A History of the American People

For the election of 1852 the Democrats were able to unite round a campaign platform which
promised to abide by and adhere to a faithful execution of the acts known as the Compromise Measures,' and for their candidate they picked a man peculiarly adapted to follow that s me,a
Northerner with Southern inclinations.'
Franklin Pierce (1804-69) was born in Hillboro, New Hampshire, had been to Bowdoin and
practiced as a lawyer in Concord. So by rights he should have been an abolititionist and an
Emersonian, a political Transcendentalist, and a thorough New Englander. But in reality he was
a Jacksonian Democrat, another Young Hickory' and an ardent nationalist, all-out for further expansion into the crumbling Hispanic South, and thus to that extent a firm ally of the slavery- extenders. He had been a New Hampshire congressman and senator and had served assiduously in the Mexican War, of which (unusually in the North) he was an enthusiastic supporter, reaching the rank of brigadier-general. At the 1852 Democratic convention he emerged, after many votes, as the perfect Dark Horse compromise candidate, being nominated on the forty- ninth ballot. He is usually described ascolorless.' When he was nominated, an old farmer-friend
from New Hampshire commented: Frank goes well enough for Concord, but he'll go monstrous thin, spread out over the United States.' Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had been a close friend of Pierce at Bowdoin, called on Pierce after he was nominated, sat by him on the sofa, and said: Frank, what a pity ... But, after all, this world was not meant to be happy in-only to succeed in.'
This story is apocryphal, but Hawthorne said something similar to Pierce in a letter in which he
undertook to write Pierce's campaign biography. Horace Mann, who knew both, said of the
proposed biography, If he makes out Pierce to be a great man or a brave man, it will be the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote.' Hawthorne agreed:Though the story is true, it took a
romancer to do it.'
Hawthorne had to conceal two things: Pierce's drinking-it was said he drank even more than
Daniel Webster, and he was certainly often drunk-and the fact that he hated Pierce's wife Jane.
So did a lot of other people. The Pierces had two sons. Their four-year-old died in 1844; their
surviving son was killed a month after the election in an appalling railroad accident, and Jane
felt, and said, that the presidency had been bought at the cost of their son's life. Hawthorne
burned documents about Pierce which were highly derogatory, commenting: I wish he had a better wife, or none at all. It is too bad that the nation should be compelled to see such a death's head in the preeminent place among American women; and I think a presidential candidate ought to be scrutinised as well in regard to his wife's social qualifications, as to his own political ones.' Jane was the daughter of the Bowdoin president and sister-in-law of its most distinguished professor: but women of academic families are not always congenial.' The fact is, Hawthorne hated most women, particularly if they had intellectual pretensions, which Jane certainly did: he said of women writers,I wish they were forbidden to write on pain of having their faces
scarified with an oyster-shell!'' At any rate, The Life of Franklin Pierce duly appeared, the tale of
A beautiful boy, with blue eyes, light curling hair, and a serene expression of face,' who grew up to be a distinguished military man and a conciliatory politician, anxious to preserve the Union by reassuring the South and appealing tothe majority of Northerners’ who were ‘not actively
against slavery’ to beware of what Hawthorne called `the mistiness of a philanthropic system."
Pierce won handsomely. The Whigs selected the Mexican War commander, General Winfield
Scott, who like most generals was lost in the complex politics of ethnic America. He not only
bellowed out his antislavery views, which the Whigs had allowed for, but turned out to be a
strident nativist only happy with Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock, so he alienated the Germans
and the Irish. In the end he carried only Tennessee, Kentucky, Vermont, and Massachusetts,