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Franklin Pierce
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When Franklin Pierce was born, Thomas Jefferson was just starting his second term as president. Franklin Pierce was the son of Benjamin Pierce, a recognized hero of the Revolutionary War. Benjamin Pierce served as a general under George Washington. Since Franklin Pierce grew up the son of a war hero, it was no wonder that Franklin's childhood fantasy was to be a war hero himself someday. He would get his chance in the war with Mexico. However, before he could go to war, his mother insisted that he go to school.
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Franklin Pierce was born 23 November 1804 at Hillsboro, New Hampshire and first appeared in the U.S. Federal Census in 1810. Pierce served as the 14th President of the United States, serving from 1853 to 1857. A veteran of the Mexican War, Pierce had ... served as a U.S. Senator and Congressman. When his term of office began, the population of the U.S. was 23,191,876.
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Though not born to great wealth on November 23, 1804, Franklin Pierce had more advantages than most people in rural New Hampshire. His father, Benjamin Pierce, had led the local militia to victories in the American Revolution, and as a result, he enjoyed a status in the area of Hillsborough that gave him influence in local politics. Both he and his wife Anna's families had been in America since the early Puritan settlements of the 1620s. Like most people raised in turbulent times, Benjamin and Anna wanted their eight children to have better a education than their own.
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In 1852, Franklin Pierce seemed to his fellow Democrats an ideal choice for the presidency. He was a northerner with southern sympathies and could therefore engender credibility in both regions in this year marked by continuing debate over slavery. But "Handsome Frank Pierce" ... had an almost pathological impulse to please, and that trait, combined with his willingness to listen to pro-slavery extremists, served the country poorly once he was in office. The most obvious case in point was his approval of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which opened an area once closed to slavery to settlement by slaveholders. The result was armed violence in Kansas and a sharp escalation in hostilities between North and South. As for Pierce's reputation, many fellow northerners could not find words harsh enough to describe this man who seemed to be selling out his own region.
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Franklin Pierce assumed the presidency at a time of tranquility. By virtue of the Compromise of 1850, the United States seemed to have weathered the storm surrounding the slavery issue. When the problem suddenly reappeared during his administration he had little success in dealing with it and policies he established hastened the disruption of the Union. With roots and home in the northern, anti-slavery state of New Hampshire, Pierce sided with the South on the issue of slavery. Devoted to the Union of the States, his aim was to uphold the Constitution of the United States and to avoid civil war at all cost. His views made him unpopular in the North and he failed to win a second term.
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Franklin Pierce was born at Hillsboro, N.H., on Nov. 23, 1804. A Bowdoin graduate, lawyer, and Jacksonian Democrat, he won rapid political advancement in the party, in part because of the prestige of his father, Gov. Benjamin Pierce. By 1831 he was Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives; from 1833 to 1837, he served in the federal House and from 1837 to 1842 in the Senate. His wife, Jane Means Appleton, whom he married in 1834, disliked Washington and the somewhat dissipated life led by Pierce; in 1842 Pierce resigned from the Senate and began a successful law practice in Concord, N.H. During the Mexican War, he was a brigadier general.
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Franklin Pierce