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This chapter assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Franklin Pierce, focusing on six realms: public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Pierce won the Democratic Party's 1852 presidential nomination after a forty-eight ballot impasse in which none of the party's top three leaders was able to muster the two-thirds vote needed to become the Democratic flag bearer. A gregarious nonentity, he took office amid growing anger over the Fugitive Slave Act and passed on to his successor an acutely polarized nation. Pierce's historical reputation is captured in a survey of sixty-four historians conducted by C-SPAN in which he ranked fortieth in a field of forty-two.

More than any presidential election since 1836, the 1852 campaign focused on the character and reputation of the opposing presidential candidates rather than on alternative public policies. Southern Democrats' campaign tactics, northern Whigs' disgust with their platform, and the Democrats' selection of Franklin Pierce, a man particularly vulnerable to personal attack, all contributed to that focus. Their indistinguishable positions on the Compromise and the irrelevance of economic issues because of prosperity forced them to appeal for votes by contrasting their nominees. Despite the considerable problems faced by the Whig party, many Whig leaders, especially the party's high command who orchestrated the campaign from Washington, convinced themselves that victory was certain. Although some prescient Whigs had long predicted defeat in 1852, even a few of the previous naysayers converted and remained optimistic until the votes were cast. For the historian blessed (or cursed) with hindsight, explaining that confidence is far more difficult than explaining the outcome itself.

This chapter examines the political maneuverings of Northern Democrats over the issue of slavery during the June 1852 Democratic National Convention in Baltimore. Delegates to the Democratic National Convention began congregating a month in advance to meet, scheme, and negotiate. Thirty-one states meant thirty-one delegations, with each state casting as many votes as it had presidential electors. But many states sent far more than their voting delegates. The South expected to command the convention as it always had. If Northern Democrats wanted to influence the proceedings, or possibly receive a nomination, they would have to cater to the South and convince them of their continued fidelity. This chapter first discusses the Democratic National Convention before turning to the campaigns for the 1852 elections. It then considers Northern Democrats' focus on cabinet appointments and patronage as well as their views concerning loyalty to the pro-Southern party agenda and abolitionism. It also explores how President Franklin Pierce addressed mounting Southern suspicion and mobilized Northern opposition, both from doughfaces and activists with antislavery sentiment.

The Civil War era posed profound challenges to the six presidents. There is widespread agreement that Abraham Lincoln met that test in a superlative manner while Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan responded to it abysmally. It is also widely held that Millard Fillmore's performance was pedestrian and James K. Polk's was unusually effective. This chapter reviews the way each of these protagonists rose, or failed to rise, to the challenges of his times. It then explores the ways in which the leadership criteria employed in this book figured in the period under consideration. It concludes by discussing a pair of theoretical issues implicit in Allan Nevins' assertion in the epigraph to this chapter that if the nation had “possessed three farseeing, imaginative, and resolute” chief executives “instead of Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, the [Civil] War might have been postponed.”

The Whig party's own history after defeats in the presidential elections of 1836 and 1844 and the entire course of American political history demonstrate that outs can mount comebacks by exploiting the mistakes of the ins. Whig predictions, moreover, were largely accurate. During Franklin Pierce's administration, Democrats divided over patronage and policy, and they committed blunders that produced massive defeat at the polls. Whigs, however, did not reap the fruit of voters' backlash in the congressional elections of 1854–5 or in the 1856 presidential election. Although Whigs' reactions to the party's plight after the crushing defeats of 1852 differed, virtually all of them factored Democrats' imminent disruption into their calculations for the future. Thus, the Whig party's fate continued to be shaped by its interaction with the Democratic party. The central theme of 1853, in sum, was the search for new issues to fill the void that had emerged in 1852.

This chapter examines how Northern Democrats, led by President Franklin Pierce, achieved legislative victory for the Slave Power. Pierce faced a host of formidable challenges as he tried to craft a domestic and diplomatic program that would please the Slave Power and distract Americans from divisions over slavery. While he owed his nomination and election to the South, Pierce would have to somehow bring about an expansion of slavery if he hoped for continuing support from that section. This chapter first considers Pierce's activist foreign policy before discussing the role of Attorney General Caleb Cushing in implementing Pierce's domestic policies, including the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. It then describes a bill in Congress aimed to permit the expansion of slavery into the then-free western territories, as well as the Northern Democrats' development of a policy called “popular sovereignty.” Finally, it provides an overview of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.

The last living son of Franklin Pierce was decapitated in a train wreck just weeks before his inauguration in March 1853. His fragile wife, who had previously suffered the loss of their other two children, almost came undone. Little Ben’s death probably affected his father’s presidency. For the Pierces developed a close relationship with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in part because the young Davis children became surrogate children for the bereft couple in the White House. That relationship became all important; it was Davis who persuaded the president to cooperate with Stephen Douglas and a group of Southern congressmen in January1854 in a crucial revision of the disastrous Kansas-Nebraska act, which, in turn, helped to spark the formation of the Republican Party. Pierce’s solicitude of Davis and his concern for his wife played their role in ruining Pierce’s presidency and pushing the United States down the road to Civil War.

This chapter focuses on Franklin Pierce, one of the worst presidents in American history. Pierce was totally dominated by his Southern cabinet members, resulting in a “government by cabinet.” Notwithstanding his weaknesses both as a man and as president, he was a committed Jacksonian who, as a matter of political philosophy, subscribed to the broad views of executive power espoused by the Democratic Party for the previous twenty years. Pierce believed in the presidential removal power, opposed a national bank and internal improvements, and maintained all the other elements of the Jacksonian creed with great fervor. The Democrats, for their part, began trying to associate him with Andrew Jackson as early as the election campaign of 1852, a period of adulation that was short lived. Though his supporters labeled him “Young Hickory of the Granite Hills,” after the election no one ever compared Pierce to Andrew Jackson again.

Southern Democrats wielded tremendous power over national policy in the mid-1850s, and Stephen Douglas’s efforts to harness his them to his program of northwestern development resulted in disaster. This chapter first reinterprets Jefferson Davis’s service as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), focusing on his use of camels for military transportation in the southwest. Far from a whimsical frontier tale, the camel episode became entwined with a shadowy network of slave traders and proslavery expansionists whose late antebellum schemes reveal the chilling consequences of slaveholders’ federal clout. This context elucidates Douglas’s infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act. Striving to align powerful southern Democrats behind his efforts to promote the Greater Northwest, Douglas pushed the Act through Congress—and unleashed a political cyclone that devastated the Democratic Party’s northern wing. By 1856, violence in Bleeding Kansas made a mockery of popular sovereignty and thwarted Douglas’s presidential ambitions, while Davis anticipated returning to his role as a proslavery sentinel in the Senate.

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to use the period from the Mexican–American War to the Civil War (1846–1865) as a stage to assess the strengths and weaknesses of six American presidents: James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. These men merit attention because of the demands placed on the chief executive in this momentous era and because they varied so greatly in the caliber of that leadership. The chapter then provides context by discussing the background against which these six presidents performed their duties, followed by a discussion of the causes of the Civil War.

Hawthorne was an inactivist who fetishized deferral. His campaign biography of Franklin Pierce is said to provide a retroactive template for his fiction. The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance—Hawthorne's three “American” novels gave fictional form to the age's ethical and legislative impasse, the Compromise of 1850. This chapter carries this consensus by foregrounding Hawthorne's connection to the dissenting ferment that he, like his friend Pierce, saw as a menace to sectional peace. The novelist was out of the country during much of the 1850s, first as Pierce's consul in Liverpool and then as a resident in Italy; but during his creative heyday, from 1850 to 1852, he was acutely conscious of the mounting pressures on free speech. Indeed, his book on Pierce placed him at the center of those pressures. He hoped the prohibitions would prevail and stifle the seditious ferment of anti-slavery oratory.

Chapter 6 considers the presidential election of 1848, the Compromise of 1850, and the election of 1852. During these years the friendship of Buchanan and King first intensified, then cooled, as each man took a separate path to political power. In 1852 the Democratic Party refused to place Buchanan and King on the same ticket, because the pair had become too closely associated together to balance its growing sectional and ideological divisions. Instead, the Democracy chose the dark horse Franklin Pierce for president and then selected King as his running mate to pacify Buchanan and his supporters. King’s precipitous decline in health, followed by his death in April 1853, ended the decades-long political and personal friendship with Buchanan. In response, Buchanan prepared for another round of exile abroad, this time as American minister to England.

Chapter Three shows that the Republican Party, established in the mid-1850s, was dominated by moderates—most notably, Abraham Lincoln. They insisted that the territorial issue alone best demonstrated the party’s antislavery principles while at the same time respecting the Union and the Constitution. Republicans of all types distanced themselves from abolitionists and emphasized that they posed no threat to slavery in the states where it existed. Lincoln endlessly professed confidence that stopping the spread of slavery to the territories would be the first step toward ultimately ending it. But his private surmise was more pessimistic. In 1855 he wrote an anguished lament to George Robertson, an eminent Kentucky jurist, who several decades before had looked forward to “the peaceful extinction of slavery.” Lincoln sadly suggested that history had taken a wrong turn and that there was “no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us.” One must conclude that territorial restriction was, for Lincoln, a barren hope, a necessary ploy to secure the allegiance of voters who yearned for slavery’s demise.

This chapter examines the fate of the Northern Democratic Party after 1860. Democrats assembled in Charleston on April 23, 1860 for the national convention. Regular Democrats scored a victory on the second day of the convention with the election as permanent chairman of Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, while day three saw a major triumph for Stephen Douglas's group. This chapter discusses the results of the 1860 Democratic National Convention and the 1860 elections and considers what happened to Northern Democrat notables such as James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce after the period. It argues that the Northern Democratic Party's efforts to please the Southern party bosses, purge their ranks of antislavery sentiment, and convince free state voters of the benevolence of the Slave Power, combined with their proslavery legislation and rhetoric, fractured and split the party, paved the way for Republican ascension and Southern secession, tore the nation apart, and led to civil war.