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When the best thing you can say about a president is that he wasn't ugly, you're clearly not dealing with the greatest leader of all time.

Such is the case with Franklin Pierce, widely derided as one of the nation's worst presidents -- alongside his successor, James Buchanan.

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Not that I was going to waste a lot of time on either of them. After battling through Millard Fillmore for two weeks, I was hell-bent on knocking out Pierce and Buchanan in quick order.

That way I could finally move out of this spell of mediocre one-term chief executives, and make it to the relative excitement of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.

To save time and sanity, I fell back on the American Presidents Series -- in this case, the Pierce volume written by Michael Holt. 

This was the best alternative to Peter Wallner's well-reviewed but massive 750-page exploration of Pierce, the second volume of which -- two volumes! -- calls Pierce a "martyr" in the title.

Pierce's personal life was hellacious, his frail wife constantly suffering from illness. All of their children died young. Perhaps the most tragic incident was the January 1853 train wreck that claimed the life of his son Benjamin. It came just two months before Pierce's inauguration.

The death of Benjamin likely did Pierce no favors when it came to his alcoholism, either.

It's hard not to have this death in mind when you look at Pierce's failure as a president. But Pierce was a man with a long, distinguished political career as a Democrat by the time he reached the White House.

He'd already served in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Not to mention military service in the Mexican War and public service in his home state of New Hampshire.

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But his ascension overlapped with two explosive trends that would lead to his downfall: the disintegration of the Whig party and the internal strife in his own party, the Democrats. 

Much like the Democratic-Republicans of James Monroe after the death of its rival, the Federalist Party, Pierce's Democrats turned their energies toward internal strife. 

Pierce took it upon himself to try to keep his party tied together, painstakingly doling out positions to every faction of the Democrats. 

He hoped that by treating everyone equally, he could bring his party together. Instead, the fractures deepened and Pierce's hopes at unity crumbled.

But the really big problem that will forever saddle Pierce's reputation is the Kansas-Nebraska Act. If previous things like Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850 were the spark to Civil War, the Kansas-Nebraska Act poured on gasoline. 

Conceived by Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, the act created the states of Nebraska and Kansas and allow for the people to choose whether or not the territories would be admitted as "free" or "slave" states. 

The devastating act destroyed the slavery boundary established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which many, especially Southerners, considered moot after the Compromise of 1850). 

Southern Democrats overwhelmingly supported the act. Northern Democrats split down the middle, further endangering Pierce's role as the party's head. 

The turmoil was at its peak in Kansas, where pro-slavery supporters flooded the state from across the border in Missouri to make Kansas a slave state. They set up a government in Lecompton -- while anti-slavery forces set up their own, competing government in Topeka.

Pierce backed the Lecompton government -- even as he appointed multiple territorial governors, each worse than the previous one. 

Pierce's handling of the entire situation was so bad, and yet his defense of his actions so adamant, that Holt himself isn't sure whether or not Pierce believed his own defense. 

Nebraska wouldn't become a state until after the Civil War, in 1867. But Kansas became the grounds on which the battle over slavery finally boiled over, the two forces clashing in violent conflicts that gave the state the nickname "Bleeding Kansas." 

Kansas was eventually admitted as a free state in 1861, just months ahead of the start of the Civil War. 

For Pierce, the mid-term elections in 1854 and 1855 were damning. Know-Nothings captured many seats across the North, taking advantage of the Democratic turmoil, and the newly formed anti-slavery Republican party captured a few as well. 

These defeats were too much for the Democratic party leadership to bare. Despite calls for him to run for re-election, Pierce eventually bowed out to support Douglas -- who would, in turn, bow to James Buchanan. 

Pierce was on the political periphery after leaving the White House, living through the Civil War. He died in 1869. In his post-Presidential career, the most well-known story seems to be of the angry mob that gathered at his New Hampshire home to ask why Pierce didn't fly the flag after Lincoln's assassination. 

Pierce elegantly defended his patriotism to the crowd's satisfaction, who peacefully departed.

But that the group could even be pushed to question the patriotism of a former president showed just how low their regard was for Pierce  -- who was already in Lincoln's long, tall shadow. 

History was equally unkind. 

Scorecard: 

Days to read Washington: 16
Days to read Adams: 11
Days to read Jefferson: 10
Days to read Madison: 13
Days to read Monroe: 6
Days to read J. Q. Adams: 10
Days to read Jackson: 11
Days to read Van Buren: 9
Days to read Harrison: 6
Days to read Tyler: 3
Days to read Polk: 8
Days to read Taylor: 8
Days to read Fillmore: 14
Days to read Pierce: 1
Days behind schedule: 14

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