Third and final installment of examining the obscure Presidents on this long Presidents’ Day weekend. With William Henry Harrison, I played a little bit of “what if” with his presidency and argued that he’s more significant than he gets credit for. With Millard Fillmore, I argued that while not great, he is in no way terrible and deserves a fresh look. Today, with Franklin Pierce, I’m going to argue that he is a legitimately great President. Let’s examine Young Hickory of the Granite Hills.
Franklin Pierce was born in New Hampshire in 1804, the son of a Revolutionary War lieutenant and prominent Jeffersonian republican. To this day, he is New Hampshire’s only contribution to the Oval Office. Pierce is unusual in that he was not your typical New Englander. While he did not support slavery, Pierce did not like the abolitionists for their holier-than-thou attitude. If you’ve spent any time in Connecticut or Massachusetts, you know the type of people I’m talking about. Pierce was an outdoorsman who loved ice skating and fishing and found more in common with southern hospitality than Puritan moral superiority. This earned him the “doughface” label – a northern man with southern sympathies.
A Mexican War veteran, Pierce found his way into politics as a New Hampshire representative and Senator. He served during a time of titans such as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. Pierce’s private life was a mixed bag. He had a lifelong struggle with alcoholism, only made worse by all three of his children dying young. Tragically, Pierce’s last surviving son was halfway decapitated right in front of his parents as the result of a train accident. Pierce’s wife struggled with chronic depression for the rest of her life and hated the public spotlight of Washington, D.C. Despite this, Pierce was a very likeable, charismatic, handsome man. He also went through periods of sobriety, even becoming president of a New York temperance society.
As evidence of his popularity, Pierce can lay claim to never losing an election. When the Democrats nominated him for the Presidency, he crushed Whig candidate Winfield Scott, who ironically was Pierce’s commander in the Mexican War. Pierce carried 27 out of 31 states, defeating Scott by an electoral count of 254 to 42. Electoral massacres like this are very rare in American history. FDR’s landslides or those of Nixon and Reagan’s reelections are in the same category. It’s almost impossible to imagine a candidate having that much support today. Regardless, the New England elite criticized Pierce for being crude and unrefined. But Pierce was intelligent. Amazingly, he gave his inaugural speech entirely from memory. It was three thousand words. Hardly an uneducated rube. But how was his presidency?
He was against federally funded infrastructure. This may have been Pierce towing the Democrat party line against the Whigs, but I think he was sincere. Pierce gave half-hearted support to internal improvements that would benefit commerce, like railroads. But he vetoed several “general welfare” infrastructure bills. He vetoed a bill for federally funding insane asylums:
It can not be questioned that if Congress has power to make provision for the indigent insane without the limits of this District it has the same power to provide for the indigent who are not insane, and thus to transfer to the Federal Government the charge of all the poor in all the States. It has the same power to provide hospitals and other local establishments for the care and cure of every species of human infirmity, and thus to assume all that duty of either public philanthropy, or public necessity to the dependent, the orphan, the sick, or the needy which is now discharged by the States themselves or by corporate institutions or private endowments existing under the legislation of the States.
This is the correct stance. Pierce is arguing that there is nothing in the constitution that allows the federal government to provide insane asylums, and that it could open Pandora’s box to all sorts of corruption. We saw something similar recently when Donald Trump pulled federal funding from the Special Olympics and was labeled a monster for it. Just because something may be kind, that does not mean that the government must pay for it. It has nothing to do with hating the handicapped or the mentally ill. It’s just reality. The level of discourse around this stuff was more mature back in 1853, but the root issue was still there.
The railroad issue becomes a huge problem later on with old Whig Republicans who inherited Clay’s American System. So many of these big railroad projects were massive grifting operations for Republican politicians. They needed constant bailouts because they were always going bankrupt due to inefficiency issues that private sector railroads could not afford. This is the problem with the Critical Democrat Theory of American history. “Republicans were always the good guys and Democrats were always the bad guys.” Or, “Democrats have always been the party of slavery.” There’s much more going on here.
Pierce was great on foreign policy. As a “Young American” Jeffersonian, he believed in American westward expansion, but through diplomacy, not force. He continued the Asian trade policies of the Fillmore administration. The Gadsden Purchase from Mexico happens under Pierce – the final land purchase of what are now the lower 48 states. Pierce continues to repair relations with Britain over Canadian border disputes. He also took a stand against Britain, who wanted to get America involved in the Crimean War. Pierce expelled the British ministers, stating that getting America involved in a European conflict would be a violation of neutrality, and a violation of the prior Clayton-Bulwer treaty between Britain and the U.S. Britain then backed off. Imagine if Presidents had the cajónes to tell off Europe today?
Pierce’s record is spottier on the Cuba situation. The Ostend Manifesto was an effort to purchase Cuba from Spain and use force if the Spanish did not acquiesce. Pierce did not draft the manifesto, but probably would have supported it. Ultimately, America backs down from this, and the Cuba issue is pushed down the road. There is evidence that Pierce wanted to acquire Cuba as a slave state to give the south a political concession. A similar situation occurs in Kansas, and that is what Pierce is most known for.
Bloody Kansas takes place in 1854 when Pierce signs the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law. Like Fillmore, Pierce believed in popular sovereignty for the territories. They could decide whether or not to be slave or free states. Northern Democrats, largely Stephen Douglas, wanted to get a transcontinental railroad running through the southwest and needed slave states for the political capital to pull it off. This sets off fireworks on both sides and we see “squatter sovereignty” in the territories, with both groups fighting over whether or not these territories would become slave states or free states. This does lead to violence and a mini-civil war in Kansas.
But is this Pierce’s fault? He is largely acting on precedent when it comes to the sovereignty issue. Pierce is acting in line with 1850, 1820 and going even further back to the Northwest Ordinance. He was doing what he thought would be in the best interest of preserving the Union, not using dictatorial powers to force a government on the territories/states. Unfortunately, this destroyed Pierce politically. The Democrats did not nominate him to run for reelection in 1856. This even leads to the destruction of the Whig party. Historians consider Franklin Pierce to be a loser since he was a one-termer, and they largely blame the “civil war” on him. This is unfair and does not reflect Pierce’s actual actions as an executive.
He was a vocal critic of Lincoln. It’s easy to forget, but Lincoln was not a popular President. He wouldn’t have to suspend habeas corpus, censor the press, and jail his political opposition if he had popular support. Pierce was not a fan of these measures. It’s unclear what Pierce would have done if secession happened under his watch. Pierce was a unionist. As far back as his Senate run, he believed that slavery would die out or end peacefully. But the more important point to consider is that secession did not happen under Pierce’s watch. It did not happen under the watch of any of the presidents leading up to Lincoln (the first states secede under Buchanan’s lame duck period after the election of Lincoln). Yet, all of these presidents get lumped into the “terrible” category by professional historians for their “lack of vision.” Because of this, Pierce is portrayed as a traitor to America despite being nothing of the sort.
Pierce’s post-presidency life was not kind to him. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, an Antifa mob approached Pierce’s Concord, New Hampshire home and demanded to know why he wasn’t hanging the rainbow flag on his porch. I’m sorry, I’m getting my eras mixed up here…. an angry mob approached Pierce’s home and demanded to know why he wasn’t hanging the American flag in honor of Lincoln. New England puritans have always behaved like this. Same passive-aggressive virtue signaling. Same Maoist struggle sessions. The only difference is that today, this behavior isn’t limited to just New England.
Ultimately, Pierce died in 1869 of cirrhosis of the liver. He lost his long battle with alcoholism, literally drinking himself to death. It’s easy to judge him for that, or call him a failure, but many of us will never face the tragedies that Pierce faced. I want to remember Pierce for the good job that he did. Franklin Pierce will never be revised by the professional historian class. He didn’t start wars that killed millions or do any of the other monarchal things that the academics love. He was just a man that did his job. He was an excellent President, scoring good to great on all possible metrics. He could have used personal tragedy as an excuse to neglect his duties. But Pierce had more character than that.
The Presidents should be measured by how they upheld their oath to defend the Constitution. The Constitution expressly states exactly what the Presidents duties are. We should not be ranking them on unrelated things like “vision” or “crisis leadership” or any of these categories that wind up on C-Span polls. We don’t rank Jimi Hendrix based on how far he can kick a football, we rank him based on his guitar skills. Pierce had great foreign policy. He was not chief legislator. He took principled stances on the decisions he made as an executive. His administration even reduced the federal debt by 50%, a feat only topped by Andrew Jackson. He did everything he was supposed to do, and he did it well. Franklin Pierce deserves to be remembered as a great President. I hope this goes a small way towards rehabilitating his legacy.
From Pierce’s memorized inaugural address:
Standing, as I do, almost within view of the green slopes of Monticello, and, as it were, within reach of the tomb of Washington, with all the cherished memories of the past gathering around me like so many eloquent voices of exhortation from heaven, I can express no better hope for my country than that the kind Providence which smiled upon our fathers may enable their children to preserve the blessings they have inherited.
More Presidents’ Day obscurity: