Franklin Pierce: Ineffective

01VOA Learning English presents America's Presidents.

02Today we are talking about Franklin Pierce, the 14th President of the United States.

03He took office in 1853 at age 48.

04At that time, he was the youngest person elected to the White House.

05Pierce was known for being social and for his good looks.

06But his personal life was full of tragedy, and he was not an effective chief executive.

07Over time, he has come to be remembered as one of the country's worst presidents.

08Franklin Pierce was born in the northern state of New Hampshire.

09He was one of eight children.

10He attended school regularly as a child, and he went on to Bowdoin College in Maine.

11There, he developed his skills as an excellent public speaker.

12He also became an able lawyer.

13Pierce's abilities carried him far, but his personal connections helped too.

14His father became the governor of New Hampshire.

15Shortly after, Pierce was elected to the state legislature.

16He soon became a member of the U.S.

17Congress, first as a member of the House of Representatives, and then as a senator.

18Several important things happened in Pierce's personal life during those years in Washington, D.C.

19He married Jane Means Appleton.

20They soon had a son, but the child died after only three days.

21The couple went on to have two more boys.

22In Washington, Franklin Pierce also developed friendships with many people from the South.

23They defended the right of states to permit slavery.

24Although he was from the North, Pierce came to share the opinions of his Southern friends.

25He grew to dislike anti-slavery activists, who were known as abolitionists.

26As a politician, Pierce was a member of the Democratic Party and strongly supported the ideas of President Andrew Jackson.

27But politics did not appeal to his wife.

28She also did not like her husband's habit of drinking alcohol with his friends.

29Jane Pierce belonged to the temperance movement, which urged Americans to avoid the use of alcoholic drinks.

30So Pierce resigned his job in the Senate and moved back to New Hampshire.

31There, he stopped drinking alcohol and earned fame as a lawyer and public speaker.

32But tragedy struck again.

33His second son became sick and died.

34Pierce remained active in politics in New Hampshire.

35He helped the Democratic candidate for president at the time, James K.

36Polk, win votes in the state.

37When Polk entered the White House, he gave Pierce a position as a general in the Mexican-American War.

38Pierce did not earn the respect of his troops.

39In one battle, he passed out after he fell off his horse and crushed his leg.

40Some of his men, seeing what happened, fled the battlefield.

41Others called him Fainting Frank.

42Although Pierce had his critics, he returned to New Hampshire as a leader in the state's Democratic Party.

43Yet, no one expected him to become president of the United States.

44Pierce's nomination came during the Democratic National Convention in 1852.

45Party leaders could not agree on a candidate.

46They were split among the three top choices.

47So the party turned to Pierce.

48They liked the fact that he was not well-known or had taken any strong positions as a lawmaker.

49As a result, fewer people could object to him, they reasoned.

50Pierce did very little during the election campaign.

51He did not need to.

52Many voters, especially in the South, did not like his opponent.

53When the election was held, Pierce won easily.

54But before he took office, another terrible thing happened.

55Franklin and Jane Pierce were traveling by train with their youngest son, Benjamin, who was 11 years old.

56The train went off the rails.

57Benny was killed instantly in front of his parents.

58Neither Franklin nor Jane Pierce ever really recovered.

59Jane believed their son's death was a punishment from God for her husband becoming president.

60As president, Pierce faced an extremely difficult situation.

61The country's ongoing dispute about whether and where to permit slavery was becoming more intense.

62Under Pierce, the dispute centered on the areas of Kansas and Nebraska.

63At the time, both areas were considered territories, not states.

64And each territory was above the line of the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

65That act, approved by lawmakers nearly 35 years before Pierce took office, banned slavery in northern areas, including what would become Kansas and Nebraska.

66But pro-slavery settlers demanded that Kansas and Nebraska voters, a group comprised of white men, decide the issue for themselves, a majority of U.S.

67lawmakers agreed.

68Under pressure, President Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854.

69The measure was one of the most important in U.S.

70history.

71It overturned the Missouri Compromise and canceled the ban on slavery.

72It incited years of intense violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery activists, and it pushed a divided nation even further apart.

73The troubles also showed Pierce to be an ineffective president.

74He could not ease the tensions over slavery nor unite the country behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

75And he delayed using his power to stop the violence in Kansas until it was far too late.

76Finally, his sympathy for pro-slavery groups angered many in the North, including people in his own party.

77The Democrats did not nominate him again at the next election.

78After four years as president, Pierce returned to New Hampshire.

79He rarely socialized and began drinking alcohol again.

80After his wife died in 1863, Pierce seemed to disappear from public life.

81Americans heard little about him until his death in 1869.

82But he lived to see the ultimate tragedy of the Civil War that he, like other presidents before him, had failed to prevent.

83I'm Kelly Jean Kelly.

84I'm Kelly Jean Kelly.