Ranking the Presidents: Franklin Pierce

[kensmind]

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest ranking, how would you grade the performance of Franklin Pierce as President of the United States? You can go to this link to cast your vote. Franklin Pierce is another in a string of largely forgotten Presidents between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. Like many of these men, he was a northerner

Comments

[sdu754]

Pierce is one of those Presidents that I feel sorry for. Had he not been convince to support the Kansas-Nebraska Act by Douglas & Davis, he might have been a good President. If not for Kansas-Nebraska, he might have been able to acquire Cuba. That one act destroyed his presidency and made the Civil War inevitable a short time later. One could argue that the civil war actually started with bleeding Kansas.

[kensmind]

I think scholars also underestimate the effect that Pierce's family tragedies had on his judgement as president. Still, it's hard to fathom why he and Buchanan ignored the majority in Kansas, other than because they wanted to keep their political support in the south.

[sdu754]

The Democratic party had its power base built in the south from the days of Jackson. I think that they also felt that balancing the Senate half free/half slave would keep the peace. This balance was unsustainable as there were more people in the free states to settle the west.