On the list of things no one ever says, you can add "Why isn't there a new biography of Franklin Pierce?" And on my list of things I never say, I've added, "Boy, I'm sure looking forward to blogging about Franklin Pierce." Just doesn't happen.
Even with a truncated schedule, I'm still thrown for a loop by Franklin Pierce, New Hampshire's only president and number 14 on the list of Chief Executives. He's bad, horribly so, and while Roy F. Nichols does his best to laud him in Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills, it's like putting a fresh coat of wax on a rusty heap (and not even that fresh a coat: Nichols's book was first published in 1931). I love that one of the reviewers on Amazon states that this is the definitive biography of Pierce, which is a little like saying you're the best breakdancer in Monaco; there's a lot less competition.
Nichols's book is an artifact of its time, written in a manner that only a few biographers might attempt now. Here's a representative selection, taken from the chapter on Pierce's days at Bowdoin: "For no matter where a college may be, whether in the heart of life or upon remote borders youth creates a pleasure world of its own in which to take its ease. Franklin had soon discovered his. There was the forest with its sweet-smelling shade, its miles of winding paths, its whispering pines with all that charm and mystery which have ever called men to the groves. There was the river with its moods. In the spring it was a furious freshet, often carrying giant tree trunks in its swift course and tossing them like chips over the falls. Always it was fascinating by day and filled the nights with a slow continuous roar which gradually sank into silence in the last few seconds before the boy was completely lost to the war in sleep."
That's only about half the paragraph, by the way. No wonder this book is 546 pages. But there's something lovely and missing now about the way Nichols writes, a florid, over-written prose that's lush to wander in for a while. But only for a while.
Maybe we shouldn't pick on Pierce; the man's obscurity is obscure. While Millard Fillmore has his funny name and James Buchanan has the rumors of homosexuality to keep them in vague public memory, Pierce is just Pierce, one of the caretaker presidents, Northerners who made concession after concession to the South in order to preserve an increasingly cobbled-together Union. Pierce had a hard life, too; at one point, he's the lowest in his class at Bowdoin, he maintains a drinking problem that affected his ability to work, and three of his sons die early deaths.
The most significant of these is his son Benjamin, Bennie, who dies in January of 1853. The President-Elect, his wife, and his son were on a train which derailed; the parents were uninjured, but Bennie Pierce was killed instantly, before his parents' eyes. "It is difficult to express adequately the effect which this...tragedy worked upon the President-Elect," writes Nichols, and I can't help but agree. Perhaps a Pierce not consumed with grief and regret and guilt would have made a difference in the final years before the Civil War; perhaps he would have moved away from strict Constitutionalism to an understanding of what America was supposed to be; perhaps all of our history might have been different.
But it wasn't. Pierce was Pierce, a man forgotten by history.
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