One hundred and fifty years after he served his term as U.S. President, Franklin Pierce is finally getting the recognition of history buffs. ABC News story here In his lifetime, he was written off as a failure and as a weak, ineffectual leader who was wrong on the overriding issue of his time: slavery.
Pierce personally did not approve of slavery. But his position was that because the U.S. Constitution allowed slavery, it was wrong to deny people the right to have slaves.
A small group of Pierce enthusiasts in his home state believes the nation’s 14th president deserves a second look.
“He had the terrible task of being president just before the Civil War,” said Florence “Chips” Holden, a member of the Pierce Brigade, founded in the 1960s to save Pierce’s Concord home from being torn down. “He made the big mistake of trying to keep both the North and the South happy, and it backfired.”
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