Images and More: Passed Presidents - # 14

Franklin Pierce, our fourteenth president, died 144 years ago today. The first president born in the 19th century, ‘Handsome Frank’ was the son of a Revolutionary War officer and governor of New Hampshire. His story does not begin in a log cabin.

I’m enjoying the new basis for presenting the ‘Dead Presidents Quest’. The change from the chronological order of service to the anniversaries of their passing adds an element. It also allows me to bounce around the eras and histories as we commemorate them on the day they drew their last breath. Unfortunately, since I started this format in August, all three of the featured guys died in office and two of them were murdered. Though the next man up did not die on the job, his story is also sad.

Historical marker at entrance to Old North Cemetery,

Concord, NH (7 October 2009)

Pierce won the presidency in a landslide and four years later, his own party would not nominate him for a second term. A New Englander with southern sympathies, he supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act which nullified the Missouri Compromise and permitted new territories to decide if they were to be free or slave states. Since slavery is one of those issues that has very little middle ground...and testosterone was so dominant in those days, the Act led to warfare among the settlers and moved the nation further towards the Civil War.

Pierce also supported the southern scheme that we should acquire Cuba and make it another slave state. The failure of his Democratic administration spurred the creation of the Republican Party. As a result, he has been a fixture on many ‘Bottom Ten’ lists of our presidents.

Apart from doing little more than grease the skids toward Civil War, the real sadness of his life was personal. He married Jane Appleton, a painfully shy, strict Calvinist who was raised by a minister father who slept only a few hours a night and ate barely enough to keep him alive. He felt it was God’s will that he be denied even the simplest pleasures of life. Life of the Party he was not.

Jane battled depression much of her life. She hated politics and Washington. She persuaded Franklin to quit his U.S. Senate seat and return to Concord. When Franklin ran for president, she and her son Bennie wrote letters to each other that expressed their hope that Daddy would lose.

Pierce Family Grave, Concord, NH (13 August 2010)

The Pierces had three sons. One died three days after birth. The second succumbed to typhus at age four. After Pierce was elected president, Bennie, their only child for 10 years, was killed in a train accident at age eleven. His parents were there and witnessed their last child’s death from a massive head injury. For years, the First Lady wore black and hardly ever emerged from her bedroom. The White House was draped in black bunting and clearly was not the place for parties and social activity in Washington.

Pierce was New Hampshire’s only president. Despite that, his sympathy with the Southern cause and criticisms of Abraham Lincoln’s management of the war did not sit well with his Concord neighbors. When Lincoln was assassinated, a mob gathered on his property and accused him of treason. It took over 50 years before the state’s citizens acknowledged their only president with a statue on the capitol grounds.

In front of the capitol in Concord, NH (7 October 2009)

I had never been to Concord, New Hampshire before 2004. The quest to photograph presidents’ graves was underway by then and a business conference in Massachusetts got me close enough for my first visit that October. By 2009, the interest had turned to state houses and I returned to Concord to shoot the capitol. Melanie Swords and CJ’s wedding got me back there a year later. Both times, I drove the short distance to Old North Cemetery to pay respects to ‘Handsome Frank’ and ‘Sad Jane’.