The 14th President of The United States, Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce: Franklin Pierce became president in an apparent quiet time. The United States, by virtue of the Compromise of 1850, seemed to have acclimated to their sectional storm. Chasing the recommendations of southern advisers, Pierce - New English - was hoping to prevent another outbreak of that storm. But his policies, far from preserving calm, divisiónde accelerated the union. Franklin Pierce was born in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, in 1804, and attended the University of Bowdoin. After graduation,

he studied law, then entered politics. At 24 he was elected to the legislature of New Hampshire; two years later he became its spokesman. During the 1830's, he went to Washington, first as a Representative, then as a Senator. Pierce, after serving in the war in Mexico, was nominated for the presidential nomination by friends from New Hampshire in 1852. At the Democratic Convention, delegates agreed easily, a platform that promised aid without diverting the Compromise of 1850 and hostility for any effort to agitate the issue of slavery. But they voted 48 times and eliminated all reonocidos candidates before nominating Pierce, a true "dark horse".

Probably because the Democrats were more firmly attuned to the commitment that the Whigs, and because Whig candidate Gen. Winfield Scott was suspect in the South, Pierce won with a large margin of popular votes. Two months before he took office, he and his wife saw their eleven year old son died when their train was wrecked. Still overwhelmed, Pierce assumed the Presidency nervously exhausted. In his inaugural address, he proclaimed an era of peace and prosperity in the country and force in its relations with other nations. The United States should acquire additional possessions more with the reason for his own safety, he said, and would not be deterred by "outsiders timid no evil". Pierce had to do only gestures about the expansion to incite the wrath of northerners, who accused him of acting like the claw of a cat Southerners eager to extend slavery into other areas. Therefore he aroused apprehension when he pressured Great Britain to abandon its special along the Central Coast of Central American interests, and even more when he tried to persuade Spain to sell to Cuba.

But the most violent renewal of the storm stemmed from the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repulsed the Missouri Compromise and reopened the question of slavery in the West. This measure, the work of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, grew in part from his desire to promote a railroad from Chicago to California through Nebraska. And Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, advocate of a southern transcontinental route, had persuaded Pierce to send James Gadsden to Mexico to buy land for a southern railroad. He purchased the area now covered southern Arizona and part of its New Mexico for $ 10,000,000. Douglas's offer to organize western territories through which a railroad might run, caused extreme problem. Douglas proveeyó in their bills that the residents of the new territories could decide about slavery for themselves. The result was urgent in Kansas, southerners and northerners vied for control of the territory. Gunfire erupted, and "Bloody Kansas" became a prelude to civil war. To the end of his administration, Pierce could claim "a peaceful condition of things in Kansas." But to his disappointment, the Democrats rejected the renominarlo, turning to less controversial Buchanan. Pierce returned to New Hampshire, leaving his successor to face the rising fury of the divisional whirlwind. He died in 1869.