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Millard is so eager to get an education that he enrolls in a small academy. He is nineteen years old. Among the other students is the redheaded Abigail Powers, who is two years older. The couple fall in love but do not marry for six years due to lack of money.
Millard Fillmore is the last Whig president. By 1856, the party will cease to exist, undone by the Compromise of 1850. From now on, every chief executive will be affiliated with either the Republican or Democratic Party.
The controversial anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published and becomes a bestseller. And the German revolutionary Karl Marx publishes a series of articles on his communist beliefs in the New York Tribune. At home in the White House, there is decay. Guests notice the nicked and tattered furniture and are surprised by springs poking out from the frayed cushions. It has been more than thirty years since the building was refurbished after being burned in the War of 1812.
Just three weeks after Millard Fillmore leaves the presidency, Abigail passes away from pneumonia at the Willard Hotel in Washington. She contracted the illness while standing at her husband’s side during a snowstorm for the swearing-in of new president Franklin Pierce. Tragically, their daughter, Mary, contracts cholera and dies three months later at twenty-two years old.
For a seasoned politician, his time in office was remarkably inept, misjudging the mood of his own party.
Millard Fillmore dies of a stroke on March 8, 1874. He is seventy-four years old and is laid to rest at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo. At the time of his death, he has seen five other men serve as president.
Fillmore was a weak chief executive who failed to grasp the growing danger America was facing from a slavery-driven insurrection. His successor will be even worse.
President-elect Pierce is scheduled to take the oath of office in two months. He is forty-eight and has been married eighteen years. Franklin and Jane are opposites in many ways. She is a deeply religious teetotaler, while he is not as pious and is known to hit the bottle hard. Jane is a Whig and Franklin a Democrat. But both are in agreement about their deep love for Benny. He is the only one of three sons still alive; Franklin Jr. and Frank Robert died from disease at ages three days and four years, respectively. Benny Pierce is intelligent and kind.
Suddenly, the president-elect hears a loud crack as one of the train’s axles breaks in two. The passenger car derails and tumbles twenty feet down a rocky embankment. Screams. Hysteria. Bodies hurled from their seats. The car “broke in pieces like a cigar box,” the New York Times will state. America’s new president-elect climbs out of the wreckage as it rolls to a halt. He is badly bruised but otherwise unhurt. Jane is distraught but not injured. Yet Franklin Pierce cannot find his son. He frantically searches the carnage, believing Benny might have been ejected from the train.
Franklin Pierce finds Benny’s lifeless body. It is crushed. Flying metal has struck his son in the back of the head, almost decapitating him.
The president-elect moves quickly to shield his wife from what he sees, throwing a cloak over the corpse. But he is too late. At the sight of her precious boy, Jane Pierce lets out wails of grief that continue into the night. “Mrs. Pierce was taken away in a very high state of anguish,” the Times will report.
On March 4, 1853, Franklin Pierce recites the oath of office on a bitter cold and wet Friday. Standing on the East Portico of the Capitol, he places his right hand on a law book instead of swearing on a Bible. Thus, he is the first president to be affirmed instead of taking an oath. Pierce does so because he believes God is punishing him for past sins by killing Benny, and he is unworthy of taking a biblical oath. The new president then becomes the first chief executive to recite his inaugural address, in this case a thirty-three-minute speech, from memory.
Still in mourning, Jane Pierce is not in attendance. “You have summoned me in my weakness,” President Pierce tells America. “You must sustain me by your strength.”
Chronically depressed long before the death of his children, Pierce often drinks to excess. The president usually goes to bed at 11:00 p.m., whereupon his alcohol intake leads to a night of snoring and poor sleep until 5:30 a.m. This causes him to nap at midday. He is impulsive.
Born in 1804, Franklin Pierce is the son of New Hampshire governor Benjamin Pierce. He is a descendant of Thomas Pierce, who helped settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. The future president attends Philip Exeter Academy and then Bowdoin College in Maine. There, he develops a reputation for being “chivalrous, manly, and warm-hearted.” “He was one of the most popular students in the whole college,” says a friend. One of Pierce’s fellow students and best friends is Nathaniel Hawthorne, a writer also descended from America’s first settlers.
While her husband serves in Congress, Jane remains on the New Hampshire farm. Alone in the capital, Franklin Pierce begins to drink even more heavily.
But the new president will never fully kick his addiction to alcohol.
Franklin Pierce responds well to the military. Drinking does not openly affect his leadership, but an anonymous 1852 letter to a New Hampshire newspaper refers to Pierce as the “hero of many a well-fought bottle.”
At the time, Pierce had been out of elected office for ten years. Yet Virginia quickly casts all fifteen votes for the northerner with southern sympathies. On the forty-ninth ballot, he wins the nomination.
But by then, nobody is listening to Franklin Pierce. Devastated by Jane’s death, his chronic alcoholism leads to gastritis, malnutrition, and, finally, liver damage. Abdominal fluid accumulation caused by cirrhosis of the liver kills President Pierce. He dies alone at 4:35 a.m. on Friday, October 8, 1869, in Concord. He is sixty-four years old.
Violence is in the air. While Washington awaits a new president, forces of rebellion and sedition are gathering strength in the South, To confront those forces, Pennsylvanian James Buchanan steps into the arena. He will become an even worse leader than Franklin Pierce.
So, after being sworn in by Justice Taney, who has a long face and large bushy eyebrows, Buchanan surprises the crowd. He is usually an energetic public speaker, but today he bores the audience, talking about the economy and need to expand the navy. Slavery in the new territories, the president tells the crowd, is “happily a matter of but little practical importance.” More than a few in the audience are stunned. On the matter of Dred Scott vs. Sanford, Buchanan cryptically notes he will “cheerfully accept” the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Black people, the Supreme Court states, are not American citizens and thus have no constitutional rights. As such, they have no power to sue in federal court.1 In addition, it is ruled that the United States has no authority to ban slavery in new states and new territories. The law does not allow for slaves brought there by owners to be freed. As he predicted, James Buchanan cheerfully accepts the judgment. So does the South. But many in America do not.
At twenty-eight, Buchanan is engaged to twenty-three-year-old Ann Coleman, a wealthy black-haired beauty born the daughter of an iron magnate. Soon, Buchanan’s busy law practice and rumors that he is overly flirtatious with other young women lead her to break it off. This deeply wounds Buchanan. Yet before the couple can discuss reconciliation, Ann dies suddenly. Some suspect she killed herself. Buchanan’s letters of condolence to her family are returned unopened.
James Buchanan then enters politics “as a distraction from my great grief” and is elected to Congress representing central Pennsylvania. Upon arriving in Washington, he takes a room at Mrs. Ironside’s Boarding House on Tenth and F Streets. The nickname for such establishments is “bachelors mess” due to the number of single congressmen in residence. Buchanan shares a room with Alabama’s William Rufus King, who will later become vice president under Franklin Pierce. This arrangement continues long after each man buys a home of his own.
President Andrew Jackson mocks them both. The phrase Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy is applied. Some gossip is even more direct, using the term Mr. Buchanan and his wife. When separated, Buchanan and King exchange long letters, with orders that they later be burned. But that is not always the case. One carefully worded missive, written by King as he departs for a diplomatic mission in France, states, “I am selfish enough to hope you will not be able to procure an associate who will cause you to feel no regret at our separation.” Other letters survive to this day, portraying some intimacy.
By 1843, the Democrat is elected to Congress, where he serves ten years. Throughout his time in the House of Representatives, Johnson toes the southern position that slaves are private property and their ownership is protected by the Constitution.
So, it comes as no surprise when Andrew Johnson is elected to the US Senate in 1857. The former tailor continues to support slavery, speaking out against those who would attempt to end the practice.
Thus, he returns to Tennessee in 1862. Johnson’s growing influence makes it possible for him to make a special request of President Lincoln. When the Emancipation Proclamation is issued, Lincoln exempts Tennessee. So, while slaves are free everywhere in the Confederacy, an exception is Johnson’s home state.
