Franklin Pierce, by Paul Raymond Audibert, Paris.

Additional information on Audibert pending.

Franklin Pierce, Fourteenth President of the United States, Born Hillsboro, N.H., November 23, 1804, died Concord, N.H., October 8, 1869. The following is excerpted from the coverleaf of the engraving:

"The repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas turmoil furnished the main historical features of the administration of President Pierce, and opposite views must continue to be taken by even the most careful students of his course in relation to them. It must be remembered, however, for the sake of justice, that he came to the consideration of each successive emergency as a State Rights Democrat, and not as an anti-slavery man, and that he was deeply impressed by the morbidly excited condition of the Southern people. He was able to see and understand the operation of great and dangerous forces, which his fellow citizens of New Hampshire, for instance, were unable to properly estimate or were preparing to altogether disregard."***

"Ex-President Pierce was not an old man when he returned to Concord. He was in the very ripeness of physical and intellectual capacity, but he was identified as a statesman with the politcal ideas, doctrines, and policy which his own State and section were regarding with increasingly heated condemnation."

"The practice of law could not be resumed by a man who had been the chief magistrate of the nation, and it was well for the ex-President that his private fortune secured him independence. His anti-slavery neighbors turned cold shoulders to him for a time, although his own genial manners underwent no change. The bitterness of party animosity became even more intense during the swift years of Mr. Buchanan's administration, and Mr. Pierce firmly adhered to his old principles and views. He believed and said that the nation was drifting toward civil war and the destruction of the Union, and a host of men hated him for saying so.*** There came a day when his fellow citizens were forced to admit that they had been somewhat in error. Lincoln was elected, and the prophetic warnings of men like Pierce were rapidly verified. The South did indeed break away and civil war came.*** A great mass meeting was held at Concord, in the very street which its first company of volunteers for the Mexican War had paraded and drilled, in 1847, with private Pierce in the ranks. There was a platform erected for public men and orators, and there, when the crowd gathered, they say old Franklin Pierce, the Democratic ex-President, who had told them long ago that this sort of thing was coming. Never before had he been greeted with such tremendous enthusiasm. It seemed as if he had once more become, "the most infulential man in New Hamshire."--WILLIAM O. STODDARD (1861-1864)(Lincoln's assistant secretary), in The Lives of the Presidents." Frederick A. Stokes Company. Effective published copyright, ©Mickey Cox 2002. All rights reserved.