Hello there! It's June which means 2025 is nearly halfway over, and if we don't start busting out some of these recaps soon, I fear this blog may never recover. Including this slim biography on our 14th president, I have no less than twelve books sitting in my book cart waiting for recaps before I can re-shelve them and move on with my life so let's get cracking, shall we?
Even though I was determined to get to Pierce last year and even started reading this paltry biography in September, I didn't get past the first chapter and ended up having to start completely over a couple weeks ago. That means I didn't make any progress on my goal of reading through the U.S. presidents last year. Oy. But we dust ourselves off and keep trying. I was determined to finish Franklin Pierce by the end of May and I just barely eked it out Saturday evening.
Which also means that I'm sitting here ignoring the eleven other books (five of them from last year) that have been waiting for recaps longer and filling you in on my most recently completed reading endeavor before I forget everything I just learned about Franklin Pierce. Which wasn't much. Even though after reading Eisenhower's tiny biography on Zachary Taylor I determined to avoid The American Presidents series from here on out, I unfortunately could not find an affordable option for Peter Wallner's two-volume series on Pierce and had to settle for Michael F. Holt's scant rendering of our 14th president instead.
While this is technically a cradle-to-grave biography of Franklin Pierce (which meets my criteria for this particular life goal), it was more an argument for Holt's thesis that without a strong opposition, a political party is doomed to fracture internally and become its own worst enemy. For the majority of this 154-page biography, I didn't get much insight into Franklin Pierce at all and felt that Holt focused too much on the entire political landscape of the time rather than on the specific man he was tasked with writing about. The final chapter of the book covering Pierce's life after his presidency was by far the most interesting and illuminating.
Franklin Pierce was born in 1804 to American Revolutionary war hero and two-time New Hampshire governor Benjamin Pierce. After getting an education in the law at Bowdoin College in Maine and Northampton Law School in Massachusetts, he quickly ascended in local and state politics before moving on to the U.S. House of Representatives and finally the Senate. He then retired from politics and after a brief (and embarrassing) stint as a colonel in the Mexican-American War, he left the national scene altogether for nearly ten years, practicing law back home in New Hampshire.
Then during the 1852 Democratic National Convention, Pierce's name came up as a dark horse contender when no one could agree on one of the bigger name candidates. Ultimately, Pierce and Alabama's William R. King were chosen to run for president and vice president on the Democratic ticket. Even though Pierce's name had been sunken in political obscurity for the last ten years prior to the 1852 presidential election, he easily won running on a platform committed to upholding the Compromise of 1850 signed into law during Fillmore's presidency. His running-mate King ended up dying shortly after they were sworn in meaning Pierce served his one presidential term with no acting VP (which, let's be honest, isn't really that big of a deal since American vice presidents really don't do all that much). He is our country's only president from New Hampshire to date.
As for his presidency: it was a disaster. Franklin Pierce was a likable guy and he liked to be liked which isn't a particularly helpful trait when it comes to making tough decisions or taking a hardline stance on issues of national importance. His main objective as top dog of the land was maintaining party unity which was pretty much impossible at this point in our nation's history. You would think that by this point, the American political landscape would have split along sectional divides: the Northern anti-slavery contingent against the Southern states' rights contingent. But in 1852, we still had the Democrats spanning all settled states and their main opposition the Whigs spanning all settled states (with a lot of smaller parties sprinkled throughout with their own pet platforms). In trying to hold all the factions of Dems together, Pierce effectively pissed everyone off and started that sectional split all the major politicians of the day were so desperately trying to avoid in the name of keeping the country unified. Pierce used his presidential patronage to divide jobs up evenly among all the aforementioned Democratic factions which blew up in his face. He threw his weight behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act which effectually repealed the Missouri Compromise, earning him the accusation of being a slavery-loving doughface. By the time his term came to an end, he really hadn't accomplished much of anything and in his final annual message to Congress he bitterly contended that it wasn't his fault the country was such a mess. He was not renominated by his party, and he spent his remaining twelve years on earth traveling with his wife abroad, farming in New England, and spending time with friends.
As for his personal life, he married Jane Means Appleton in 1834 and by all appearances, loved her and took care of her until her death in 1863. She was a frail, sickly woman often suffering with bouts of tuberculosis. They had three sons together but none of them survived past childhood, their third son being killed in a train accident—in the seat behind them!—at the age of of eleven. Jane hated politics and spent most of her time as First Lady living as an isolated recluse. As I mentioned, Frank Pierce was a highly likable person and his friends and family and even his presidential cabinet seemed to genuinely love and respect him, and he earned the lifelong loyalty of those whom he was close to. Some of his dearest friends included American author Nathaniel Hawthorne and Confederate president Jefferson Davis. All in all, I think Pierce was a good guy who just wasn't cut out for politics and certainly served his political career during an impossible time in American politics. He struggled with alcoholism all his life and finally succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver in 1869 at the age of 64.
As we move one step closer to the man who is arguably America's most famous president, Abraham Lincoln, I found it interesting that Pierce tried to remain neutral and stay out of the press about Lincoln's administration but ended up publicly airing his criticisms when Lincoln trampled the civil rights of Democrat Clarence Vallandigham. Many in the North branded Pierce a traitor to the Union and a mob stormed his home when he didn't raise the flag in a gesture of mourning after Lincoln's death. I'm approaching the most heated and politically charged time in my nation's history in my personal read-through of the American presidents, and it's getting tense.
Next up is James Buchanan who is considered by literally everyone to be our nation's very worst president, bar none. I'm sincerely hoping to read his biography by the end of the year, but we'll see what happens.
