5
Defeat
On November 1, 1855, two months before Pierce sent his third annual message to the Senate, he asked his assembled cabinet members whether he should seek renomination at the Democrats’ 1856 national convention. They unanimously urged him to do so. Historians do not know whether he ever discussed this decision with Jane, but it seems unlikely given her continuing detestation of politics and life in Washington. Pierce’s decision to seek another term was driven, in part, by a desire for vindication against the escalating criticism of his administration from opponents both inside and outside the Demo-cratic Party. He also seemed to believe that he was the Democrat most capable of resolving the nation’s domestic and foreign problems and thus to save his cherished Union.
Nonetheless, Pierce’s decision raises two significant questions. Why, given the widespread anger among Democrats at his administration’s patronage allocation, to say nothing of the thrashing Democratic candidates had suffered at the polls in 1854 and early 1855, did Pierce think he had a realistic chance of achieving renomination? By November 1855 he well knew that some Democrats had already been talking up Stephen A. Douglas or James Buchanan as more “available”—that is, more likely to win—Democratic candidates. Why, moreover, unless he was totally delusional, did he think he had a chance of winning reelection even if he won renomination?
One answer to the first question is that certain elements in the Democratic Party wanted him to run again. None were more enthusiastic than Democratic newspaper editors in the South, especially the Deep South. They had been praising Pierce to the skies for more than two years, and well into the spring of 1856 they urged his renomination. Northern Free Soilers attacked Pierce, argued the Democratic sheet in Jackson, Mississippi, in February 1854, because “he interprets rightly the philosophy of the Baltimore platform, and has manifested an unyielding determination to stand upon that covenant, though he himself should fall in attempting to maintain it in its integrity. He is a lion in the pathway of the fanatics.” “No Chief Magistrate has ever so fully thrown the weight of his official position, and brought to bear so unreservedly the influence of administration in favor of the South against the fanatics and fanaticism of the North,” echoed a Mobile, Alabama, Democratic editor in November 1855. “Mr. Pierce takes as his guide the Constitution, limited by the doctrine of strict construction, confining the Federal Government to the exercise of none but clearly delegated powers, which is fatal to Abolitionism and all other isms that threaten the Union and our rights in the Union.”
Some New England Democrats also endorsed his renomi-nation. Later that November, Pierce’s secretary, Sidney Webster, successfully enlisted the chairman of the New Hampshire state Democratic committee to secure a resolution demanding Pierce’s nomination from the party’s state convention, which met in December. Democrats from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont also backed his renomination. Together, delegations from the Deep South and New England provided a base on which Pierce could presumably build a convention victory.
Pierce’s belief that he could win reelection if he won renomination, in turn, reflected a misreading of the political situation. After Democratic defeats in the three New England states in the spring of 1855, Democratic candidates enjoyed a minor comeback. Most of the subsequent contests during the remainder of the year occurred in the South, where Democrats rebuffed the Know Nothing challenge in all but three states. Yet Democrats also achieved some success in elections for minor state offices in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and even in Maine’s gubernatorial election. What success Democrats achieved in the North, however, could primarily be attributed to the failure of their polyglot opponents to combine behind a single ticket. In early November 1855 Pierce did not foresee that the various anti-Nebraska men in the new Congress would ultimately unite behind and elect Nathaniel P. Banks as Speaker of the House, thus signifying the coalescence of the Democratic Party’s northern opponents behind a potentially powerful Republican Party.
The growth of the Republican Party during the first half of 1856, based primarily on hostility to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was the shoal on which Pierce’s hopes for renomination foundered. The longer the impending presidential campaign appeared likely to focus on Kansas, the larger the number of northern Democrats grew who believed it would be suicidal to run Pierce in 1856; he was too prominently associated with the act. Conversely, because James Buchanan had been in England during 1854 and 1855, he escaped any personal responsibility for the administration’s policy toward Kansas, and the more he appeared to be the safest candidate to growing numbers of northern—as well as southern—Democrats.
During the fall of 1855, after the adjournment of the pro-slavery territorial legislature, Kansas had assumed a misleading appearance of tranquillity. From the start of 1856 until the meeting of the Democratic national convention on June 2, however, events in or about Kansas doomed Pierce’s bid. On January 15, even before Banks’s election as Speaker, dissident northerners in Kansas held elections to establish the “free state” government to rival the official territorial government elected in March 1855. This defiant action forced Pierce to take a public stand, one that seemed overtly prosouthern. In a message to Congress dated January 24, 1856, Pierce blamed the confusion in Kansas primarily on his first choice for territorial governor, Andrew H. Reeder, who had delayed the elections for the territorial legislature, and then its first meeting, in order to pursue his speculations. He admitted that Missouri-ans had interfered in the legislative elections but justified their interference as a reaction to attempts by abolitionist groups in the Northeast to “colonize” the territory. In any event, he contended, “whatever irregularities may have occurred in the elections, it seems too late now to raise that question. . . . For all present purposes the legislative body thus constituted and elected was the legitimate legislative assembly of the Territory.” Hence the attempt to establish a “free state” government in defiance of that legislature was not just “illegal”; it was “revolutionary.” “It will become treasonable insurrection if it reach the length of organized resistance by force to the fundamental or any other Federal law and to the authority of the General Government.” Consequently, “it will be my imperative duty to exert the whole power of the Federal Executive to support public order in the Territory; to vindicate its laws, whether Federal or local, against all attempts at organized resistance, and so protect its people in the establishment of their own institutions.”
Pierce followed this message with a proclamation, issued on February 11, that ordered the members of the new “free state” government “to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes.” It also warned that “any attempted insurrection” against the territorial government “would be resisted not only by the employment of the local militia, but also by that of any available forces of the United States.” Pierce was throwing the weight of the federal government, including its military forces, behind the illegally elected proslavery territorial legislature, which had brazenly deprived northern settlers in Kansas of fundamental civil rights and was determined to make Kansas a new slave state. If anything more were necessary to destroy Pierce’s electability in most of the North, this was it.
The next shoe fell on February 22, when two different political meetings were held at the opposite ends of Pennsylvania. In Pittsburgh the still embryonic Republican Party, which did not yet exist in several northern states, made its first attempt at forming a national organization. Every free state, as well as Kansas and Nebraska territories, sent representatives. They adopted a platform that among other things pledged to oust the Pierce administration from power and instructed a newly appointed national committee to draft a call for delegates to attend a presidential nominating convention in Philadelphia on June 17. That call invited all Americans “who are opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, to the policy of the present Administration, [and] to the extension of Slavery into the Territories” to elect delegates to that convention. Republicans explicitly presented themselves as the anti-Pierce party.
Meanwhile, the Know Nothings’ national nominating convention in Philadelphia fractured along sectional lines over the slavery extension issue. Most northern delegates stomped out in disgust when the convention nominated former president Millard Fillmore and when its national platform failed to call for repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and for reimposition of the 1820 ban on slavery north of the thirty-six-thirty line. Dubbing themselves North Americans, they called for a separate party nominating convention in New York City, one week before the Republican national convention was scheduled to meet. The bolt of northern Know Nothings did not assure Republicans that they might join forces with their new party, which styled itself the defender of northerners’ rights against Slave Power aggressions. It did, however, enhance the chances that North Americans might do so.
In May, scarcely two weeks before Democrats convened in Cincinnati, that assurance ultimately came. Friction between the official territorial and “free state” governments in Kansas, both of which were heavily armed, was almost inevitable. One flashpoint concerned men accused of violating the laws of one government who paid fealty to the other, whether or not those violations had anything to do with slavery. This was the case when the proslavery legislature sent a posse, including many Missourians, to arrest several “free state” leaders in the town of Lawrence, Kansas, on May 21, 1856. The posse terrorized the townsfolk, destroyed the printing press of an antislavery newspaper, and shelled a stoutly built hotel with cannon fire. No blood was shed, yet this “invasion,” immediately labeled the “Sack of Lawrence,” provided grist for the Republican propaganda mill in northeastern states. “The War Actually Begun—Triumph of the Border Ruffians—Lawrence in Ruins—Several Persons Slaughtered—Freedom Bloodily Subdued,” hyperbolized the eastern Republican press.
Two days before this incident, on May 19, 1856, Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts Republican senator with Free Soil antecedents, began a carefully rehearsed and extraordinarily vituperative two-day speech on the Senate floor called “The Crime against Kansas.” In it he attacked the South, the state of South Carolina, and, in wantonly cruel language, South Carolina’s senior senator Andrew Pickens Butler, who had temporarily returned to his home state. Southerners in Washington were furious, and one of them, Representative Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina, a distant cousin of Butler, determined to avenge the insult to his state and his family. On May 22, he entered the Senate chamber, accosted Sumner who sat at his desk, and beat him into bloody unconsciousness with a gutta-percha cane. No other incident in 1856 so enraged the North or ensured that most northern Know Nothings would indeed enlist in the Republicans’ antisouthern crusade. The more potent the Republican Party appeared in the North, the more remote were Pierce’s chances of obtaining the Democrats’ presidential nomination.
Yet it was not just events related to Kansas that undermined Pierce’s chances. Rancorous intraparty factionalism also hurt. Both of Virginia’s U.S. senators supported Pierce, but the chairman of Virginia’s delegation to the Cincinnati convention, Governor Henry Wise, supported Buchanan. And Wise had gained so much credit from Virginia Democrats for reversing the Know Nothing tide in the state’s 1855 gubernatorial election that his opposition to Pierce could prove decisive, no matter what the two senators wanted.
New York was another state whose convention vote seemed in play. Pierce had sided with New York’s Soft-Shells in squabbles over patronage in the Empire State, and they strongly supported his renomination. That support, if nothing else, drove Daniel Dickinson, the Hards’ leader, to back Buchanan, the man whose nomination Pierce most wanted to block. The two factions held separate state conventions in 1856 and sent separate delegations to Cincinnati. From Pierce’s perspective, therefore, much depended on which delegation the convention seated. Its decision to seat both and give each delegate a one-half vote effectively deprived him of New York’s support.
Finally, credible reports that Pierce’s managers had entered into negotiations with those of Stephen A. Douglas prior to the convention to cooperate against Buchanan caused Indiana’s Democratic senator Jesse D. Bright, one of the most unsavory characters ever to serve in the Senate, and who was jealous of Douglas, to support Buchanan in Cincinnati and to turn the Indiana delegation, as well as those of a few other midwestern states, against Douglas and Pierce.
The combination of these developments caused James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald who had been savaging Pierce since 1853, to pronounce an epitaph on Pierce’s chances on May 29, 1856, five days before the national convention opened. “Pierce’s follies, his imbecilities, his false promises, and still falser associates, have ruined him with his own party. He is now merely a dupe in their hands.” A few days later, the hostile Republican New York Times echoed that judgment in an editorial. Although it, like its reporters in Cincinnati, expected Buchanan to win the nomination in a cakewalk, it opined that “the only certainty appears to be that PIERCE will be thrown overboard at once, as a political Jonah, and the South is not so fishy as to make an attempt to swallow him.”
Perhaps a better index of Pierce’s current standing in the North, however, occurred in his hometown of Concord, New Hampshire. In late May its residents, who had purchased a magnificent horse for Pierce when he went off to Mexico in 1847, now burned him in effigy along with Preston Brooks.
The newspaper predictions about an immediate abandonment of Pierce at the Cincinnati convention proved erroneous. The convention opened on June 2 but did not begin balloting for the presidential nominee until June 5. In the meantime the credentials committee had to resolve disputes between contesting delegations from Missouri and New York, and the latter was not resolved until the morning of June 5 itself. The convention also adopted the party’s national platform before the nomination balloting began. Its most important plank endorsed the Kansas-Nebraska Act on precisely the same grounds as Pierce had taken—namely, that it embodied the principle of congressional noninterference that was articulated by the Compromise of 1850 and endorsed by the nation in 1852. Other planks denounced the bigotry of the Know Nothings, condemned the antisouthern sectional agitation of the Republicans for endangering the Union, and charged the next administration with ensuring “the ascendancy” of the United States in the Gulf of Mexico. Intriguingly, the resolutions committee that wrote the platform initially defeated a resolution offered by the member from Maryland praising the Pierce administration, only to adopt a similar one with the crucial caveat that it not be presented to the convention until after the balloting for the presidential nominee was over—that is, when it would do Pierce no good.
Nomination by the Democratic national convention required a two-thirds majority. On the first ballot, Buchanan failed to get even a simple majority. He led the count with 135 votes, but Pierce ran a respectable second with 122 while Douglas obtained 33 and Lewis Cass a mere 5. Pierce won 26 of New England’s 41 votes, with Buchanan capturing the others, including a majority of Maine’s and all of Connecticut’s. Virginia, Louisiana, Delaware, and three-fourths of Maryland’s votes went to Buchanan, as did a minority of Kentucky’s. Nonetheless, Pierce outpolled Buchanan 74 to 34 among slave-state delegations, while Missouri cast its 9 votes for Douglas. North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas voted for Pierce unanimously. New York split down the middle, casting 17 votes for Buchanan and 18 for Pierce. Over half of Buchanan’s total came from just three states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.
Pierce’s initial support did not instantly melt away as pundits had predicted. Over the next four ballots his support held steady at 119 votes while Buchanan’s inched above 140, still shy of a simple majority let alone the necessary two-thirds. On the sixth ballot Tennessee shifted its 12 votes from Pierce to Buchanan, although on the very next ballot it switched them to Douglas. Tennessee’s defection from the Pierce column led to a perceptible decline in his support. By the seventh ballot he was down to 89, and by the fifteenth and last ballot held on June 5, he fell to 79 as Buchanan and Douglas climbed to 152 and 63 votes, respectively. Telegraphic dispatches had kept Pierce abreast of the events in Cincinnati, and that night he wired his New Hampshire floor managers to withdraw his name the following morning. His bid for renomination was over.
Pierce hoped and expected that most of his supporters would shift to Douglas in order to stop Buchanan, and on the first ballot on June 6 Douglas’s support rose to 121 votes. Still, Buchanan led with 168. From Washington, Douglas telegraphed William A. Richardson, the chairman of the Illinois delegation, to withdraw his name, in part because he had received assurances from Buchanan’s managers that they would support his nomination in 1860. That withdrawal ended the contest; on the seventeenth and final ballot Buchanan was unanimously nominated as the Democrats’ contender for the presidency. Only after that result did the convention adopt the platform plank that praised Pierce and his administration, although one Indiana delegate protested that “he would never consent that the great North-West should be slandered and stultified by the supposition that she endorsed the Administration of Franklin Pierce.”
The convention still had to nominate a vice presidential candidate, and on the first ballot ten men received votes. John A. Quitman of Mississippi led with 59 votes; John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who was at the convention, followed closely with 55. That both men were well-known friends of Pierce was probably no coincidence. The nomination was a bone tossed by the victorious Buchanan men to the defeated Pierce forces, and on the second ballot, after the Mississippi delegation had withdrawn Quitman’s name, Breckinridge received the nomination.
“Poor Pierce,” mocked the hostile New York Times in an editorial several days after the convention closed. “With all the resources of the Government at his command, [he] has been unable to secure for himself the empty honor of renomination. He was taken up, in the first place, because he was unknown, and now he is spurned because he is known.” “What a book he might write about the ingratitude of parties!” The historian can only imagine the depths of Pierce’s personal disappointment, but publicly he reacted to the outcome at Cincinnati with characteristic graciousness. When a crowd of celebrating Democrats that included both Stephen Douglas and Lewis Cass came by a few days after the convention closed, he gave them an impromptu address from a White House window. He urged Democrats to pull together behind the ticket in order to save the Union. He would happily return to private life in New Hampshire, he avowed, “with a consciousness of having adopted no single measure of public policy during my administration which I did not believe to be demanded by the best interests of the country, nor one which does not, tonight, command the approbation of my judgment and my conscience.” Pierce closed his speech by predicting a Democratic victory in the fall if all Democrats rallied behind the principles enunciated in the party’s platform, which, he stressed, were the same principles to which he had adhered during his administration.
Four days after the close of the Cincinnati convention, and with the meeting of the North American convention in New York City, a series of political maneuvers began that would challenge Pierce’s confident prediction of Democratic victory. The Sack of Lawrence and the brutal caning of Senator Sum-ner enhanced the chances of a merger between northern Know Nothings and Republicans, but such a coalition required the mutually suspicious leadership of the two organizations to agree upon a common presidential candidate. Shrewd Republican politicos such as New York’s Thurlow Weed were especially concerned that the North Americans would jump first to nominate a candidate whom the Republicans would then be forced to embrace, thus alienating hundreds of thousands of northern voters who considered most Know Nothings bigoted thugs. So the wily Weed devised a brilliant stratagem. He persuaded the North Americans to nominate Speaker of the House Nathaniel P. Banks for president.
But what neither he nor Banks himself told the delegates was that Banks was to be a stalking horse for a different Republican nominee whom the Know Nothings would then be forced to endorse in order to bring about the merger. The plan worked like a charm. The North Americans nominated Banks, who made no response to the convention until after the Republicans nominated John C. Frémont at Philadelphia. Then Banks declined the North Americans’ nomination and urged them to back Frémont, which they grudgingly did, although a dispute about which party’s vice presidential nominee should be on the ticket with Frémont was not settled until late August. The most conservative northern Know Nothings continued to support Millard Fillmore, who received a separate nomination from a rump Whig convention in September, but the vast majority of the Democratic Party’s northern opponents had been united behind the Republican banner. November’s results would show what a potent political combine had been created.
As a sitting president and now a lame duck for the remaining nine months of his term, Pierce played no direct role in the ensuing campaign. But his actions as president surely affected it. In May he had vetoed three internal improvement bills, and in August he nixed two additional bills. With Pierce now largely impotent, Congress overrode the vetoes. Kansas, however, remained the administration’s and the Democratic Party’s biggest headache.
No blood had been shed during the Sack of Lawrence, but a few nights later, apparently in retaliation for this raid, the anti-slavery fanatic John Brown and his sons butchered five innocent settlers along Pottawatomie Creek in Franklin County, Kansas. Not one of the victims owned slaves; their offense was that they paid fealty to the official territorial legislature. During the summer, armed skirmishes between those loyal to the territorial legislature and those aligned with the “free state” government erupted, although there was far more marching and countermarching than serious fighting. In any event, Governor Wilson Shannon proved increasingly ineffective in keeping the peace. In contrast, Colonel Edwin Sumner, commander of the regular army troops in Kansas, proved, if anything, too effective in dealing with the “free state” government that Pierce had declared insurrectionary. He arrested its elected governor, Charles Robinson, on a charge of treason and dispersed the first meeting of the “free state” legislature on July 4, 1856—actions that allowed Republicans to charge that the army sided with proslavery men.
The longer “Bleeding Kansas” remained in the public eye, the more the Republicans benefited. In his message to Congress in January 1856, Pierce had said that the best solution for the troubles in Kansas was to admit it to statehood as soon as it had the requisite population. On offense Republicans vainly cried for its immediate admission as a free state. In June Georgia’s onetime Whig but now Democratic senator Robert Toombs introduced a bill that went Pierce one better. It called for waiving the population requirement, moving for immediate Kansas statehood, and holding an election in Kansas for delegates to a state constitutional convention. The election would be monitored by a federal commission that would ensure that this time only legitimate residents of Kansas voted. The Senate passed this sensible measure by a vote of thirty-one to thirteen, but the Republican majority in the House refused to consider it. “All these gentlemen want is to get up murder and bloodshed in Kansas for political effect,” Stephen Douglas accurately protested in a Senate speech. “They do not mean that there shall be peace until after the presidential election. . . . An angel from heaven could not write a bill to restore peace in Kansas that would be acceptable to the Abolition Republican party previous to the presidential election.”
Absent action by Congress that might resolve the turbulent situation in Kansas, the responsibility fell to Pierce and his administration. He sent another army officer to replace Sum-ner as commander of federal troops in the territory, and in late July he appointed John W. Geary of Pennsylvania to replace the feckless Shannon as territorial governor. This appointment was a ten-strike. A veteran of the Mexican-American War who had seen much combat, the imposingly tall and decisive Geary, with the help of the new army commander Persifor Smith, managed to restore order to Kansas when he reached the territory in the fall. By then, however, the political damage to the Democratic Party had already been done. “Bleeding Kansas” and “Bleeding Sumner” had given Republicans almost invincible electoral slogans.
Almost is the key word here, for in November James Buchanan won the three-way race for president. He won with only 45 percent of the popular vote and largely because he carried every slave state but Maryland, Millard Fillmore’s lone trophy. It was the North, however, that best reflected the political reaction to Franklin Pierce’s presidency. In 1852 Pierce had carried fourteen of the sixteen free states. In 1856 Buchanan won but five—California, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—while Republicans carried the remaining eleven. Of the northern states Buchanan won, moreover, he eked out a bare majority of the popular vote in only two: Indiana and Pennsylvania. Had all the opponents of Pierce’s administration aligned behind a single candidate rather than dividing between Frémont and Fillmore, the Democrats would have lost the other three as well.
The voter realignment against the Democratic Party was especially marked in the upper North. Pierce had swept his home state of New Hampshire in 1852 with almost 57 percent of the popular vote; in 1856 Frémont carried it with 53.7 percent while Buchanan garnered less than 46 percent. Or take Michigan and Wisconsin, the states where the Republican Party had first formed in 1854. Pierce had carried the former with 50.4 percent of the vote and the latter with 52 percent in the three-way contest of 1852. Buchanan won only 41.5 percent of Michigan’s vote and 44.2 percent in Wisconsin.
The region-wide figures are more stunning. In 1852 Pierce had won 49.8 percent of the North’s popular vote. In 1856 Buchanan earned only 41.4 percent. It is true that the Democrats ran considerably better in the North’s congressional elections in 1856 than they had in 1854. To give but one example, Democrats won eight House seats in Ohio in 1856—largely because Know Nothings and Republicans split the antiDemocratic vote—whereas their total in 1854 was zero. Regardless, this indicated a massive swing of the northern electorate against the Democratic Party and a telling index of what Franklin Pierce had done to it.
One other aspect of the 1856 presidential election merits emphasis. Millard Fillmore won almost four hundred thousand votes in the North, and in three states his support helped Buchanan to victory. Yet that total was less than a third of the vote amassed by Frémont in the free states. In the words of William E. Gienapp, the foremost historian of the Republican Party’s origins, 1856 constituted a “victorious defeat” for the Republicans, for the results clearly indicated that the Republicans, and not the Know Nothings, had displaced the Whigs as Democrats’ major party foe, that Republicans were the party of the future for anyone who wanted to punish Democrats at the polls. By 1860 almost all of Fillmore’s northern supporters had moved into the Republican column, and their conversion helps explain why Abraham Lincoln won.
There is no evidence that Pierce ever conceded that he personally was largely responsible for the damage done to the northern wing of the Democratic Party. In the final annual message he sent to Congress on December 2, 1856, he attributed the nation’s and his party’s troubles to an old enemy: antislavery fanatics in the North who endangered the Union. This message—surely one of the most bitter and intemperate ever sent to Congress—deserves extensive quotation.
Pierce began by seeming to deny that the Democratic Party was imperiled in the North. In the recent election, he averred, Americans had asserted “the constitutional equality of each and all of the States of the Union as States.” They had “maintained the inviolability of the constitutional rights of the different sections of the Union” and reaffirmed their commitment to the Constitution and the Union. “In doing this,” he continued, “they have at the same time emphatically condemned the idea of organizing in these United States mere geographical parties, of marshalling in hostile array toward each other the different parts of the country, North or South, East or West.”
Yet Pierce recognized that the overtly antisouthern Republican Party was no mere phantasm. political “associations” had been formed in some northern states by “individuals who, pretending to seek only to prevent the spread of the institution of slavery into the present or future inchoate States of the Union, are really inflamed with desire to change the domestic institutions of existing States.” They dedicated “themselves to the odious task of depreciating the government organization which stands in their way and of calumniating with indiscriminate invective not only the citizens of particular States with whose laws they find fault, but all others of their fellow citizens throughout the country who do not participate with them in their assaults upon the Constitution.” Their objective of abolition was “revolutionary,” and it would lead “inevitably into mutual devastation and fratricidal carnage.” Still, “they endeavor to prepare the people of the United States for civil war by doing everything in their power to deprive the Constitution and the laws of their moral authority and to undermine the fabric of the Union by appeals to passion and sectional prejudice, by indoctrinating its people with reciprocal hatred.” For years they had acted “aggressively against the constitutional rights of nearly one-half of the thirty-one States.”
To prove this charge, Pierce treated Congress to his version of American history. He began with the formation of abolitionist societies that he had first denounced in the 1830s. Next on his list was northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Then came a truly “revisionist” explanation of the repeal of the 1820 prohibition against slavery extension north of the thirty-six-thirty line in the Louisiana Territory. That ban, he falsely alleged, “was acquiesced in rather than approved by the States of the Union.” When northerners in the 1840s had refused to extend the line to the new Mexican Cession, they had “repeal[ed] it as a legislative compromise,” and thereafter “this enactment ceased to have binding virtue in any sense” as the territorial provisions of the Compromise of 1850 proved.
The sophistry of this analysis is breathtaking. In 1820, as compensation for allowing Missouri’s admission as a slave state, every southerner in the Senate and a majority of them in the House had agreed to divide the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase Territory at the thirty-six-thirty line, with slavery allowed south of it and forever prohibited north of it. This line applied exclusively to that geographic area, not any other. Pierce was arguing that northerners’ refusal to extend the line to a different geographic area in the 1840s repealed the sectional agreement over the line within the Louisiana Territory. But his inventive history was just beginning.
By 1854, when the territories of Kansas and Nebraska were organized, it had “come to be seen clearly that Congress does not possess constitutional power to impose restrictions of this character upon any present or future State of the Union.” Pierce never mentioned the Republican Party by name in this message, but in these words he dismissed the party’s central policy objective—congressional prohibition of slavery from territories—as unconstitutional. In any event, Pierce continued, complaints that repeal of the 1820 prohibition violated a sacred compact were bogus. Congress had the right to repeal any law it had previously enacted. “The repeal in terms of a statute, which was already obsolete and also null for unconstitutionality, could have no influence to obstruct or to promote the propagation of conflicting views of political or social institutions.” In fact, “all the repeal did was to relieve the statute book of an objectionable enactment, unconstitutional in effect and injurious in terms to a large portion of the States.” Little wonder that southern Democrats loved Pierce!
Finally, Pierce turned to the situation in Kansas. Here his prosouthern tilt was even more marked. “Revolutionary disorder in Kansas had its origin in [northern] projects of intervention . . . and when propagandist colonization of Kansas had thus been undertaken in one section of the Union for the systematic promotion of its peculiar view of policy there ensued as a matter of course a counteraction with opposite views in other sections of the Union.” It was true that Missourians bent on supporting the proslavery territorial legislature had repeatedly intervened in Kansas, Pierce admitted, but northern outsiders who supported its opponents in Kansas had also poured in from Iowa. More important—and here Pierce was absolutely correct—“the difficulties in that Territory have been extravagantly exaggerated for purposes of political agitation elsewhere.” “Irregularities” in Kansas elections “were beyond the sphere of action of the Executive.” In contrast, he boasted, “the attempt of a part of the inhabitants of the Territory to erect a revolutionary government, though sedulously encouraged and supplied with pecuniary aid from active agents of disorder in some of the States [i.e., the North], has failed.” And the military had expelled armed outsiders. Pierce rejoiced in “the peaceful condition of things in Kansas, especially considering the means to which it was necessary to have recourse for the attainment of the end.”
But his defense of his actions did not end there. Sectional conflict over slavery in Kansas was “inevitable.” “No human prudence, no form of legislation, no wisdom on the part of Congress, could have prevented it. It is idle to suppose that the particular provisions of the organic law were the cause of the agitation.” That agitation “was inherent in the nature of things.” What was more, he ended, northerners who faulted him for failing to stop Border Ruffians’ illegal interventions into elections within Kansas were mistaken. It was up to the people themselves to guarantee that elections were honest and fair. Local elections were beyond the purview of a president’s constitutional authority.
Thus in his valedictory address to Congress and the nation, Franklin Pierce exempted himself from any personal responsibility for the reverses suffered by the northern Democratic Party and the escalating sectional conflict over slavery extension that afflicted his beloved Union. That conflict, after all, “was inherent in the nature of things.” What this historian, at least, does not know is whether Pierce actually believed what he had written.