce's former commanding officer, General Winfield Scott, ran on the Whig ticket in 1850. Pierce was a dark horse candidate during the Democratic primary, and eventually won the party's nomination after 39 ballots. His wife Jane was not pleased; she didn't want to go back to Washington.
The election of 1852 was nasty but not exciting. Rumors of Pierce's cowardice during the war, as well as claims that he was "Hero of many a well-fought bottle" made for spicy attack ads, but Pierce still trounced the disorganized Whigs.
Following the election, but before Pierce's inauguration, he and his wife and their surviving son, 11-year-old Benjamin "Bennie" Pierce, were riding a train back from Boston when it derailed. Bennie was crushed and decapitated before his parents' eyes.
Pierce carried on, but he and his wife were obviously dramatically affected by this, and many historians believe that Pierce's poor performance as president, and subsequent alcoholism, were at least partly a result of this trauma.
One-Term President
Pierce was, all things considered, not a terrible president, he just wasn't a very good one at a critical time when the country really needed someone brilliant. The rift between North and South was growing, slavery was becoming an irreconcilable divide, and while Pierce was consistently on the side of slave-owning Southerners, he wanted to hold his party together first, and the country second.
His greatest blunder was supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened up Kansas and Nebraska to the slavery question, and effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise. The result of this was a series of armed conflicts known as "Bleeding Kansas," and Pierce's growing unpopularity in the North.
In the 1852 gubernatorial and congressional elections, the Democrats got slaughtered, largely because of Pierce's unpopularity. The disintegrating Whigs and Northern Democrats were splitting away and allying with former Know-Nothings to form the Republican Party. Nonetheless, Pierce wanted to run for reelection in 1856.
At this point, the author of this biography offers some of his rare editorial comments, where he points out that Pierce was delusional to think he had a chance. He had no hope of winning, as Southern Democrats were peeling away from the North in droves, and Pierce couldn't even get renominated by his own party. To this day, Franklin Pierce is the only incumbent President ever to be denied renomination by his own party. Instead, his former minister to the UK, James Buchanan, won the Democratic nomination and went on to become his successor and possibly the worst president ever.
Retirement and Death
Pierce and his wife did the usual ex-President thing, and went traveling, staying with some of their rich friends, and then took a tour of Europe. Jane's health continued to deteriorate, though she clearly did better in warm climates.
Pierce mostly stayed out of politics, though some of his allies floated his name for a possible presidential run again in 1860 and 1864. Pierce firmly rejected any such suggestions. During the Civil War, Pierce fell under some criticism for his Southern sympathies. A letter he had written to his former cabinet member and good friend Jefferson Davis was publicized, he openly criticized President Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, and he was at one point accused of being part of a Copperhead (pro-Confederacy) conspiracy. Pierce vehemently denied this and there is no evidence that it was true. Pierce supported the Union, albeit tepidly, and when Lincoln's own son died in the White House, Pierce sent the President a consoling letter. He later talked down a mob who was angry at him for not flying a flag in solidarity after Abraham Lincoln's assassination.
His wife Jane died in 1863. Pierce began hanging out with his old friend Nathaniel Hawthorne again, and Hawthorne died in 1864, literally in the next room, while the two of them were traveling together. Pierce began drinking more heavily (he had always been a hard drinker, though his wife had apparently gotten him to control it while she was alive). He donated money to Hawthorne's children and tried to help his old friend Jefferson Davis (who had been imprisoned after the war while the government decided whether or not to try him for treason). He bought some land.
In 1869, he died of cirrhosis of the liver. He was buried next to his wife and sons.
Franklin Pierce was not a terribly interesting president, though his administration was relatively scandal-free. His main failures were political; he tried to hard to keep the Democrats together and didn't do enough to keep the country together. He made the same mistakes many of his predecessors did, in thinking he could somehow take slavery off the table as a political issue. He was apparently an honest if not brilliant politician.
This biography was short, which was mostly what I was looking for since frankly I didn't have the heart to read another 500-page biography of a forgotten POTUS whose impact on American history was pretty minimal.
My complete list of book reviews.