Franklin Pierce appeared a youthful forty-eight years old when he took office. He was generally well-liked by politicians. His career had included service in both houses of Congress. Alcohol had become a problem for him in Washington, however, and in 1842 he had resigned from the Senate and returned home to try to best the bottle, a struggle in which he was successful. His law practice boomed, and he added to his reputation by serving as a brigadier general during the
This engraving of Franklin Pierce shows him on his horse during the Mexican War. In actuality, he did not remain there long. During one battle, Pierce was thrown from his horse and sustained pelvic and knee injuries. While leading his men the next day, he fainted. Another officer assumed that Pierce was drunk. For years, Whigs attacked Pierce's military record, calling him "hero of many a bottle.”
Mexican War. Although his nomination for president came as a surprise, once made, it had appeared perfectly reasonable. Great things were expected of his administration, especially after he surrounded himself with men of all factions: To balance his appointment of a radical states’ rights Mississippian, Jefferson Davis, as secretary of war, for example, he named a conservative Northerner, William L. Marcy of New York, as secretary of state.
Only a strong leader, however, can manage a ministry of all talents, and that President Pierce was not. The ship of state was soon drifting; Pierce seemed incapable of holding firm the helm.
This was the situation in January 1854 when Senator Douglas, chairman of the Committee on Territories, introduced what looked like a routine bill organizing the land west of Missouri and Iowa as the Nebraska Territory. Since settlers were beginning to trickle into the area, the time had arrived to set up a civil administration. But besides his expansionist motives, Douglas also acted because a territorial government was essential to railroad development. As a director of the Illinois Central line and as a land speculator, he hoped to make Chicago the terminus of a transcontinental railroad, but construction could not begin until the route was cleared of Indians and brought under some kind of civil control.
The powerful southern faction in Congress wanted the railroad to pass through New Orleans or Memphis; it refused to support Douglas’s proposal. The railroad question aside, Nebraska would presumably become a free state, for it lay north of latitude 36°30’ in a district from which slavery had been excluded by the Missouri Compromise. Under pressure from the Southerners, led by Senator David R. Atchison of Missouri, Douglas agreed first to divide the region into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and then—a fateful concession—to repeal the part of the Missouri Compromise that excluded slavery from land north of 36°30’. Whether the new territories should become slave or free, he argued, should be left to the decision of the settlers in accordance with the democratic principle of popular sovereignty. The fact that he might advance his presidential ambitions by making concessions to the South must have influenced Douglas too, as must the local political situation in Missouri, where slaveholders feared being “surrounded” on three sides by free states.
Douglas’s miscalculation of northern sentiment was monumental. It was one thing to apply popular sovereignty to the new territories in the Southwest, but quite another to apply it to a region that had been part of the United States for half a century and free soil for thirty-four years. Word that the area was to be opened to slavery caused an indignant outcry; many moderate opponents of slavery were radicalized. A group of abolitionist congressmen issued what they called their “Appeal of the Independent Democrats” (actually, all were Free Soilers and Whigs) denouncing the Kansas-Nebraska bill as “a gross violation of a sacred pledge” and calling for a campaign of letter writing, petitions, and public meetings to prevent its passage. The unanimity and force of the northern public’s reaction was like nothing in America since the days of the Stamp Act and the Intolerable Acts.
But protests could not defeat the bill. Southerners in both houses backed it regardless of party. Douglas, at his best when under attack, pushed it with all his power. The authors of the “Appeal,” he charged, were “the pure unadulterated representatives of Abolitionism, Free Soilism, [and] Niggerism.” President Pierce added whatever force the administration could muster. As a result, the northern Democrats split and the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed late in May 1854. In this manner the nation took the greatest single step in its march toward the abyss of secession and civil war.
The repeal of the Missouri Compromise struck the North like a slap in the face—at once shameful and challenging. Presumably the question of slavery in the territories had been settled forever; now, seemingly without justification, it had been reopened. On May 24, two days after the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed the House of Representatives, Anthony Burns, a slave who had escaped from Virginia by stowing away on a ship, was arrested in Boston. Massachusetts abolitionists brought suit against Burns’s former master, charging false arrest. They also organized a protest meeting at which they inflamed the crowd into attacking the courthouse where Burns was being held. The mob broke into the building and a guard was killed, but federal marshals drove off the attackers.
President Pierce ordered the Boston district attorney to “incur any expense” to enforce the law. He also sent a federal ship to Boston to carry Burns back to Virginia. Thus Burns was returned to his master, but it required two companies of soldiers and 1,000 police and marines to get him aboard ship. As the grim parade marched past buildings festooned with black crepe, the crowd screamed “Kidnappers! Kidnappers!” at the soldiers. Estimates of the cost of returning this single slave to his owner ran as high as $100,000. A few months later, northern sympathizers bought Burns his freedom—for a few hundred dollars.
In previous cases Boston’s conservative leaders, Whig to a man, had tended to hold back; after the Burns incident, they were thoroughly radicalized. “We went to bed one night old fashioned. . .Whigs,” one of them explained, “and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
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