In Praise Of Pierce (August/September 1985 | Volume: 36, Issue: 5)

In Praise Of Pierce

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Authors: Elting E. Morison

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August/September 1985 | Volume 36, Issue 5

It’s been a long time since anyone put in a good word, or in fact any kind of word at all, for Franklin Pierce. I am a New Hampshire man who lives not far from the house where the fourteenth President was born and who therefore grew up, so to speak, beneath his paling shadow. From such a position I would like to take this opportunity to rearrange the perspectives now distorting or, indeed, obscuring the nature of his career. Words from Samuel Butler will serve as a text for my remarks. On observing a pipe organ built by the local carpenter, he said to his skeptical companion, “My boy, you must not judge by the work, but by the work in connection with the surroundings.”

The surroundings in which Franklin Pierce spent much of his life were the Jeffersonian words made flesh. The population of New Hampshire was of those “chosen people” who owned their own farms, tilled their own soil, and were the only depositories of both “essential virtue” and “the sacred fire.” In 1852, the year Pierce was elected to the Presidency, the largest potential source of metropolitan contamination in this community was the city of Manchester, which numbered 13,885 souls.

Great care had been taken in the preceding years to keep things that way. In 1840 the legislature took away the power of eminent domain from the railroads, and a little later it struck the limited-liability clause from all corporation charters. None could possibly do more to fulfill the injunction in the basic text to “keep the workshops in Europe.”

Within this structure of life the citizens practiced almost daily that right to manage their own affairs that the Jeffersonian scheme prescribed. In recurrent town meetings, party caucuses, ad hoc committees, and county and state conventions, they selected delegates, nominated candidates, and passed resolves on contemporary issues. On election days almost all of those qualified went to the polls to vote.

As these people believed that all men were created equal, they also assumed that almost anybody could handle affairs of state. From fence viewer to governor, almost everybody, it seemed, was at some time in his life a public servant. The “intermittent fever” that persisted in New Hampshire “throughout the year,” so they said, was “politics.”

A state with such persuasions followed naturally along the paths laid out by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Moving steadily on these paths, New Hampshire became in due course a center of energy in the Democratic party, its place secured not only by philosophic sympathies but also by men who had an absolute mastery of political organization.

Franklin Pierce was one of these and one of the best—”a man of parts,” as they used to say. He had gone to Bowdoin College, where he had become an acquaintance of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a lifelong friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who later wrote his biography. Soon after his graduation he married Jane Appleton, the daughter of the