Franklin Pierce

Pierce, Franklin

(1804–69) fourteenth U.S. president; born in Hillsborough, N.H. A lawyer, he steadily ascended the political ladder as a Democrat, moving from the state legislature (1829–33) to the U.S. House of Representatives (1833–37) to the U.S. Senate (1837–42). He returned to private law practice in New Hampshire. Expansionist in sentiments, he served as an officer in the Mexican War (1846–47). A staunch Democrat, in 1852 he was nominated as a compromise presidential candidate—a Northerner sympathetic to the South—and he defeated the Whigs' Gen. Winfield Scott. Pierce then proved unable to mediate the issues boiling around slavery, signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) (giving settlers the right to vote for slavery), and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. The successes of his administration included a treaty with Japan and the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico, which added 20,000 square miles to the U.S.A., but these did not distract people from the turmoil he unleashed in Kansas. The Democrats ignored the unpopular Pierce at the 1856 convention, and he largely retired from politics, although he revived his unpopularity by attacking Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.