As the nation lurches towards a presidential transition, it seems oddly appropriate that today’s #stampoftheday pictures a one-term, 19th century president, who, one of his obituaries contended, “possessed…none of the attributes of greatness.”
The president in question is Franklin Pierce, who was born on November 23, 1804 and served for one term, from 1853 to 1857. Pierce, who is generally considered to be among America’s worst presidents, is pictured on a 14-cent stamp, issued in 1938.
Before he was 30, Pierce had served in the New Hampshire legislature and had been elected to the U.S. Congress where he served as a congressman. In 1837 he became a US Senator but he resigned four years later in part because his wife Jane, who was shy, deeply religious, and often in bad health, detested Washington and refused to live there. Back home in New Hampshire, Pierce was a high-profile attorney and a political operator of sorts. He also served as a volunteer general in the Mexican-American War, where he had passed out in battle (albeit from a knee injury) and gained the nickname “Fainting Frank.”
In 1852, Pierce and his allies laid the groundwork for him to be chosen as a compromise candidate for president if, as expected, the Democratic convention split between pro-slavery Southerners and less supportive Northerners. After the delegates deadlocked for 48 ballots, Pierce, a Northerner who didn’t challenge slavery, emerged as a compromise candidate. Pierce ran against the General Winfield Scott, and a third candidate who, unlike Pierce and Scott, opposed the Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1950. After what Pierce biographer Peter A. Wallner, called “one of the least exciting campaigns in presidential history,” Pierce won an overwhelming victory and became the youngest man thus far elected president.
At his inauguration, Pierce made it clear where he stood on major issue of the day, stating: “I believe that involuntary servitude, as it exists in different States of this Confederacy, is recognized by the Constitution….I fervently hope that the question is at rest, and that no sectional or ambitious or fanatical excitement may again threaten the durability of our institutions or obscure the light of our prosperity.”
As president, Pierce backed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, a measure advanced by Stephen Douglas, ambitious and talented Democratic Senator from Illinois (who would defeat Abraham Lincoln in an 1858 Senate race but then lose the presidency to Lincoln in 1860). The act repealed the more than three-decade-old prohibition against slavery in territories north of a previously agreed-upon line, and instead allowed voters in those territories to decide if they wanted slavery. Its passage led to violence in Kansas as settlers fought over how the territory would vote on the issue of slavery. Northern repulsion over the Act gave rise to the new Republican Party and likely hastened the onset of the Civil War.
Pierce’s administration was marked by other controversies and bitter infighting among the various Democratic factions. So although he wanted to run for a second term, he party refused to nominate him. He returned to New Hampshire and during the Civil War became a harsh critic of President Abraham Lincoln, taking particular issue with Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus for those who spoke out against the war. A heavy drinker for much of his life, Pierce died in 1869 of cirrhosis of the liver.
When he died, he was seen as a particularly unimpressive president. His New York Times obituary, for example, stated “although his record as a statesman cannot command the approbation of the nation, he still should be followed to the grave with that respect which is due to one who has filled the highest office in the gift of the people – a President of the United States.”
That negative view has continued unabated. Historians generally rank him as among the worst American presidents because, as historian Eric Foner has contended, “His administration turned out to be one of the most disastrous in American history.” Similarly, Roy Nichols, who wrote a biography of Pierce argued: “He was an inexperienced man, suddenly called to assume a tremendous responsibility, who honestly tried to do his best without adequate training or temperamental fitness.”
Pierce’s poor legacy also is reflected in the fact that few places and entities are named after him. And the most notable – the private Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire and the University of New Hampshire’s (UNH) Franklin Pierce School of Law – weren’t founded until the early 1970s (when the university started as a college and the law school started as a separate institution affiliated with Franklin Pierce College, the private university’s private predecessor).
The law school dropped Pierce from its name in 2010, when it officially affiliated with UNH. In 2019, however, the law school added Pierce back to its official name in 2019. But, in an FAQ about the name change school officials explained, they did so “to honor the school’s past, not the legacy of President Franklin Pierce,” who the FAQ noted was a “‘politician of limited ability'” generally viewed as “as an inept chief executive whose traditional style of leadership failed in the face of the massive electoral divisions over slavery and the aggressiveness of Southerners.”
In the wake of last summers’ protests about racial injustice, the school’s faculty voted to ask the board of trustees to drop the Pierce name. Their statement read in part, “while he may have been a product of his time, he is not a historical figure worthy of the honor of having New Hampshire’s only law school, part of the state’s flagship public university, named after him.” As of this writing, however, the name has not been changed.
As of today, it is increasingly likely that Donald Trump will, like Pierce, be a one-term president. And, it also seems likely that mainstream historians and others will judge Trump to have been one of the worst (if not the worst) president in US history. That raises the question of whether 100 years from now, someone will decide to start (or perhaps re-start) a Donald Trump University, and, if so, whether that name will prove to be controversial.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.