Every Day Is Special: November 23 - President Pierce's Birthday

November 23 - President Pierce's Birthday

Posted on November 23, 2017

Some people think he was one of the best looking of the U.S. presidents. He was also popular and outgoing.

But being a president is not like being a movie star - it doesn't matter all that much what you look like, and popularity and friendliness only go so far. It's much more important to be hard working, to be honest, to be knowledgeable, to have a good character, to have good ideas. Most important is to have those leadership skills that are hard to describe. I'll take a stab at describing leadership: the ability to inspire others to do what's right and to make people feel more unified, more hopeful, more confident.

Franklin Pierce didn't have too much of any of that.

Franklin Pierce is routinely ranked one of the worst presidents: in the bottom fourth of the presidents, across the board, including being ranked #40 or #41 out of 43 by several historians.

Why so low?

Franklin Pierce was president before the Civil War, and many historians say that his actions, and even his inactions, are partly to blame for causing the Civil War. Although he was from the North - mostly New Hampshire - he was more upset by the anti-slavery movement than by slavery itself. He was afraid that the abolition movement threatened the unity of the nation, and his idea of how to make sure that there was no Civil War was to compromise rather than lead, and even to break previous compromises by giving more to the South in an effort to keep Southern states in the Union.

Because of Pierce's actions, violence broke out in Kansas, violence erupted over the spread of slavery westward, and northerners became angry over his enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Pierce's popularity plummeted.

Pierce was a Democratic president (at that time, the two parties were the Democrats and the Whigs - no Republican Party as yet). He expected to run as a Democrat for a second term, but his party said no, thanks; the Democratic Party nominated and successfully elected James Buchanan.

(Obviously, Buchanan was also not able to head off the Civil War. As a matter of fact, historians generally rank Buchanan even lower than Pierce!)

When the Civil War came, and Abraham Lincoln served as president, Pierce criticized Lincoln's every move. Because of this, Pierce's popularity sank even more.