The Franklin family as they are

His parents’ names were Benjamin and Anna B. Kendrick. Both of Pierce’s parents wanted to ensure all of their children would have a great education. In fact, Pierce’s mother made it her mission that they do so. Until about age 12, Pierce went to various local schools however, after that, he was sent off to various private academies.

At age 15, Pierce found himself at Bowdoin (pronounced BOW- dun) College in Maine. It turns out Pierce was a bit of a party boy and was dead last in his class for some time.

While at college, he became friends with writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. If that doesn’t 000ring a bell, then perhaps his novel, The Scarlet Letter, does. Eventually, he started to take his education more seriously.

His friends convinced him to work harder. Every day Pierce started waking up at 4 in the morning, paying more attention in class, and studied until midnight. As a result, he developed the skills to be a great public speaker and he ended up graduating fifth in his class in 1824.

In 1829, when Pierce was 24 years old, he was elected to the New Hampshire State Legislature. Within two years, he was selected as its Speaker of the House, with the aid of his father, who had by then been elected governor.

In the 1830s, Pierce was sent to Washington D.C. as a state representative. Despite his rapid ascent in the world of politics, Pierce soon found his life in Washington both tedious and lonesome. After developing a dependency on alcohol, he decided it was time to settle down.

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In 1834, he married a shy, religious woman named Jane Means Appleton, who supported the temperance movement. Jane disliked the Washington lifestyle even more than her husband did. Nevertheless, a year after the couple’s first of three sons were born, Pierce accepted his election to the U.S. Senate.

The Gadsden Purchase, negotiated by James Gadsden, U.S. minister to Mexico, is signed. At the cost of $15 million, the United States gets more than 29,600 square miles of new territory in southwest Arizona and New Mexico. The purchase establishes the final boundaries of the United States, and by providing a strip of land to the Pacific Ocean, will be used as a route for the Southern Pacific Railroad. In addition, the treaty resolved outstanding differences between the two nations regarding the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War.

The greatest tensions of Franklin Pierce’s presidency–and, ultimately, his downfall–can be attributed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, proposed by Senator Stephen Douglas in early 1854. The bill formally organized Kansas and Nebraska into territories, opening them to settlement and railroad building; it also repealed the ban on slavery in Kansas mandated by the Missouri Compromise in 1820, declaring that the citizens of each territory–not Congress–had the right to choose whether the territory would allow slavery (a concept Douglas called “popular sovereignty”). Pierce’s support helped push the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress.

After Jane’s death, Pierce decided to stop drinking completely. But that didn’t happen. After all, he was an alcoholic! He started drinking ‘’over the limits” due to stress over her death and having to deal with hatred from almost all of the U.S.! He died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1869. He was buried next to his wife and kids. Sadly, all 3 of his sons died before the age of 11. Franklin Pierce was one of the worst presidents in history. There was, however, one bright note in Pierce’s presidency: he was the first President to put up a Christmas tree in the White House.