Frankly, His Story is Piercing
Hillsborough, NH
The Pierce Homestead had eluded me for years.
For nearly a quarter century, my husband and I have been on a quest to visit a presidential home, library, or other site—prison, perhaps—affiliated with each of our nation’s presidents. While visiting Historic Jamestowne, the Yorktown Battlefield, and Colonial Williamsburg in 2001, we happened upon John Tyler’s Sherwood Forest. Our delightful day there got us thinking, “Hey, if visiting the home of America’s obscure 10th president can be such a hoot, let’s visit ‘em all!”
I’m up to 21 sites, or 22, if vacationing a couple of blocks from Joe Biden’s Rehoboth Beach house counts. My husband remains mired in the single digits, with the lame excuse that work interferes with his ability to visit presidential sites when the mood strikes.
Since the Pierce Homestead is a mere 83 miles from my own, I regarded it as low-hanging presidential fruit, to be plucked when time didn’t allow a jaunt to, say, Martin Van Buren’s home in Kinderhook, NY. But, whenever going to our 14th president’s childhood home occurred to me, it was closed, or I was busy.
On May 31, 2024, all of the stars finally aligned: the site was open, I was not otherwise engaged, and I remembered that the Pierce Homestead existed.
Which is more than most Americans can say about Franklin Pierce himself. According to a highly scientific survey, the only president more forgotten than our man Frank is Chester A. Arthur.
Read on, and I’m pretty sure you’ll remember Franklin Pierce’s story for the rest of your life.
He arrived in the world on November 23, 1804, the fifth of eight children born to Revolutionary War general, two-term governor of New Hampshire, and self-made man Benjamin Pierce and his wife, Anna. By all accounts—including his own—Frank had a happy childhood. I saw and heard evidence of this during my enjoyable house tour (who knew there were so many butter churning options?), discussion with the friendly and knowledgeable Pierce Homestead tour guides, and subsequent jaunts around Hillsborough, a small town located 25 miles west of Concord, the New Hampshire state capital.
A fun-loving guy, Frank partied, hunted, and fished to the detriment of his studies during his first two years at Bowdoin College in Maine. He managed to pull it together academically with help from his bestie, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Yes, THAT Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter and, as you may recall from a recent post, a disgruntled member of the Brook Farm Utopian Community. Pierce and Hawthorne were lifelong friends; in fact, it was Pierce who discovered Hawthorne’s dead body in the hotel room across from his during an 1864 trip to the White Mountains.
After college, “Handsome Frank” rode his good looks, amiable personality, and father’s coattails into politics, ultimately climbing the political ladder into the U.S. Senate at the tender age of 34. He distinguished himself in D.C. as a man who drank harder than he worked. In the mid-1830s, Frank married Jane Means Appleton, a Congregationalist minister’s daughter. Nobody is quite sure why.
Jane was a handful. Other than her religion and their three sons, the frail, melancholic, and acerbic Jane didn’t like much of anything, including her husband’s drinking. Reportedly, he gave up the booze, at least when she was around. Jane really disliked Washington D.C., and, in 1842, she made her husband promise that he would never again seek political office.
And he didn’t. . .technically. . .as in splitting hairs technically.
I compare what happened next to Bill Clinton’s insistence that he DID. NOT. HAVE. SEXUAL. RELATIONS. WITH. THAT. WOMAN. Do most Americans consider the oral sex that he admitted to—and of which there is the infamous blue dress proof—a form of sexual relations? I’m going to go out on a limb and say yes. Did Clinton pay a high price for his linguistic gymnastics? No limb, definite yes.
Franklin Pierce paid an even higher price for his own linguistic gymnastics.
From 1842, when he resigned from the Senate, until 1852, Pierce served basically as the Democratic party boss of New Hampshire (with a brief and ignominious stint in the Mexican-American war). Jane wasn’t thrilled by her husband’s career choice, but at least he—and, by extension, she—wasn’t in D.C.
Frank, however, was chomping at the bit to be part of the action. He let it be known that, while technically he wasn’t adding his name to the list of potential Democratic nominees for president in 1852, he sort of kind of possibly wouldn’t say no if someone else nominated him. Not that he was office seeking, mind you! It was more like “Move my card to the back of your Rolodex and call me if all else fails.”
Which it did. The Democratic party was a hot mess of internal discord, with northern Democrats seeking to limit the expansion of slavery and southern Democrats insisting that settlers should choose whether to allow slavery in the new northern and western territories. As a result, convention delegates couldn’t agree on a candidate who was acceptable to the entire party.
Then Virginia’s Henry Wise remembered Franklin Pierce’s existence.
I imagine him saying something along the lines of, “Hey, everyone, Fred Pierce—or maybe it’s Frank—you know, that guy from Vermont, New Hampshire, whatever—we need a northerner on the ballot, but one who won’t get all hot under the collar about slavery. He’s never done anything objectionable—or really anything at all. Who can argue with that?”
Nobody! The story goes that Frank and Jane were on a leisurely carriage ride when a messenger informed them that Pierce had been nominated on the 49th ballot. Frank was gobsmacked: I’m thinking it was a combination of: ”Wow! The Democrats DO love me!” and “Uh-oh, Jane won’t like this.”
Jane fainted.
In the general election, Frank beat his Mexican-American War commanding officer, General Winfield “Old Fuss and Feathers” Scott, in a landslide because the Whigs were even more dysfunctional than the Democrats.
On January 6, 1853, just two months before Pierce’s inauguration, Franklin, Jane, and their 11-year-old son, Bennie, were traveling a short distance by train from a family funeral in Andover, NH, back home to Concord. About a mile outside the station, the two-car train lost an axle, derailed, and fell into a gorge, where it broke apart. Franklin searched the wreckage for Bennie, who had been sitting behind his parents. After finding his son dead and partially decapitated, Pierce was unable to shield the boy’s mangled body from Jane.
The Pierce’s other two sons had died young of illnesses. Jane was out of her mind with grief when Bennie, the single remaining light in her life, was taken. Initially, she refused to join her husband in Washington. When she did, she shut herself in a bedroom for two years and wrote letters to Bennie.
She also proclaimed that his death was God’s retribution for Franklin seeking the presidency after promising he wouldn’t.
Unsurprisingly, Pierce wasn’t thinking clearly when selecting his Cabinet, a misguided mishmash of extremists. His Secretary of War, for example, was Jefferson Davis, whose follow-up gig was becoming the first and only president of the Confederate States of America.
Desperate to preserve the Union, Pierce appeased southerners by doing things like expanding the scope of slavery and giving teeth to the Fugitive Slave Act. To make nice with northerners, he—hmm, other than being born in New Hampshire, he did pretty much nothing.
The only unity Franklin Pierce achieved during his administration was to make everyone in the nation despise him.
Small wonder, then, that Pierce’s beloved Democratic party refused to renominate him in 1857. He reacted by saying, “There’s nothing left to do but get drunk.”
And so he did, for the 12 remaining years of his life. Franklin Pierce died alone in his home in Concord in 1869 from cirrhosis of the liver.
Harper’s Weekly eulogized Pierce in part by stating that his presidency “outraged humanity, liberty, and the better sense of the country.” Theodore Roosevelt called Pierce "a servile tool of men worse than himself ... ever ready to do any work the slavery leaders set him."
The United States descended into civil war only five years after Pierce left office. IMHO, either the outright civil war that America fought from 1861-1865 or a less bloody dissolution of the union with prolonged slavery was inevitable from the moment the founding fathers—many of whom were slaveholders—chose to kick the can down the road rather than dealing head-on with the slavery issue.
Franklin Pierce may well deserve his reputation as one of our nation’s worst presidents, a “dough face” northerner who sympathized with the south. He may have hastened the start of the carnage that was our Civil War. The die, however, had been cast decades before he was born.
What rises to the surface after my weeklong Franklin Pierce Obsession is the sad reality that, during his lifetime, there was no Alcoholics Anonymous, no grief or marriage counseling, no man crying allowed. Pierce was a damaged person who could have benefited from all of the above services and supports.
Would any of this have made him a better president? One thing’s for sure: he couldn’t have been much worse.
Resources
11:00 am Pierce Homestead tour and lots of fabulous, history-nerd post-tour conversation on May 31, 2024 (thank you, Carolyn, Sara, and Mike)
Holt, Michael F. Franklin Pierce. Times Books, 2010
Ginsberg, Gary. First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents. Twelve/Hachette Book Group. 2021
pages 210-217 of Brady Carlson’s book Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation’s Leaders, and his article Franklin Pierce: NH’s Forgotten President
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Life of Franklin Pierce. Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. 1852.
I now know 100% more about Franklin Pierce than I did before. Thank you so much for writing this very interesting article. Just so you know, I’d love to join you on one of your future explorations, so let me know if Gabe is unavailable.
Fascinating read about a president I knew absolutely nothing about and apparently didn’t miss much! I so enjoy your articles!