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Vote: | A Republic without parties is a complete anomaly. The histories of all popular governments show absurd is the idea of their attempting to exist without parties. |
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Vote: | With the Union my best and dearest earthly hopes are entwined. |
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Biography
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Franklin Pierce (November 23, 1804–October 8, 1869) was an American politician and the 14th President of the United States, serving from 1853 to 1857. Pierce was a Democrat and the first president to be born in the 19th century. He was a "doughface" (a Northerner with Southern sympathies) who served in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. Later, Pierce took part in the Mexican-American War, becoming a brigadier general. Because his private law practice in his home state of New Hampshire was so successful he turned down several important positions. Later, he was nominated for president as a "dark horse" candidate on the 49th ballot at the 1852 Democratic National Convention. In the presidential election, Pierce and his running mate William R. King won in a landslide, beating Winfield Scott by a 50 to 44 percent margin in the popular vote and 254 to 42 in the electoral vote. He became the youngest president up unto that time.
His good looks and inoffensive personality caused him to make many friends, but he did not have the brillance to avoid the impending American Civil War. Pierce's popularity in the North went down sharply after he came out in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, repealing the Missouri Compromise and reopening the question of the expansion of slavery in the West. Pierce's credibility was further damaged when several of his foreign ministers issued the Ostend Manifesto. Abandoned by his own party, he was not renominated at the 1856 presidential election, and was replaced by James Buchanan. After losing the Democratic nomination, Pierce continued his lifelong struggle with alcoholism as his marriage to Jane Means Appleton Pierce fell apart. He destroyed his reputation by declaring support for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He died in 1869 from cirrhosis.
Kunhardt wrote in The American President what many historians believe about Pierce: that he was "a good man who didn't understand his own shortcomings. To his credit, he loved his wife and reshaped himself so that he could put up with her aristocratic, nervous ways and show her true affection. He was one of the most popular men in New Hampshire, polite and thoughtful, easy and good at the political game, charming and fine and handsome. And he was genuinely religious. And yet he was a timid man with a shallow, rigid, old-fashioned mind which could not cope with a changing America. In addition, Pierce was hounded by guilt, temptation, and just plain bad luck."
Early life Pierce was born in 1804 in a log cabin near Hillsborough, New Hampshire, part of the Transcendental Generation. The site of his birth is now under Lake Franklin Pierce. Pierce's father was Benjamin Pierce, a frontier farmer who became a Revolutionary War soldier, state militia general, and two-time governor of New Hampshire. His mother was Anna Kendrick. Pierce had six older and two younger siblings, four brothers and three sisters.
Pierce attended school at Hillsborough Center and moved to the Hancock Academy in Hancock at the age of 11; he was transferred to Francestown Academy in spring 1820. Later that year he was transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy to prepare for college and later that year entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he participated in literary, political, and debating clubs. There he met writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, with whom he formed a lasting friendship, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also met Calvin E. Stowe, Sargent S. Prentiss, and his future political rival John P. Hale.
In his second year of college, his grades were the lowest in his class; he changed his habits and graduated in 1824 third in his class. After graduation he in 1826 entered a law school in Northampton, Massachusetts, studying under Governor Levi Woodbury and later Judges Samuel Howe and Edmund Parker in Amherst, New Hampshire.
He was admitted to the bar and began a law practice in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1827.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Franklin Pierce".
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