On a cold and blustery morning in Concord on Tuesday, Franklin Pierce’s story was remembered by a National Guard officer as one of “challenge, recovery and perseverance” at a ceremony in his honor.
In their hats and mittens, classes of second- and fourth-graders huddled together beside the 14th president’s grave at the Old North Cemetery as Lt. Col. William Davis told them Pierce did his best to hold the country together at a tumultuous time. Today would have been his 212th birthday.
For the United States, Pierce’s 1853 inauguration came in the tense run-up to the Civil War. And personally for the Hillsboro native, it came less than two months after the tragic death in a trainwreck of his only living son, an 11-year-old who perished as a child like his two brothers before him.
“How much challenge did this individual face?” Davis asked the students, who replied, “a lot.”
“More than any human should be asked to bear,” Davis said.
And yet Pierce is frequently remembered not for his accomplishments in the face of adversity – cleaving the national debt and making a welcoming gesture toward Catholics by appointing to his cabinet the first Roman Catholic to hold such a position – but rather for the stand he didn’t make against slavery.
His White House biography notes that his administration began at a time when the U.S. “seemed to have weathered its sectional storm” by virtue of the Compromise of 1850. Pierce was chosen for the nomination by his Democratic Party in part because he would avoid agitation on the slavery question, inviting support from Southerners.
“But his policies, far from preserving calm, hastened the disruption of the Union,” reads the first paragraph of his White House biography.
Long after his death, the only New Hampshire-born president is sometimes remembered first for his pro-slavery stances. But a Manchester author and historian, Peter Wallner, who wrote a two-part biography about Pierce, says the president may have been partly a victim of circumstance.
“He wasn’t a successful president at all, although I tend to think that was more the time period he lived in,” said Wallner, who considers himself at least “a little biased” in Pierce’s favor after his extensive studies.
“I have a hard time trying to decide what Pierce could have done that would have made things better. In fact, I think he could have made things a lot worse,” Wallner said.
For the anti-slavery majority in New England, Pierce’s reputation was well soured by the time the Civil War began, Wallner said, largely because of his administration’s support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. That bill introduced slavery into a section of the country where it was formerly excluded by the Missouri Compromise.
“That made him unpopular up here in the North,” Wallner said.
But the alternative could have had an even worse effect, he said.
“If he had taken a strong stance against slavery in 1854 or 1855, I think the South would have seceded – or possibly would have seceded – and the Civil War could have started five years earlier,” Wallner said. “I’m not sure the North would have won.”
The South would have been far more united than the North at that time, he said, and the advantage in manufacturing and railroads that eventually helped the North win the war was still being developed in those intervening years between Pierce’s presidency and the start of the Civil War.
“It’s hard to know if (the North) would have even fought as well as they would later on,” Wallner said. “That’s just my feeling. I’m not sure that’s 100 percent accurate, but I have a hard time understanding what Pierce could have done differently that would have produced a better result.”
So on Tuesday, in front of the tall monument in the historic cemetery marking Pierce’s grave, the young students from Christa McAuliffe School heard mainly about other aspects of his life: his law practice, his rise through legislative ranks, his service in the Mexican-American War, his expansion of the U.S. and his intent to keep it united.
“Franklin Pierce’s is a story of challenge, recovery and perseverance,” Davis explained. “Today, we honor the life of a patriot, a public servant, a family man and a defender of those who couldn’t defend themselves.”
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)