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CHAPTER XV.

ENERAL BENJAMIN PIERCE was a soldier in the revolutionary war, was afterward a radical Jeffersonian democrat, who hated England and loved France; was an independent, large-hearted farmer; was for many years a representative of his town in the New Hampshire legislature; was a general in the state militia; was for a time a member of the governor's council, and two years governor of the state. He was an ardent politician, and with political weapons fiercely fought the federalists.

BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE.

Franklin Pierce was the son of Governor Benjamin Piercethe sixth of eight children.

Franklin was a bright, handsome, active boy, who took his father's politics by inheritance and repeated the ancestral arguments till they became his own. He was a generous boy, who won favor at home, at school, and wherever he was known. His father had suffered much for want of an education, and as Franklin inclined to it, he resolved that he should be educated. The district school gave him a good start; the farm gave him practical industry; the academies at Hancock and Francestown fitted him for college; Bowdoin college gave him a classical course of study; Judge Levi Woodbury and the law school at

Northampton, Massachusetts, trained him in law; so that at a little past twenty-three, Franklin Pierce the boy, had become Mr. Franklin Pierce, the man and the lawyer.

Among his classmates in college, were Professor Calvin E. Stowe, a theological teacher and writer of note, and the husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe; Nathaniel Hawthorne, a very distinguished writer of romance, and who has written a biography of Mr. Pierce up to his nomination for the presidency; and John P. Hale, a statesman, orator and foreign minister, much distinguished in his day. Other noted men were in college with him, among whom was John S. C. Abbott, much known as an author, who wrote a sketch of Mr. Pierce's life in "The Lives of the Presidents."

MR. PIERCE THE LAWYER AND THE POLITICIAN.

Mr. Pierce entered upon the practice of law in Hillsboro, his native town; succeeded poorly in the beginning, but persevered and attained reasonable success. His bent of mind was to politics. His father was a radical partisan politician. The son was a chip of the old block. His politics was partisanship. Judge Woodbury, his law preceptor, was a strong politician of the same school. New Hampshire politics was the kind he was trained in. He was cradled, bred, educated in radical, partisan democracy. The air was too full of it, it was too one-sided, it had too little opposition, to rise to philosophical, or statesmanlike democracy. He was honest and hearty in it. His cast of mind, under his training, made that kind of politics his meat and drink. His cheerful, confident, frank and winning manners, made him a favorite with intensely clanish politicians of his school. Between thoughtful, broad, humane democracy, which is founded in the rights of human nature, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and which was meant by the originators of the party that bears that name, and that to which Mr. Pierce lent his life service, there is but little affiliation.

The town of Hillsboro elected Mr. Pierce, when twenty-five, its representative in the legislature, and re-elected him for four successive years; the legislature made him its speaker the last two

years; his congressional district elected him to Congress when twenty-nine, the youngest member in the House, and re-elected him in two years; his legislature elected him to the Senate of the United States in 1837, when he was thirty-three years oldthe youngest member of that body. He thus went rapidly up the stairway of political promotion, till, while yet a youth, he sat in the most dignified and honorable body of men in the nation, with such men as John C. Calhoun, Thomas H. Benton and James Buchanan around him.

While a member of the House, Mr. Pierce opposed all forms of internal improvement by the general government, the bill authorizing a military academy at West Point, and all antislavery measures. Young as he was, he was fast in the partisan ruts. His political career had thus far been in President Jackson's time, to whose policy and fortunes he adhered with filial devotion.

As a senator, he was in Mr. Van Buren's administration, which was but a prolongation of Jackson's, with the bitter results keenly felt in the prostration of all business and fearful hopelessness and want of courage among the people. Under Mr. Van Buren, his old law preceptor, Judge Levi Woodbury, was secretary of the treasury.

In 1842, the year after General Harrison's election, Mr. Pierce resigned and returned to the practice of law in Concord, New Hampshire, whither he had moved in 1838.

In 1846, President Polk offered him the attorney-generalship of the United States, but he declined it, though in full sympathy with him, his administration, and the measures he was expected to carry out. About the same time the democratic party of New Hampshire proposed to put him in nomination for governor, which was equivalent to an election; but he declined this also.

Mr. Pierce was in hearty sympathy with the annexation of Texas and the course pursued to bring it about, and when the war opened with Mexico, which it caused, volunteered to fight for the state we had severed from our neighbor to become slave territory, with as much zeal as though a great benefit was to be

bestowed upon an oppressed race. regiment and was made its colonel. to the rank of brigadier-general.

He enlisted in the ninth Soon after he was promoted He embarked with a portion

of his troops at Newport, Rhode Island, May 27, 1847.

In a month he landed on a sand-beach at Virgara, Mexico; collected, by great efforts, wild mules and mustangs enough to transport his luggage; broke his prairie animals to the harness; in the tropical heat of the middle of July started on the Jalappa road over sand-hills, and stream-beds and prairie stretches for Puebla, to reinforce General Scott. By labor, fatigue, skill and devotion worthy of the best of causes, he made bridges, fought off guerillas, captured villages, took possession of haciendas or Mexican estates; cared well for his four hundred sick men, and transported his twenty-four hundred men to a union with the main army at Puebla, without the loss of a wagon.

At Contreras, by order of General Scott, General Pierce, with four thousand men, fought twice that number and gained a complete victory. Though he was severely hurt by a fall of his horse, he kept his post of duty against the advice of officers and surgeons. He followed the enemy and fought him again desperately at Cherubusco, though faint and haggard with pain and loss of sleep; and still again at Molino del Rey. But so badly injured was the intrepid and ardent young soldier, that he had to be carried to the hospital, and the city of Mexico was taken without his further help. He remained in the captured city till December, and then returned to his home in New Hampshire.

At Concord General Pierce took up again the practice of his profession, and also the advocacy of his party politics, defending stoutly the pro-slavery wing of his party, the compromise measures of Congress, the fugitive slave law and its enforcement, as though there were no defiance of democratic principles in all this, and no violation of enlightened conscience.

In 1850 General Pierce presided over the constitutional convention in his state.

In 1852 the democratic national convention, at Baltimore, after thirty-five ballotings for a candidate for the presidency,

brought in the name of Franklin Pierce, and on the forty-ninth ballot he was nominated, receiving two hundred and eighty-two votes to eleven for all others. His name was proposed by the Virginia delegation. The election was an active one. The compromise measures and the fugitive slave law had secured possession of the country. Quiet had settled down upon the opposition, and with it had come apathy to many. General Scott was the whig candidate. He received the votes of Vermont, Massachusetts, Tennessee and Kentucky; all the rest went for General Pierce.

PRESIDENT PIERCE.

March 4, 1853, Mr. Pierce was inaugurated fourteenth president of the United States. In his inaugural address he maintained the then dominant doctrines of his party on the subject of slavery, and reprobated the discussion of that subject.

Very soon came a further dispute with Mexico about the boundary, which was settled by the acquisition of Arizona. It was Mexico's misfortune to lose by all her disputes. Under this administration routes to the Pacific were explored; a settlement with Great Britain of the fishery question was made; the Missouri compromise was repealed; the territories of Kansas and Nebraska were organized, by a special act, under which came the desperate efforts of the south to organize a pro-slavery government in Kansas. The recital of the events of what was called the "Kansas War" would be too long for this place. It intensified the differences of the time between north and south, and was participated in chiefly by those of extreme views and excitable dispositions. Few cool heads went to Kansas at that time from either section of the Union. If any went there cool they soon became heated. Missouri desperadoes played a strong part in that Kansas trouble that so shook the country in the administration of President Pierce, who was so warm in his espousal of extreme southern views that he got the name of "the northern man with southern principles."

Mr. Pierce vetoed bills for the completion and improvement of certain public works; for appropriating public lands for the