Franklin Pierce: Encyclopedia II - Franklin Pierce - Presidency

Franklin Pierce - Presidency

Pierce served as president from March 4, 1853, to March 4, 1857. Two months before he took office, shortly after boarding a train in Boston, president-elect Pierce and his family were trapped in a derailed car when it rolled over an embankment near Andover, Massachusetts. Pierce and his wife survived and were merely shaken up, but they watched as their 11-year-old son Benjamin ("Bennie") was crushed to death in the train disaster. Grief-stricken, Pierce entered the presidency nervously exhausted. The family had already lost two children to typhus, and Jane Pierce believed the train accident was divine punishment for her husband's acceptance of the high office of the presidency. As a result, Pierce chose to "affirm" his oath of office on a law book rather than the Bible, becoming the first and thus far only president to do so. In his inaugural address, he proclaimed an era of peace and prosperity at home and vigor in relations with other nations, saying that the United States might have to acquire additional possessions for the sake of its own security and would not be deterred by "any timid forebodings of evil."

Pierce selected for his Cabinet not men of similar beliefs but a broad cross-section of people he personally knew. Many thought that the diverse group would soon break up, but instead it became the only Cabinet that would remain unchanged through a four-year term.

Pierce aroused sectional apprehension when he pressured Britain to relinquish its special interests along part of the Central American coast, and even more when he tried to persuade Spain to sell Cuba for $100 million because of the expansive sugar crop in Cuba. The release of the Ostend Manifesto, signed by several of Pierce's cabinet members, caused outrage with its suggestion that the U.S. seize Cuba by force, and permanently discredited the Democratic Party's expansionist policies, which it had so famously rode to victory in 1844.

But the most controversial event of Pierce's presidency was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and reopened the question of slavery in the West. This measure, the handiwork of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, allegedly grew out of his desire to promote a railroad from Chicago, Illinois to California through Nebraska. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, advocate of a southern transcontinental route, had persuaded Pierce to send James Gadsden to Mexico to buy land for a southern railroad. He purchased the area now comprising southern Arizona and part of southern New Mexico for $10,000,000, commonly known as the Gadsden Purchase.

Douglas, to win Southern support for the organization of Nebraska, placed in his bill a provision declaring the Missouri Compromise null and void. Douglas provided in his bills that the residents of the new territories could decide the slavery question for themselves. Pierce, who had acquired a reputation as untrustworthy and easily manipulable, was persuaded to support Douglas' plan in a closed meeting between Pierce, Douglas, and several southern Senators, with Pierce consulting only Jefferson Davis of his cabinet. The passage of Kansas-Nebraska caused widespread outrage in the North and spurred the creation of the Republican Party, a sectional, Northern party which was organized as a direct response to the bill. The election of Republican Abraham Lincoln would provoke secession in 1861.

Meanwhile, Pierce lost all credibility he may have had in the North and was not renominated.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Presidency", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki