He is the President no one knows. If school children remember him at all, it is as a name that comes somewhere between the Mexican War and the Civil War—and that judgment is strangely close to the heart of the matter. The generation of Webster, Calhoun, and Clay was gone by 1852. In Baltimore, where the divided Democrats were meeting to select a presidential candidate, forty-eight ballots failed to produce a two-thirds vote for any of the contenders. Then, on the forty-ninth, the delegates gave the nomination to Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, whose only virtue seemed to be that no one hated him enough to keep it from him. He was safe, and safe was what a man had to be in Baltimore in 1852.

On the advice of older, wiser politicians, the candidate did as little as possible and said almost nothing during his campaign against General Winfield Scott. The Whigs called him coward, a drunkard, and an ami Catholic, and there was some substance behind each ugly charge; but when the ballots were counted, Franklin Pierce had 214,000 more than Scott, 254 electoral votes against 42, and that was all that mattered—or so it seemed.

His program, he said, would be to provide territorial and commercial expansion (which would please the radicals) and to preserve the Union (which would keep the conservatives happy). Pierce considered it a safe, sound policy, and if the year had not been 1853 it might have been. But just then it was perhaps the most difficult and dangerous course he could have steered.

In an effort to achieve harmony, he gave representation in his cabinet to every faction in the Democratic party, thereby ensuring trouble under the best of circumstances. Only there were to be no best of circumstances, but instead a violent eruption of national emotions. The Administration’s Kansas-Nebraska Bill resulted in Bloody Kansas; the anti foreign, anti-Catholic movement took dark shape in the Know-Nothings; westward expansion and industrialization were shaking the uneasy balance which had existed between North and South, and southerners saw the handwriting on the wall. The times demanded daring and ingenuity and brilliance, hut Pierce had none of them; nor did he comprehend the irresistible tide of forces he was attempting to stem. So at the end of four years, with the nation rushing toward disaster, the Democrats ux*k the unparalleled course of turning their own man out and selecting another who appeared to be safer even than Pierce had seemed in 1852—James Buchanan. And Franklin Pierce, fourteenth President of the United States, disappeared from the stage of history as ignominiously as he had entered upon it.

But there is more to his story than posterity has cared to remember, and much of it is revealed in the photograph Mathcw Brady took at the time of his inauguration. This is not the proud, determined look of an incoming President; it is the haunted expression of a