Franklin Pierce

In the minds of practically all historians - especially those who specialize in American history - 3 men stick out as the most incompetent, corrupt, and damaging to ever sit in the Oval Office: James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and the subject of this inaugural post, Franklin Pierce. Of this trio, Pierce is the most honored. Or rather, the least derided. He manages to, in almost all situations, rise to the "top" of the bottom 3. He is despised by historians, for sure, but not to the extent that Johnson and Buchanan are. I, however, disagree with this assessment. While Buchanan and Johnson are also confined to my bottom 3, Pierce, in my opinion, is confined to the ignoble title of the worst president in US history. The chaos of the 1850s and 1860s, while rooted in multiple administrations the inescapable moral blot of slavery - away from which no American eyes could turn - was the fault of Pierce more than it was any other specific individual's. Pierce's incompetence and spinelessness nearly cost the survival of the United States. It is for this reason that I have declared him the worst of the worst.

Pierce took the oath of office on March 4, 1853, replacing Millard Fillmore. The only president to "affirm" his dedication to the Constitution and the legal trinity it chartered rather than to "swear on" that dedication, Pierce was inaugurated a mere two months after an awful tragedy. On January 6, 1853, his son was decapitated in a train accident. This fact would devastate any witness and any parent, but Pierce was both a witness to this event and the father of the young boy brutally stolen by the event. He was crushed. His wife, First Lady Jane Appleton, spent his inauguration hidden away in a hotel room writing letters apologizing for the soul of their dead son. Pierce, who had relapsed into alcoholism during his service in the Mexican-American War, was equally crushed. This misery explains his faults but does not excuse them.

As president, Pierce firmly opposed infrastructure spending. This is one of several reasons that I hold such a low opinion of him but is not the main or even a major reason. His opposition to infrastructure projects came with one exception: He supported the construction of a railroad to be built across the entire US, a transcontinental railroad. In pursuit of this, Pierce began looking for ways to fund his railroad. Under American law, no area which yet to be organized into a territory could not have its federal land sold to private settlers. So, toward the end of 1853, Pierce requested that Congress draft a bill organizing the Nebraska Territory, i.e. the remaining area of the Louisiana Purchase that hadn't been organized. Southern Congressmen, however, strongly opposed this.

Signed by James Monroe in 1820, the Missouri Compromise banned slavery in almost all of the Louisiana Purchase. By organizing the Nebraska Territory, its land would be placed one step closer to statehood, a terrifying prospect to the slave-holding aristocracy. So, Pierce - a Democrat from New Hampshire - saw his requests for an organized Nebraska Territory shot down. On January 4, 1854, Stephen Douglas, the infamous rival of Abraham Lincoln, proposed an early version of what would become the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Meant to placate southern interests, the Kansas-Nebraska Act split the Nebraska Territory into the Kansas Territory in the south and the Nebraska Territory in the north, allowing residents of the two regions to vote on whether or not they'd permit slavery. On May 30, 1854, Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law despite his own personal dislike of slavery. That alone makes him a bottom 5 president. But the rest of his presidency would cement him as the worst.

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1854, pro-slavery Americans known as Border Ruffians flocked to the Kansas Territory, while anti-slavery Americans known as Free Staters flocked to both the Kansas and Nebraska Territories. Each side hoped to sway the elections in favor of their view on slavery. The slaveholders believed that when Douglas and Pierce split the Nebraska Territory, the idea was to allow slavery in the southern territory and ban it in the northern territory. As a result, when Nebraska voted to prohibit slavery, no one contested the vote. However, in March of 1855, Border Ruffians stuffed the ballot box to ensure a pro-slavery result. They got what they wanted and so created a Kansas Territory government that punished people with 10 years of hard labor for harboring fugitive slaves, required public officials to swear that they would use their position to protect slavery, and executed people who distributed abolitionist texts.

At the end of 1855, Border Ruffians - who now were defined by their support for the fraudulent pro-slavery government - and Free Staters - who now were defined by their support for a trio of abolitionist governments claiming to run Kansas - began clashing in a mini-civil war known as Bleeding Kansas. Pierce also failed to address this crisis. Not only did he never succeed at quelling, ending, or mitigating the violence, he also indicted several framers of anti-slavery Kansas policies like the Leavenworth Constitution and Topeka Constitution on treason. He did this despite the fact that, as most Americans already knew at the time, the pro-slavery territorial government was fraudulent.

In terms of foreign policy, Pierce had some successes. He attempted to convince Britain to rescind some colonial claims in Central America and his ambassadors held a dinner where they discussed plans to revive the Revolutions of 1848. Unfortunately, these two facts canceled each other out and prevented either goal from actualizing, but I still give Pierce and his officials some credit for their effort. He also kept the US out of the Crimean War, even expelling the British ambassador after his government tried to recruit British immigrants to America for Britain's war effort. However, his foreign policy contained some major flaws as well. On December 30, 1853, his government signed a treaty codifying the Gadsden Purchase, which acquired what is now southern New Mexico and southern Arizona for the US. Some consider this a plus, but I consider it a minus because those living in the territory had no say in the agreement. Their land was given to a separate nation without their consent, which is very immoral in my eyes.

During the Pierce presidency, Spain was suffering from a massive national debt. Hoping that this would make his expansionist offers more appealing to Madrid, Pierce routinely asked Spain if it would like to sell its colony of Cuba to the US for $130,000,000. Spain declined this offer, yet Pierce repeatedly and continuously brought it up, creating tensions between America and Spain. These tensions grew far worse on February 28, 1854, when an American ship called the USS Black Warrior was destroyed near Cuba. To his credit, Pierce worked to resolve these tensions in October 1854, when he asked his ambassadors to Britain, France, and Spain - a group that, interestingly, included future-President James Buchanan - to gather in Ostend, Belgium, and write a diplomatic solution to the tensions.

Buchanan and his colleagues came up with the Ostend Manifesto. In this paper, the ambassadors explained that the US needed control over Cuba. This was because, they argued, a lack of US authority in Cuba put the south at risk, as American slaves could escape to Cuba and launch a revolt there. Thus, if Spain didn't cede or sell Cuba to Washington DC, America would have no choice but to declare war on Madrid. Pierce was upset with this document and thankfully rejected it. But he never punished the ambassadors for their reckless and racist behavior. Thus, when the Ostend Manifesto was leaked to the press later in October, domestic tensions over slavery worsened and war between the US and Spain nearly exploded into our reality.

Pierce had other, less damning flaws. He lowered tariffs and brokered a free trade agreement with British-occupied Canada. I am a protectionist, so I consider these things to be flaws with the Pierce Administration rather than accomplishments of it. If someone was more supportive of free trade, I could see how this would actually garner rather than reduce points for Pierce. For as much as I criticize Pierce, he had other accomplishments than just those that I listed above. He improved the military and extended citizenship to people born to Americans living abroad. Although I generally dislike territorial expansion, I see no issues with the Guano Islands Act. This bill permits Americans to go to unclaimed islands with no residents - since there are no people on these islands to consent to such an acquisition, I'm not as uncomfortable with this as I am with, say, the Gadsden Purchase - and declare them US territory if they contain enough bird feces. This law helped American farmers gather more fertilizer.

In spite of these minor achievements, I still believe Pierce to be the worst president in American history. He may have helped farmers and opposed colonialism, but he also damaged the economy, opposed infrastructure spending, almost caused a war with Spain, contributed more to the dissent into civil war and disunion than any other individual president, and, most importantly, lacked the strength to stand up for what he knew was right. Despite his northern background and understanding of how cruel and barbaric slavery is, he was unable to stand up to southern slaveholders, plantation managers, and racist aristocrats. The howls and blows of angry southern mouths spitting hateful venom against people of color and northerners were able to create all the wind needed to toss Pierce into the dumpster bin of history.