Sitting Down with Marshall Flint: Why Franklin Pierce Was the Perfect Place to Begin The Forgotten Presidents

I have always loved politics, American history, and especially presidential history. Give me a disputed convention, an Electoral College landslide, a Cabinet feud, or a president who managed to irritate half the country before breakfast, and I am probably going to read about it.

So when Marshall Flint decided to launch a new series called The Forgotten Presidents with Franklin Pierce, I had questions. Lots of them.

Pierce is not exactly the president whose face appears on every documentary poster. Most Americans know Lincoln. They know Washington. They know Kennedy, Reagan, Roosevelt, and several others who have managed to remain part of the national conversation for decades—or centuries—after they left office. Franklin Pierce, on the other hand, often gets the historical equivalent of, “Oh yes, I vaguely remember that name.”

That is exactly what made him interesting.

I sat down with Marshall Flint to talk about Franklin Pierce: The President History Struggled to Forgive, why Pierce deserves another look, and where The Forgotten Presidents goes next.

Dan McGinnis: Let’s start with the obvious question. Why Franklin Pierce? Of all the presidents in American history, you decided to begin a series with Franklin Pierce.

Marshall Flint: That was actually the point. If I had started with Abraham Lincoln, everyone already knows why Lincoln matters. Franklin Pierce is different. He served at a critical moment in American history, yet most people could probably identify him only if you gave them a multiple-choice test and eliminated three presidents first.

What interested me was the contrast. Pierce won the presidency in 1852 with 254 electoral votes to Winfield Scott’s 42, carrying twenty-seven of thirty-one states. Four years later, his own party refused to nominate him again. That is an extraordinary political collapse, and once you start asking how that happened, you suddenly have a very interesting story.

Dan: That really is an impressive fall from grace. In modern political terms, that would be somewhere between losing reelection and discovering your own campaign committee has stopped returning your phone calls.

Marshall: Pretty much. Pierce entered office believing he could help hold the Democratic Party together and reduce sectional tension. Instead, his administration became closely associated with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, and the worsening national argument over slavery.

The interesting part is that Pierce did not see himself as someone trying to divide the country. Quite the opposite. He believed he was protecting the Union. The tragedy of his presidency is that some of the policies he supported had consequences that moved the country in exactly the opposite direction.

Dan: The Kansas-Nebraska Act is obviously the elephant in the room. Did you worry that the entire book would become “Franklin Pierce and that one terrible law”?

Marshall: Yes, because his presidency was more complicated than that. Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas was the principal architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, although Pierce supported it, used presidential influence to help pass it, and signed it into law. I wanted to make that distinction because historical responsibility and authorship are not always the same thing. It also is very important to understand the role Douglas played in that national discussion, mainly because we often think of Stephen Douglas as that guy who so infamously debated Lincoln. He was, in reality, an extraordinarily influential politician in the America of those days.

But Pierce’s administration also dealt with the Gadsden Purchase, expansion, foreign affairs, plans for a transcontinental railroad, Cuba, Mexico, Canada, and Central America. Those things matter too and are frequently forgotten in any discussion about the Pierce Administration. Kansas simply has a habit of entering the room, knocking over the furniture, and refusing to leave.

Dan: One of the things that surprised me most was Pierce’s personal life. The loss of his children, especially Benjamin just before the inauguration, is almost impossible to imagine. How much should readers connect that tragedy to his presidency?

Marshall: Carefully. Franklin and Jane Pierce lost all three of their sons. Benjamin, their last surviving child, was killed in a train accident less than two months before Pierce took office while the family was travelling to Washington D.C. for the inauguration. That is part of the story because presidents are human beings, and human beings do not simply switch off grief when they walk into the White House.

At the same time, grief cannot become an excuse for public policy. I did not want to write a book that says, “Something terrible happened to Pierce, therefore everything that followed should be forgiven.” That would be too simple, and history is rarely that cooperative.

Dan: The subtitle is The President History Struggled to Forgive. Do you think that is fair?

Marshall: I do, but not because historians gathered in a room and decided to personally dislike Franklin Pierce. His reputation has remained near the lower end of presidential surveys for a long time because the consequences of his administration were significant. The Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened a national controversy over slavery, violence followed in Kansas, the party system fractured, and sectional tensions increased.

That does not mean every decision he made was foolish. The Gadsden Purchase permanently shaped the southern boundary of the United States, his administration handled important diplomatic matters, and his Cabinet remained intact through his term. Those achievements deserve to be included too.

Dan: So the book is not a rehabilitation project?

Marshall: No. I am not Franklin Pierce’s defense attorney.

The goal of The Forgotten Presidents is to give readers enough information to make their own judgment. If a president deserves criticism, the criticism stays. If something went well, that stays too. I think history becomes less useful when we start with a verdict and then go hunting only for evidence that agrees with us. The series tries to avoid that.

Dan: That brings us to the series itself. What exactly makes someone a “forgotten president”?

Marshall: It does not necessarily mean literally forgotten. Nobody has erased their name from the list. It means presidents whose administrations have largely disappeared from popular memory even though the events surrounding them may have been extremely important.

Pierce is a perfect example. His name is known, but his presidency usually is not. Yet if you want to understand how the United States moved from the Compromise of 1850 toward the sectional crisis of the late 1850s, you cannot simply skip him.

Dan: The books are designed as “Two-Hour Histories.” Why keep them relatively short?

Marshall: Because not everyone wants a 700-page presidential biography sitting on the nightstand judging them for six months.

The idea is to make the presidency understandable without requiring the reader to arrive already fluent in nineteenth-century politics. Terms are explained when they matter, political figures appear when readers need them, and the books include timelines, maps, glossaries, and other quick-reference materials. And I added a frequently asked questions section at the end for readers who want a little more context.

Dan: And the next forgotten president?

Marshall: James Buchanan.

Dan: So you are really easing readers into this series gently. Pierce followed by Buchanan. Nothing controversial happening in America during those years at all.

Marshall: Exactly. Very calm period. Practically a vacation.

Buchanan is a natural next step because his presidency follows Pierce directly and takes the country even closer to the Civil War. Looking at the two administrations back-to-back gives readers a much clearer picture of how quickly the political situation deteriorated.

Dan: Final question. What do you hope readers take away from the Franklin Pierce book?

Marshall: Curiosity. I would rather have someone finish the book thinking, “I want to know more,” than believing they have now learned everything worth knowing about Franklin Pierce.

Near the end of the book I wrote, “History has been hard on him. The evidence now belongs to the reader.” That really is the point.

And after spending some time with Franklin Pierce, I think that is exactly where the book succeeds. It does not demand that you admire him, excuse him, or condemn him. It simply introduces you to a president most of us were never properly introduced to in the first place.

Franklin Pierce may still never become the life of the presidential-history party. But at least now he has a seat at the table.

Marshall Flint’s book is available in all formats on Amazon.