Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce (November 23, 1804 – October 8, 1869) was the 14th president of the United States (1853–57). Pierce was a northern Democrat who saw the abolitionist movement as a fundamental threat to the unity of the nation. His polarizing actions in championing and signing the Kansas–Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act failed to stem intersectional conflict, setting the stage for Southern secession.

Quotes



 * You have summoned me in my weakness. You must sustain me by your strength.
 * Inaugural Address (4 March 1853)


 * The storm of frenzy and faction must inevitably dash itself in vain against the unshaken rock of the Constitution. I shall never doubt it. I know that the Union is stronger a thousand times than all the wild and chimerical schemes of social change which are generated one after another in the unstable minds of visionary sophists and interested agitators. I rely confidently on the patriotism of the people, on the dignity and self-respect of the States, on the wisdom of Congress, and, above all, on the continued gracious favor of Almighty God to maintain against all enemies, whether at home or abroad, the sanctity of the Constitution and the integrity of the Union.
 * Third Annual Message (31 December 1855), as published in Official History of the United States by the Presidents (1900), Vol. 1, by the Federal Book Concern, p. 362


 * I do not believe that our friends at the South have any just idea of the state of feeling, hurrying at this moment to a pitch of intense exasperation, between those who respect their political obligations, and those who apparently have no impelling power but that which a fanatical position on the subject of domestic Slavery imparts. Without discussing the question of right — of abstract power to secede — I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood; and if, through the madness of Northern Abolitionists, that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason's and Dixon's line merely.  It [will] be within our own borders, in our own streets, between the two classes of citizens to whom I have referred.
 * Letter to Jefferson Davis (6 January 1860)


 * I never justify, sustain, or in any way or to any extent uphold this cruel, heartless, aimless unnecessary war.
 * Letter to Jane Pierce (3 March 1863)


 * Do we not all know that the cause of our casualties is the vicious intermeddling of too many of the citizens of the Northern States with the constitutional rights of the Southern States, cooperating with the discontents of the people of those states? Do we not know that the disregard of the Constitution, and of the security that it affords to the rights of States and of individuals, has been the cause of the calamity which our country is called to undergo?  And now, war! war, in its direst shape — war, such as it makes the blood run cold to read of in the history of other nations and of other times — war, on a scale of a million of men in arms — war, horrid as that of barbaric ages, rages in several of the States of the Union, as its more immediate field, and casts the lurid shadow of its death and lamentation athwart the whole expanse, and into every nook and corner of our vast domain.  Nor is that all; for in those of the States which are exempt from the actual ravages of war, in which the roar of the cannon, and the rattle of the musketry, and the groans of the dying, are heard but as a faint echo of  terror from other lands, even here in the loyal States, the mailed hand of military usurpation strikes down the liberties of the people, and its foot tramples on a desecrated Constitution.
 * Address to the Citizens of Concord, New Hampshire (4 July 1863)


 * I speak of the war as fruitless; for it is clear that, prosecuted upon the basis of the proclamations of September 22d and September 24th, 1862, prosecuted, as I must understand these proclamations, to say nothing of the kindred blood which has followed, upon the theory of emancipation, devastation, subjugation, it cannot fail to be fruitless in every thing except the harvest of woe which it is ripening for what was once the peerless republic.
 * Address to the Citizens of Concord, New Hampshire (4 July 1863)

Quotes about Pierce

 * The real casualty of the Compromise of 1850 was the Whig Party, which would never again occupy the White House, although Abraham Lincoln was a former Whig. Fillmore, who had never sought, nor desired, the presidency, found himself as the only viable candidate to run on a Whig platform in 1852. No Whig could win the presidency without the support of the southern Whigs, and Fillmore, having supported the revised Fugitive Slave Act, had a southern credential to go with the largely pro-northern compromise. But Fillmore didn't want the nomination, despite having gotten the majority of delegates. He tried, instead, to push his delegates toward Daniel Webster, but they refused. With nowhere else to go, the delegates cast their ballots in favor of Winfield Scott, who secured the nomination for the Whig Party's final appearance in a national election. Thus Scott became the Whig nominee in 1852, who with William Seward's endorsement was guaranteed to lose all support from the southern Whigs. The party was dead and Franklin Pierce-an unremarkable pro-slavery Democrat-easily won the election in 1852. On January 6, just two months before taking office, Pierce's eleven-year-old son, Benjamin, was killed in a train accident. Thus, Fillmore's presidency began and ended in the White House draped in black mourning cloth. Pierce never recovered from this loss and neither did his wife, who would tragically be referred to as a White House ghost. He was a melancholy president, a sporadically functional alcoholic, who in his one high-profile decision signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which had the effect of pushing the country closer to civil war.
 * Jared Cohen, Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America (2019), p. 81