Book Review: Franklin Pierce: The President History Struggled to Forgive

I love politics, American history, and especially presidential history, which probably explains why I occasionally find myself reading about men most people have not thought about since high school. Franklin Pierce definitely falls into that category. He is not exactly Washington, Lincoln, or Kennedy when it comes to name recognition, but that is precisely why I wanted to read—and review—Marshall Flint’s new book, Franklin Pierce: The President History Struggled to Forgive.

Pierce is one of those presidents most Americans vaguely remember from a classroom wall chart, right between the presidents we know and the presidents we pretend to know.

That makes Flint’s book a surprisingly enjoyable read because it starts with a simple question: how does a man win one of the biggest Electoral College victories of his era and, four years later, get shown the door by his own political party?

That is not exactly the career trajectory most politicians put in the campaign brochure.

Flint’s book does not try to rescue Pierce from history, and it does not spend 100 pages beating him over the head either. Instead, it gives the reader the facts, the political setting, the family tragedies, the decisions, and the consequences. Pierce comes across as a real person rather than a presidential cardboard cutout, which is probably the only fair way to look at anyone who has been dead for more than 150 years.

The personal side of Pierce’s story is especially difficult. Franklin and Jane Pierce lost all three of their sons, and their last surviving child, Benjamin, was killed in a train accident just weeks before Pierce entered the White House. The book handles that tragedy carefully. It does not use grief as a magic explanation for every decision Pierce later made, but it also does not pretend the president walked into office emotionally untouched by what had happened.

Then, of course, Washington did what Washington does best: it made everything more complicated.

The centerpiece of Pierce’s presidency was the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Senator Stephen A. Douglas was the principal architect of the legislation, but Pierce supported it, helped rally Democratic support, and signed it into law. The idea was that settlers in the territories could decide the slavery question themselves through popular sovereignty. On paper, that may have sounded like a tidy political solution.

History had other plans.

Instead of calming the slavery debate, the law reopened it with a vengeance. Proslavery and antislavery settlers poured into Kansas, elections became disputed, competing governments appeared, violence followed, and the territory earned the cheerful nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” Nothing says “successful political compromise” quite like armed factions and burning buildings.

That is where Flint’s approach works particularly well. He explains what Pierce and his allies thought they were accomplishing without pretending the results were anything other than disastrous. Pierce believed he was preserving the Union and reducing sectional conflict. In practice, some of the policies he supported helped make that conflict worse.

The book also reminds readers that Pierce’s presidency was about more than Kansas, although Kansas certainly had a talent for stealing the spotlight. His administration completed the Gadsden Purchase, dealt with plans for a transcontinental railroad, expanded American diplomatic and commercial interests, and navigated disputes involving Cuba, Mexico, Canada, and Central America. There is also the fascinating collapse of the Whig Party, the rise of the Republican Party, and the political realignment that was reshaping the country almost faster than anyone could keep track of it.

And then there is the 1856 Democratic convention.

Pierce wanted another term. His party apparently had other ideas.

After winning twenty-seven of thirty-one states in 1852, Pierce entered the next convention as an incumbent president and left without the nomination. James Buchanan got the job instead. That alone makes Pierce’s story worth reading because presidential history has produced plenty of bruised egos, but being rejected by your own party after four years in the White House is a special category of awkward.

One of the best things about Franklin Pierce is that it does not feel like homework. Flint keeps the story moving, explains the political machinery without drowning the reader in it, and provides enough background to understand what mattered without requiring a degree in antebellum American politics. Maps, illustrations, a timeline, glossary, quick-reference material, and a Frequently Asked Questions section make the book easy to use without turning it into a textbook.

Near the end, Flint writes, “History has been hard on him. The evidence now belongs to the reader.” That is probably the best summary of the entire book.

You may finish Franklin Pierce: The President History Struggled to Forgive with more sympathy for Pierce. You may finish it thinking the historians got it exactly right. Either way, you will know a great deal more about the fourteenth president than you did when you started.

And for a man who has spent most of the last century and a half hiding in the middle of the presidential lineup, that seems like a pretty good accomplishment.

Franklin Pierce: The President History Struggled to Forgive by Marshall Flint is available now in eBook, paperback, and hardcover on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3Vr0Uej