e White House.
Portrait of Franklin Pierce (1804–1869) by Mathew Brady.
This image is in the public domain via Wikicommons.
Franklin Pierce was inaugurated as the fourteenth president of the United States in March 1853 at the age of forty-eight, making him the youngest president up to that time. Nearly twenty years earlier, Pierce had married Jane Appleton, also of New Hampshire. Painfully thin and shy, Jane Pierce suffered from physical and psychological ailments most of her life. She hated politics and urged her husband to resign as a U.S. Senator in 1842 after the birth of their third son. Devoutly religious, she had convinced herself that God had taken their first two sons—a newborn and later a four-year-old—because of her husband’s political ambitions. Thereafter, Ms. Pierce forbade her husband from accepting political appointments and nominations, fully expecting him never to serve in public office again.
A decade later, however, after failing to nominate several candidates for president at its 1852 convention, the Democratic Party settled on a relatively unknown pro-slavery Northerner—Franklin Pierce. When Jane Pierce received the news that her husband had accepted the unanticipated nomination, she reportedly fainted. The Pierces’ only living son, Benjamin “Benny” Pierce, then eleven years old, shared his mother’s contempt for politics, as evidenced in a letter to his mother: “I hope he won’t be elected for I should not like to be at Washington and I know you would not either.” Though Pierce did little campaigning as was the custom of the time, he won the election handily. In an attempt to pacify the First Lady-to-be, Pierce explained that Benny, whom she adored, was now assured of a better future as the son of a U.S. president.
