Name: Franklin Pierce
Party: Democratic
Term Served: 1853–1857
Birth State: N.H
Born: 11/23/1804
Died: 10/8/1869
Religion: Episcopalian
Elected Age: 48
Age At Death: 64
Franklin Pierce (1804-1869) started politics at a youthful age as his father was once a governor of New Hampshire. He filled in as speaker of the state law-making body before winning political election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1833.
After two terms in the House and one in the Senate, Pierce came back to specializing in legal matters, just to rise in 1852 as the Democratic presidential candidate. During Pierce’s tenure (1853-1857), settlement was supported in the northwest area of the nation, even as sectional strains expanded over the issue of slavery and its augmentation into new domains.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Pierce signed in 1854, goaded abolitionist northerners and achieved the rise of the new Republican Party. Pierce’s incompetence to deal with the change in Kansas prompted renouncement by numerous Democrats, who refused to grant him the nomination of the party in 1856.
