Born: 1806
Died: 1863

Jane Appleton came from a prominent New Hampshire family. Her mother had wealth, her father, prestige. He was a Congregationalist minister and president of Bowdoin College who died when Jane was only 13. But he instilled in her a rigid and puritanical outlook on life that did not bode well for a future in politics. Nonetheless, at 28, Jane defied her family’s wishes and married longtime beau Franklin Pierce, a gregarious 29-year-old New Hampshire Congressman. It did not take Jane long to develop a distaste for politics. Her discomfort hardened into contempt once Franklin became a Senator, and in 1842, she persuaded him to quit politics for a lucrative private law practice back home.

When she learned that Franklin had accepted his party’s 1852 nomination for President, Jane was so dismayed she fainted. Family life became her refuge. She doted on her only child; Benny, having lost her first in infancy and her second when he was four. Just weeks after Franklin’s election, Benny was killed in a train wreck before his parents’ eyes. Jane fell into a permanent depression. For her first two years as First Lady, she lived as a recluse, shunning social contact and writing letters to her dead son. A trusted relative, Abby Means, looked after her in the White House and assumed the hostessing role. Later on, Franklin managed to coax his wife into limited entertaining, dressed always in black.

Fourteenth President
Franklin Pierce

Born: 1804, Hillsborough, NH
Died: 1869

Franklin Pierce was thrust into the Presidential melee of 1852 by New Hampshire supporters, after 47 ballots failed to produce a Democratic nominee. Having been the youngest-ever member of the U.S. Senate in 1837, he became the then-youngest President when elected in 1853. The tragic death of Pierce’s 11-year-old son in a train wreck darkened the early days of his Presidency. National events were no more portentous of a happy tenure in the White House.

Northern opposition forced Pierce to abandon his plans to acquire Hawaii, Alaska and Cuba, although he did manage to buy a large tract from Mexico that is now part of Arizona and New Mexico (the Gadsen Purchase) for a Southern railroad. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act superceded the Missouri Compromise. It enabled residents in all the new territories to determine their own slavery policy. Both pro and anti-slave factions poured into Kansas to try to wrest control of that pivotal territory. Shooting and bloodshed followed, giving Americans a foretaste of the Civil War. “Bleeding Kansas” lost President Pierce the support of his party and the Democrats failed to nominate him for a second term.

Fourteenth President
Democrat