September 18

"Frequently the more trifling the subject, the more animated and protracted the discussion."

Franklin Pierce, 14th President, 1853-1857-Attributed to Pierce,sometimes to Millard Fillmore.- “In a body [like Congress] where there are more than one hundred talking lawyers, you can make no calculation upon the termination of any debate.” It is hard to find favor with Pierce's Presidency and his policies. Like his fellow Presidents of the 1850's, Pierce strove to uphold the Constitution as written and his policies were ineffective in maintaining peace and a cohesive union. Hailing from New Hampshire, he was himself a lawyer and familiar the law and political process. His father was governor of New Hampshire and Franklin was elected to the state legislature in 1829 and the U.S. House of Representatives in 1832. A Democrat, he was a supporter of President, Andrew Jackson. Pierce held the belief that as the country expanded, it should be guided by the principles set forth in the Constitution. He advocated the status quo position of limited federal government and that the states had rights with which the federal government should not interfere, including the "right" to own slaves. Such a position lumped him into the category of those given the nickname of "a doughface", a northerner who supported southern slavery. He believed abolitionists were a threat to the stability of the nation and that the best way to preserve the union was to continue to abide by the law as it then existed. In his first State of the Union address, he stated, "In like manner, as a manifestly indispensable condition of the perpetuation of the Union and of the realization of that magnificent national future adverted to, does the duty become(s) yearly stronger and clearer upon us, as citizens of the several States, to cultivate a fraternal and affectionate spirit, language, and conduct in regard to other States and in relation to the varied interests, institutions, and habits of sentiment and opinion which may respectively characterize them. Mutual forbearance, respect, and noninterference in our personal action as citizens and an enlarged exercise of the most liberal principles of comity in the public dealings of State with State, whether in legislation or in the execution of laws, are the means to perpetuate that confidence and fraternity the decay of which a mere political union, on so vast a scale, could not long survive."- His belief that the states should decide the issue of slavery resulted in the acceleration of the onset of Civil War when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854. People flooded into Kansas to vote for and against slavery which led increased tension and violence, leading to the term, "Bleeding Kansas."- "Violence occurred in May 1856 when the town of Lawrence was looted and burned by proslavery "border ruffians" from Missouri. A few days later, militant abolitionists under John Brown murdered five proslavery men at Pottawatomie in retaliation for attacks on free-soil communities." (http://millercenter.org/president/pierce/essays/biography/4). Pierce lost control of the situation and subsequently was not re-nominated for a second term as James Buchanan won the Democratic nomination in 1856.