Franklin Pierce: A Son Lost to a Train Wreck and the Kansas-Nebraska Act

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Franklin Pierce, the 14th president, was born in 1804 in a New Hampshire log cabin to Benjamin Pierce, a Revolutionary War veteran who became governor. At 12 he walked 12 miles home from school in a thunderstorm, and his father drove him partway back and made him walk the rest. He rose from last to fifth in his class at Bowdoin, befriended Nathaniel Hawthorne, and at 32 was the youngest member of the U.S. Senate. He married Jane Means Appleton of a Whig family in 1834; she disliked politics, their first two sons died young, and he resigned from the Senate in 1842. In the Mexican-American War his horse fell on him at Contreras, and rumors of cowardice followed him despite Ulysses S. Grant's defense.

Nominated as a dark horse on the 49th ballot in 1852, Pierce beat Winfield Scott. Weeks before his inauguration, in January 1853, his 11 year old son Benny was killed in a train derailment in Massachusetts. Pierce delivered his inaugural address from memory, affirming his oath on a law book. His presidency brought the Gadsden Purchase, the leaked Ostend Manifesto on Cuba, and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise ban and led to Bleeding Kansas. His party passed him over for James Buchanan in 1856.

• Jane Pierce believed Benny's death was divine punishment for her husband's ambition and wrote a letter asking her dead son's forgiveness.
• Pierce named Jefferson Davis secretary of war and is the only president to keep his original cabinet for a full term.
• During the Civil War he criticized Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus.
• Union troops found his prewar letters to Davis on Davis's Mississippi plantation, and their publication wrecked his standing in the North.
• Jane died in 1863, Hawthorne died in 1864 while traveling with Pierce, and Pierce died of cirrhosis in 1869.