Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce was the 14th President of the United States (1853–1857) and one of the most-tragic figures of antebellum American politics — a presidency shaped by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and the deepening sectional crisis that would lead to the American Civil War. He was born Franklin Pierce on November 23, 1804, in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, into a politically active New England family — his father Benjamin Pierce was a Revolutionary War veteran and a two-term Governor of New Hampshire.

He attended Bowdoin College in Maine (graduating in 1824), where his classmates included Nathaniel Hawthorne (his lifelong friend) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He passed the New Hampshire bar in 1827 and was elected to the New Hampshire state legislature at age 24. He served in the US House of Representatives (1833–1837) and the US Senate (1837–1842) before resigning the Senate in 1842 to focus on his New Hampshire law practice and family.

He served as a brigadier general in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), seeing combat at the battles of Contreras and Churubusco. The 1852 Democratic Party presidential nominating convention selected him as a compromise candidate after 49 ballots. He defeated Whig candidate Winfield Scott in the November 1852 election with one of the largest electoral-vote margins in 19th-century American history.

His four-year presidency was defined by the May 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act — the legislation he championed that repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed the new Kansas Territory to determine its slavery status by popular sovereignty. The Act produced the "Bleeding Kansas" sectional violence of 1854–1858 and accelerated the political-realignment that would produce the new Republican Party. The personal tragedy of his presidency — the January 1853 train accident that killed his only surviving son Benjamin Pierce in front of his parents — shaped his subsequent term in office. He left the presidency in March 1857 having lost his party's renomination. He died on October 8, 1869, at age 64, in Concord, New Hampshire.

His name Franklin is from the Old English franklin, ultimately from the Old French franc (free), referring originally to the medieval English "freemen" landholding class. Franklin has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for over a century.