From the Encyclopedia Brittanica, online, 1987:
"14th president of the United States (1853-57). He failed to deal effectively with the corroding sectional controversy over slavery in the decade preceding the American Civil War (1861-65). An attorney and the son of a governor of New Hampshire, Pierce entered political life there as a Democrat, serving in the state legislature (1829-33), the U.S. House of Representatives (1833-37), and the Senate (1837-42). He became a devoted supporter of President Andrew Jackson but was continually overshadowed by older and more prominent men on the national scene. Resigning from the Senate for personal reasons, he returned to Concord, where he resumed his law practice and also served as federal district attorney.
Except for a brief stint as an officer in the Mexican War (1846-48), Pierce remained out of the public eye until the Democratic nominating convention of 1852, at which a deadlock developed among the leading presidential contenders. Pierce's name was entered as a compromise candidate after the leading candidates, Lewis Cass, Stephen A. Douglas, and James Buchanan, failed in their bids for the nomination due to factional rivalries. The ensuing presidential campaign was dominated by controversy over the slavery issue. Both the Democrats and the Whigs were too badly split internally to stake out strong stands on the issue; the chief question in the public mind was the finality of the Compromise of 1850, and while both parties declared themselves in favour of it, the Democrats were more thoroughly united in its support. As a result, Pierce, who was almost unknown nationally, unexpectedly swept the country in the November election. He then tried to promote sectional unity in the selection of his Cabinet, to which he named a coalition of Southern planters and Northern businessmen.
The youngest man to have been elected to the presidency as of that date, Pierce was handsome, genial, and possessed of a certain superficial brilliance. He represented the Eastern element of the Democratic Party, which was inclined for the sake of harmony and business prosperity to oppose antislavery agitation and generally to placate Southern opinion. Pierce accordingly sidestepped the fierce sectional antagonisms of the domestic scene by ambitiously and aggressively promoting the extension of U.S. territorial and commercial interests abroad. In an effort to buy Cuba, he ordered the U.S. minister to Spain, Pierre Soulé, to try to secure the influence of European financiers upon the Spanish government. The resulting diplomatic statement, the Ostend Manifesto (October 1854), was interpreted by the public as a call to wrest Cuba from Spain by force if necessary. The ensuing controversy forced the administration to disclaim responsibility for the document and to recall Soulé. The following year an American adventurer, William Walker, conducted a notorious filibustering expedition into Central America with the hope of establishing a proslavery government that would be under the control of the United States. He established himself as military dictator, and then as president, of Nicaragua, and his dubious regime was recognized by the Pierce administration. A more lasting diplomatic achievement came from the expedition that had been sent out by President Millard Fillmore in 1853 under Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan. In 1854 Pierce received Perry's report that his expedition had been successful and that U.S. ships would have limited access to Japanese ports. The Pierce administration also effected a reorganization of the diplomatic and consular service and the creation of the U.S. Court of Claims.
Among Pierce's domestic policies were preparations for a transcontinental railroad and the opening up of the Northwest for settlement. In order to open the way for a southerly route to California, almost 30,000 square miles (78,000 square km) of territory were acquired from Mexico (1853; the Gadsden Purchase) for $10,000,000. Mainly to stimulate migration to the Northwest and to facilitate the construction of a central route to the Pacific, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was enacted in 1854 and received the President's sanction. This measure opened two new territories for settlement and provided resolution of the slavery question by popular sovereignty (local option). The indignation aroused by the act, which included repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (prohibiting slavery in the territories north of latitude 36 30'), and the resultant violent conflict over slavery in the territories were the main causes of the rise of the Republican Party in the mid-1850s. Pierce's ineptness in handling the Kansas struggle made him unacceptable as a candidate for a second term, and he retired from public life in 1857.

• Married: 19 NOV 1834 in Amherst, Hillsborough Co., NH

1. Franklin PIERCE b: 2 FEB 1836
2. Frank Robert PIERCE b: 27 AUG 1839
3. Benjamin PIERCE b: 13 APR 1841