Franklin Pierce Essay Example for Free

Franklin pierce EssayFranklin Pierce (November 23, 1804 October 8, 1869) was the 14th President of the United States, serving from 1853 to 1857, an American politician and rightfulnessyer. To date, he is the only President from New Hampshire. Pierce was a Democrat and a doughface (a Northerner with gray sympathies) who served in the U. S. House of Representatives and Senate. Later, Pierce took part in the Mexican-American War and became a brigadier general.His private law practice in his home state, New Hampshire, was so successful that he was offered several important positions, which he turned down. Later, he was nominated for president as a dark horse candidate on the 49th ballot at the 1852 Democratic National Convention. In the presidential election, Pierce and his running consort William R. King won by a landslide in the Electoral College, defeating the Whig Party ticket of Winfield Scott and William A. whole wheat flour by a 50% to 44% margin in the popular vote and 254 to 42 in the electoral vote.According to historian David Potter, Pierce was sometimes referred to as Baby Pierce, apparently referring to both his untried appearance and his being the youngest president to take office to that point (although he was, in reality, only a class younger than James K. Polk when he took office). Pierce attended school at Hillsborough Center and move to the Hancock Academy in Hancock at the age of 11 he was transferred to Francestown Academy in the spring of 1820. In fall 1820, he entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he participated in literary, political, and debating clubs.There he met writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, with whom he formed a lasting friendship, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also met Calvin E. Stowe, Seargent S. Prentiss, and his future political rival, prank P. Hale, when he joined the Athenian Society, a group of students with progressive political leanings. In his second year of college his grades were the lowest of h is class, except he worked to improve them and upon graduation in 1824 ranked third among his classmates. In 1826 he entered a law school in Northampton, Massachusetts, studying under Governor Levi Woodbury, and later Judges Samuel Howe and Edmund Parker, in Amherst, New Hampshire.He was admitted to the bar and began a law practice in Concord, New Hampshire in 1827. Pierce served as President from March 4, 1853, to March 4, 1857. He began his presidency in a state of melancholy and nervous exhaustion. Two months before, on January 6, 1853, the President-elects family had boarded a train in Boston and shortly thereafter were trap in their derailed car when it rolled down an embankment near Andover, Massachusetts. Pierce and his wife survived, merely shaken up, but saw their 11-year-old son Benjamin crushed to death.Jane Pierce viewed the train accident as a heaven-sent punishment for her husbands pursuit and acceptance of high office. Pierce chose to affirm his oath of office rath er than tell it, becoming the starting president to do so he placed his hand on a law book rather than on a Bible while doing so. He was also the first president to recite his inaugural address from memory. In it Pierce hailed an era of peace and prosperity at home and urged a vigorous assertion of US interests in its foreign relations.The policy of my Administration, said the refreshed president, will not be deterred by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion. Indeed, it is not to be disguise that our attitude as a nation and our position on the globe render the acquisition of accepted possessions not within our jurisdiction eminently important for our protection. The nation was enjoying a period of economic harvest and relative tranquility. The Compromise of 1850 seemed to have calmed the storm about the issue of slavery.When the issue flamed up early in his administration, though, Pierce did little to cool the passions it aroused, and sectional fissures reopened. The g reatest challenge to the countrys equilibrium during the Pierce administration, though, was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska piece in 1854. It repealed the Missouri Compromise and reopened the question of slavery in the West. This measure, sponsored by Senator Stephen A. Douglas, had its origins in the drive to relieve the completion of a transcontinental railroad with a link from Chicago, Illinois to California through Nebraska.