Franklin Pierce Fails to Read the Room
David Blight 00:00
It's always easy to say somebody was on the wrong side of history, because we have retrospect and they didn't. But this is a case where, if you look back at Pierce's presidency from even the late 1850s, and certainly from the Civil War and beyond, it is easy to see that the Pierce presidency was on the wrong side of where history was going.
Colleen Shogan 00:27
In 1852, a Mexican war veteran named Franklin Pierce emerged as a dark horse candidate for president. The New Hampshire Democrat was reluctant to accept his party's nomination. Victory in the war had added half a million square miles to the United States, inflaming tensions between pro-slavery Americans and anti-slavery advocates over the question of slavery's expansion. And despite his New England roots, Pierce sympathized with supporters of slavery and viewed abolitionists as reckless fanatics, as today's guest David Blight notes, Pierce had a poor handle on public opinion. So, what might we learn from Pierce's misguided belief that he could unite a nation in turmoil? I'm Colleen Shogan, and this is In Pursuit, a podcast that explores lessons from America's past to write the history of America's future. Episode 11: Franklin Pierce Fails to Read the Room. David Blight, welcome to In Pursuit.
David Blight 01:37
Thank you, Colleen. It's great to be with you.
Colleen Shogan 01:39
So, on paper, few men before the Civil War were better prepared for the presidency than Franklin Pierce, yet his administration largely believed only inflamed divisions across the nation. So, what was his early life like? What was his experience? What was his career like before he became president of the United States? And what made us think that he might be a capable leader?
David Blight 02:03
He was born into politics. His father was a general in the Continental Army and the Revolution, and his father was the governor of New Hampshire. He goes to Bowdoin College. He is a lawyer at age 22. He's elected to this state house, state assembly becomes the speaker in his 20s. He he goes to Congress in his late 20s. I think at 29 he's in the U.S. Congress at 32 he's the U.S. senator, and then later he is the governor of New Hampshire. So he had a record of every office you could hold on the path to high office, and he even had a military career. He was indeed a combat veteran of the Mexican War, although that left a strange legacy for him. So he had every kind of preparation you could have as a New England Democrat, he wasn't as ambitious as some, but he had sufficient ambition that he took every one of these steps.
Colleen Shogan 03:10
So he served in the Mexican War. Can you tell us a little bit? Remind our listeners about the Mexican War and tell us about Pierce's involvement in it.
David Blight 03:21
Yeah, well, the Mexican War breaks out in 1846 because of a big border dispute. Always argued one way or another who who assaulted whom. Of course, the Mexicans never recognized the Rio Grande as their border, as the U.S. claimed, they so they thought it was the Nueces River further north, a good deal further north. Anyway, when that war broke out, and by the way, the U.S. Congress did declare war. We don't do that anymore, but that was a declared war. Pierce volunteered. He was first a private, but because of his education and background, he immediately zoomed up to brigadier general, and in the campaign from Vera Cruz toward Mexico City, in one of the first battles, he was thrown from his horse badly, tore up his knee, had internal injuries that caused him to faint. Now that left a weird legacy for him because he was sometimes later accused of being, in a very derogatory political way, the fainting general. He fainted because of pain, but he got back up, and as the story goes, he stayed with his troops all the way to the conquest of Mexico City. So he was combat veteran of the Mexican War without question, and he fully supported the war. He was an expansionist in the 1840s. That war lasted two years. It brings, of course, the huge Mexican cession to the geographic United States, which is today all of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and even part of Lower Colorado and Utah. This is a huge expanse of territory. It's an expansionist war, very controversial war, of course. And the country, in its wake, in 1848 and and shortly after, will reap the results of this expansionist war. And for some, it meant an expansion for the spread of slavery, Pierce supported that. He was a pro-slavery Democrat, and we can come to that. But he joined up and fought in this expansionist war.
Colleen Shogan 05:57
So, how does the Mexican War, as you said, so it expands the size of of the United States. How does that affect the conversation on slavery? You have to decide what to do about these new territories when it comes to slavery, right?
David Blight 06:11
And for for a very long time, from the 1830s through the 40s, high politics in America between the Whigs and Democrats tried to keep the slavery issue, the expansion issue, in a shell. They they tried with gag rules in the Congress to prevent its discussion. They couldn't, of course. The Mexican War unshucked this from its shell, if you like, and forced it into American politics as never before. Now you got this huge, expansive territory. Will those territories become slave states? Will they become free states? Will they somehow be divided? How can they be divided? And that's important because it has everything to do with the representation of the two sections-the free North, the slave South-in the U.S. Congress and the Senate. But even more importantly, at stake in this expansion question is the 19th century's conception of the American dream, which was this idea for so many Northerners? It was the idea of free labor, the right to expand, the right to get land, the ability to get land cheaply, if not free, cordon it off, improve it, and then own it. And if you had to compete at free labor ideology, at getting free land in the West for this now burgeoning immigrant population, if they had to compete with slavery and the kind of oligarchy that controls slavery and its labor system, they feared they would lose. So, what's at stake in these western territories, and Pierce will pay enormously for this politically, is the future of the United States. Would the would the West, as Americans expand now and create new states, would it be based on free labor and the ideology that came with that-the idea of mobility for the common man, common person, small people-or would it be a society expanding slave labor across the continent and making slavery permanent in the American political and geographic imagination. So there's a great deal at stake in the Mexican War besides just that land or wherever the border is supposed to be. And it was a bloody war, by the way. Although, like so many 19th-century wars, many more Americans died in that war of disease, they contracted than they did of combat wounds, or or being killed in war, but it became for Pierce's generation two kinds of big test. It was the first military test for this American military, and so many men who we will later know for their fame in the American Civil War, of course, were in the Mexican War, including Lee and Grant and so many others. But it's also now the new test of whether the American political culture, the national political party system, could contain this greatest social issue, greatest political issue, social issue, which was the expansion of slavery. Pierson, everybody else in his generation is now going to inherit that question, and what they do with it has everything to do with the fate of the Union in the 1850s.
Colleen Shogan 09:58
Well, so Pierce is from New Hampshire. As you said before, so he's a northerner. Yeah. So why is he not? Why is he pro-slavery? Why is he not for the the gradual end of slavery for both the moral question and then also the free the free labor question that you brought up?
David Blight 10:17
There was a powerful strain of essentially pro-slavery ideas in the Democratic Party of the 19th century, as long as it lasted down to the Civil War, the Whig Party had some of that too. That's how we got a Winfield Scott and a Millard Fillmore in 1848, but. that there were Northern Democrats. They will be called over time by their foes the doughface Democrats, meaning they were pro-slavery. Now that pro-slavery didn't come from owning slaves. New Hampshire had never been much of a slaveholding colony or state, but it came from the belief in states' rights. Came from the belief that Southerners had the perfect constitutional right, and Pierce fiercely believed this. He believed, and he had lots of close friends among Southerners from his years in Congress and and otherwise. It's a fierce belief that Southerners had the right to property and man. They had the right to their enslaved property, and constitutionally, no one could do anything about that. Now, even if even if you had, you know, modest anti-slavery leanings, if you believe that, then you believed that constitutionally, legally, and politically, you couldn't do anything about it. Slavery would be as permanent as Southerners chose to make it. And Pierce, to be honest about this, was essentially pro-slavery himself. I mean, he didn't own any slaves. He didn't intend to, but he fiercely defended the South's right to the ownership of slaves and their expansion and its perpetuity. This is the man who's going to get the dark horse nomination for the presidency for the Democrats in 1852,
Colleen Shogan 12:23
and he also-I mean-he's not a fan, certainly, of abolitionists, and and and it seems like he has a almost an anti-abolitionist attitude. Is that correct?
David Blight 12:33
It is essentially correct. He believed, and he's not alone in this. You know, abolitionists were never very popular, you know. Reformers and particularly radical reformers rarely are in our history. Sometimes they win the day eventually, but they're not very popular. Now he believed, as did his father, as did his whole strain of Northern Democrats, that abolitionists were essentially fanatics; they were dangerous. In Pierce's view, there could be no comity, there could be no compromise, no perpetuity to the union if you let abolitionists to have any power at all. He feared abolitionists; he denounced them. He thought William Lloyd Garrison and his ilk, for that matter, Frederick Douglass and his ilk were the greatest single threat to the American Union, and that they should be stopped. He he believed that the South had the right to deny abolitionist literature, for example, if it's sending the mails across the South, so yeah, he he was imbued with this strain, and so were some of the Whigs. Let's let's remember, even Abraham Lincoln came of age politically with disdain for a radical abolitionist. Now he's going to become one of a. He's going to become a kind kind of abolitionist. Lincoln was with time, but Lincoln's political roots were in the Clay Wing, Henry Clay Wing of the Whig Party. So there's a deep strain of this across the North, and Pierce was out there, kind of at the head of the spear among the Democrats saying the biggest problem in America is not slavery; it's the abolitionists.
Colleen Shogan 14:27
So Pierce is not the most famous Democrat in the United States in 1852, but he does manage to secure the Democratic nomination for president. Was he happy about this? How did this come about?
David Blight 14:38
No, well, particularly his wife Jane was not happy about this. I think it's complicated whether Pierce had the ambition to be president or not. You know, he he he was reluctant and all of that. I mean, he did get the nomination as a true dark horse because the party couldn't agree on anyone else. And he was nominated on 49th ballot at their convention. He had some things going for himself, though. First of all, this career, every level of the American government, he could be portrayed as a war hero, which by 52 is important. Let's not forget Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott, and others already, you know, if you had a military record, you used it. And Pierce also was extraordinarily good looking. I don't want to make too much of that. I mean, sometimes you look up Franklin Pierce, and one of the first sentences is, "He was the best looking American president ever. Okay, all right so what you know but it wasn't the age of television let's face it although when people met him he was striking bright eyes good looking guy articulate he could be quite eloquent was very well educated we're told he was enormously poised socially. You know, he'd been raised to to to be well met, and he was always good at that. He also had a drinking problem. Let's get that right out there on the table, and he had it very early, even when he was in college, possibly before. Back when they got married, he and Jane, who was the daughter of the president of Bowden, Pierce went to Bowden. He married the president's daughter. Her family didn't want her to marry him because the guy was known for his alcohol, and that that dog pierced the rest of his life. He had serious drinking problems, which was not unusual in American politics in these years, because Washington D.C. was known to be a wash in booze. The social culture of Washington D.C. once he made it there, was was wrapped around booze or the result of booze in some ways. There's no question about that. But Pierce was reluctant about this. He didn't pursue the presidency with a blind ambition by any means, and to some extent, he only reluctantly accepted it. His wife did not want him. He actually he actually left politics in the mid 1840s. Promised he went back to New Hampshire after being in Congress and the Senate, and promised his wife that his political career was over. He was going to stay home. Had a very successful law practice. He was going to stay in law practice. Then came the Mexican War. Then came the politics of slavery in the West, and it drew Pierce back in.
Colleen Shogan 17:54
And Jane Pierce, as I recall, she fainted whenever she heard that he was nominated to be the Democratic candidate for president.
David Blight 18:01
That's the story that most of the sources say that could be true. She was she's a very interesting woman. She was raised a pretty staunch Calvinist. She was the daughter of a Congregational minister, which in Upper New England meant it's still Calvinism in the early 19th century. She believed in the divine providence of God. Things happened because God found them necessary, and in their family that meant terrible tragedies. Their first two children, one died in infancy after only months. The second son died at only age four of disease, and then, as again, it's it's usually the second fact you learn about Pierce after the business that he's so good looking. A terrible train accident happened between his election and inauguration day, they were going north. I believe it was out of Massachusetts into New Hampshire with their third son Benjamin, who I believe was only 11. And there was a terrible train accidents were not uncommon in 19th century/
Colleen Shogan 19:19
It derailed the train actually went off the tracks. Derailed.
David Blight 19:23
Both parents were somewhat injured, but not much. But the boy was killed. So now their third son, 11 years old, killed in the midst of this political process. Jane Pierce went in the morning, I mean the stories are somewhat conflicting. She didn't want to go to Washington, and she didn't at first. She apparently asked Millard Fillmore's wife to be hostess at the White House at first because she didn't want to go there. That didn't work out because mrs. More got sick and herself died. Jane Pierce was not happy at the White House. In fact, the White House was had black bunting around it for quite some time. There was no social calendar at the White House, I guess, to speak of in the first two years of Pierce's presidency, so it was a very divisive, difficult thing for the Pierces, to say the least. But Pierce embraced the job. She mostly went back to New Hampshire, although we're told she did hold teas in the tradition of first ladies at the White House, and she did weigh in here and there on political matters, which is kind of interesting. She apparently at least had some anti-slavery leanings, and according to the essay that appears in your own volume, which I'm grateful I had a chance to read, she lobbied her her husband to not sign the Kansas Nebraska Act, but of course that didn't work. He he was he was all over the Kansas and Nebraska Act, and nothing was going to dissuade him from his support of it. But you see, in that relationship, 1000s of other relationships in the northern United States at this time, slavery was dividing people. It was dividing families. It was dividing, you know, neighborhoods, communities, regions, towns, and there were many different. It wasn't just people were pro-slavery or anti-slavery. There are many gradations of that. Just as just as today we have many gradations of the things we fight over, and that we're polarized. If you want to find a polarized United States, start looking at the early 1850s and follow through that decade. It's why I'm always answering when people ask, you know, where are the historical precedents for what we're living through? Well, unfortunately, there are quite a few of them, and maybe the best ones are there in the 1850s. That's both sobering and dangerous, but it's informative. We don't want what we're living through to end like the 1850s did. When he became president, he built a cabinet that was mostly Southerners, and no less than Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, was his Secretary of War, and probably the most powerful voice in Pierce's cabinet. That's worth thinking about. Pierce takes power in 1853 and builds a cabinet into 53 and 54. At the very time the Kansas-Nebraska Act passes, at the very time Americans are trying to process the results of the Fugitive Slave Act and their Fugitive Slave rescues going on across the North, and and a lot of violence. Jefferson Davis is the Secretary of War.
Colleen Shogan 23:15
I don't think people recall that. I don't think people really appreciate that that fact.
David Blight 23:20
Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War down to 1857. Four years later, he's going to be president of the Confederacy. So, I mean, it's it's and and there were other Southerners who had dominant roles in Pierce's cabinet. He was quite proud of that. He never he didn't apologize for any of that. He he believed the South Politically, was essentially right in its stand against those in the North, free soilers in particular, who wanted to stop the future expansion of slavery. In fact, free soilers, you know, had come on the scene in the 1840s. The Free Soil Party ran its first candidate in 1848 and got 10 percent of the vote. When a third party gets 10 of the vote, that's causing trouble, and it's beginning to break apart the Whig Party and it's beginning to peel off some Democrats, and by '52, it's really happening. And this division and breakup of the American political party system is already beginning to happen. But like many things, we don't always see the results of what's happening until they hit us between the eyes. In Pierce's case, he missed much of what was going on in American public opinion across the country, out in the great Midwest, where that Republican Party is sowing its roots. He he missed some of the essence of this free labor. Impulse driving American politics, and by missing that, he came to so fully support Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act, which we should explain next, so vehemently. And you know, it's always easy to say somebody was on the wrong side of history, because we have retrospect, and they didn't. But this is a case where, if you look back at Pierce's presidency from even the late 1850s, and certainly from the Civil War and beyond, it is easy to see that the Pierce presidency was on the wrong side of where history was going. Now you just don't always know that, but he was conditioned not to know it.
Colleen Shogan 25:50
You say in your essay, you know, basically that Pierce doesn't really read the room correctly, doesn't read the country in the right way, and a lot of it has to do with with the Kansas Nebraska Act. So maybe you can tell us, give us what is the Kansas Nebraska Act? What is at stake there? Why does Pierce end up signing it, and what are the ramifications of it?
David Blight 26:10
Yeah, well, the Kansas Nebraska Act comes about. It's it's brewing very much in Congress in 18 well 52 and 53. It's the result, in some ways, of the Compromise of 1850, which, even as a big five-part compromise, had not truly settled the problem of slavery in the western territories. And the new territories about to become ready for statehood were Kansas and Nebraska. Can't, if one looks back at a textbook map of the United States in 1852 to 54, Kansas and Nebraska are a huge swath of the territory from Kansas all the way up through out to Montana. It's everything that's left of the a Louisiana Purchase that hadn't become states already would that vast territory and its potential whatever six eight states or more become slave territory or free territory, and that had to be determined. So the head, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories with Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, already arguably the most potent and powerful politician in the Democratic Party, and soon to make himself even more so, he devised a bill based upon what was called popular sovereignty. Now, popular sovereignty was supposed to be this nice, ambiguous theory that you just let people move there. It's just democracy, right? You let people move there. You have a referendum. They decide if they vote. Self
Colleen Shogan 27:56
determination. Yeah, sounds democratic, right? Sure, it does. Self
David Blight 27:59
determination. Let people vote.
Colleen Shogan 28:00
Right.
David Blight 28:01
They want a slave labor system. They vote for it. They don't. They don't. But of course, what happens is bleeding Kansas eventually. And by the way, the bill though the bill is so important because it's going to blow up the American political party system. The bill at first was quite ambiguous. It was just going to be, oh, popular sovereignty will be the method. They never said a word about when these votes were supposed to occur, you know, allowing pro-slavery folks to get there early and often. But eventually, Southerners took Stephen Douglas sort of behind the shed, and they said, "No, Stephen, you must explicitly repeal the old Missouri Compromise line, which was now 34 years old. That came about in 1820. It's very important to understand the earliest compromise over slavery in the West was in 1820. Missouri came into the Union as a slave state. Maine came into the Union as a free state, and they drew the famous 36-30 degree parallel across the United States and said slavery shall never exist north of that line. That was considered by Northerners, however modestly anti-slavery they might have been for free labor reasons or otherwise, however racist they might have been, that was considered what they always called the sacred pledge. The issue of slavery in the West would somehow be just geographically Settled. Kansas-Nebraska Act moved all the way to that version. There were actually three versions, and this most radical version said that line would be repealed, explicitly repealed by this bill.
Colleen Shogan 29:57
Well, the proponents argued that Californian. It anyways is that correct? Yes, because
David Blight 30:02
it's both above and below the 3630 parallel. So unless you divide California into two Californians, into two, which was considered, of course, they were they always considered every conceivable kind of compromise of this, and eventually they're going to run out of them. But
Colleen Shogan 30:18
Right,
David Blight 30:18
so the Kansas Nebraska Act narrowly passed, and it brutally divided the Democratic Party between Northerners and Southerners, and it all but destroyed the Whig Party, which is going to have almost no representation left in the South anymore, and it gave birth overnight in the spring of 1854 to this new political group that are going to call themselves the Republicans. Now the Republicans have roots back in the old Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party for sure, but that Republican Party, born in the spring and summer of 1854 is going to be born around the single issue, single issue at first, but a lot of other issues are going to glom onto it of stopping the westward future expansion of slavery, and they hit a potent wave of American politics. This is what Pierce missed. That politics was so potent, especially out in what we call the Middle West. They called it the West, where Abraham Lincoln's going to come from. Man, that party is going to is going to soar so fast. It still astonishes some students of this story, it is the fastest growing, most successful third party movement in all of American history. And I always tell my students, if you really want a political realignment in America, and young people are always looking for that, aren't they? Aren't we? But honestly, if you want a true realignment in American history, you got two models. One was the 1850s and the slavery crisis, which ended in a civil war. The second was the Great Depression and the total economic collapse of the United States, which ended in the New Deal and eventually World War II. Which which would you choose, a civil war or or a Great Depression? And the students always look at me like, Huh. Anyway, this the Kansas-Nebraska Act because it carried the weight of all of these issues that seemingly had been compromised for 30-some years and more had always been kind of breaking up the edges of the party system. Now is going to explode it. The Whig Party will be effectively dead in the wake of Kansas, Nebraska. The Republican Party will replace it, and in 1856, that early, while Pierce is still president, but a lame duck.
Colleen Shogan 32:59
If Pierce doesn't win the nomination. No, he doesn't. He's eligible for another term. Yes, he is. He
David Blight 33:03
is. He didn't really want it.
Colleen Shogan 33:06
He he doesn't he doesn't secure the nomination for the Democrats. Right.
David Blight 33:10
Well, he is, if you like, soiled by Kansas, Nebraska. He's soiled by. Oh, that that's it's a terrible pun, but he's soiled by free soilism and its potency. And the Democrats by 56 and seven are going to go with a James Buchanan who had been out of the country,
Colleen Shogan 33:35
not Stephen Douglas.
David Blight 33:36
They don't go. No, they don't go for Douglas. He-he is-he is Kansas, Nebraska. They go for a Buchanan who had been U.S. minister to Great Britain, and he had been kind of a you know a no opinion sort of guy, even though he was the ultimate pro-slavery Democrat in some ways, but he didn't have a reputation on this most divisive of issues. The Kansas-Nebraska Act does partly because it's followed by this border civil war in Kansas, which is going to kill more than 200 people. A brutal, you know, violent kind of mini civil war out there on the border. It's going to lead to all sorts of corruption in the attempted elections for the territory of Kansas, and by 1856, 5556, and 57, the country looks west and it sees nothing but conflict. It sees violence. It sees an issue that they hope and pray their political system can contain, but increasingly they have less faith in that. That's what the Pierce presidency, if you like, left the country.
Colleen Shogan 34:53
So the Civil War comes and Pierce is is no longer in politics. He's out of office. What did he think? Of the Civil War, what did he think of Abraham Lincoln?
David Blight 35:03
He had nothing but disdain for Lincoln and the whole lot of the Republicans. He did not support, quite literally, the Union war effort. He tried to discourage enlistment in the Union Army in New Hampshire. He was accused at times of disloyalty, although that's probably overdone. I mean, you can be anti-war; you can oppose a war policy, even as fundamental as the Union cause in the Civil War without committing treason, and he thought Lincoln was a fool at first. He was part of that persuasion that believed Abraham Lincoln was a prairie bumpkin and had no business running the country in such a crisis. He'll have to eat those words eventually. So he was an anti-war, pro-slavery Northern Democrat throughout the war, and it caused him awkwardness at at best, at least. I'm sorry, in New Hampshire, he's he's retired. He he his his reputation, if you like, sinks even more because obviously 1000s of New Hampshireites supported the Union cause, and 1000s died in it. And there he is by 1863, 64, and 65, still, still trying to argue this war was a mistake, and he opposed emancipation. I mean, quite literally, he didn't he didn't take a you know take a pass on that or anything. He opposed it. He thought it was a dangerous fanatical idea, And he pretty well argued that to his dying day in 1869. It leaves a major strain in Pierce's legacy, and may have something to do. I don't know the whole story of this. May have something to do with why the the state of New Hampshire did nothing to memorialize him for something like 50 years after his death. I mean, he's the president of the United States from New Hampshire, and they did nothing to, you know, no statues, no anything. It may have been because, in the wake of the Civil War, the Union cause, and ending slavery was just part of the identity of New England by then, and there was Franklin Pierce, the New Hampshire president who had opposed it all.
Colleen Shogan 37:53
So, David, you know, you alluded to this before. In pursuit aims to unearth some of the most relevant lessons from our nation's past by looking at these presidents, and I'm starting to think, quite frankly, as we move forward, that we might learn just as much and maybe more from the presidents who we consider to be failures than the ones that we consider to be successes. Certainly, Franklin Pierce is in the former, not the latter category. There, so I mean, as our last question, what can we learn from Franklin Pierce?
David Blight 38:28
Well, I love that question, Colleen, because it takes us actually back to the Constitution. A lot of different men have held this job, very different men from all regions of our country, they've all had to exercise Article Two and its powers. But anyone who bothers, and I would urge everyone to do it right now, read Section Two of the Constitution. It's very short. The founders wanted a single president. They debated that you know Hamilton famously wanted essentially a monarch. There were others who argued for a plural presidency, and so a committee. So whoever holds this office, first of all, inherits that constitution, which is so limited it doesn't say much, and then inherits the traditions that have been tied to it. President is commander in chief of the military. That's made clear in the Constitution. So every president brings to that job a vision of the larger Constitution. In Pierce's case, it was a states' rights vision. He believed most power should be left to the states to control all their own domestic matters and institutions, and the federal government should only do what it explicitly is given the power to do, and everything else, as in the 10th Amendment. Left of the states, if you are a states' rights advocate, especially a vehement one, as Pierce was in that era, you're going to end up believing the South has its right to property in man, and that tore the United States apart, it tore the United States to pieces. It led to our most divisive event, and it forced the recreation of that very Constitution. We can go right through American history, as your your book and your project does, and see these people brought to the job, you know, political inheritances. They brought traditions to the job that they understood on one level or another, and then they brought their own beliefs, and hopefully a little bit of wisdom, and hopefully a little bit of humility, sorely lacking in our politics today. So I find it fascinating to look at the least famous, the least successful presidencies now, as I never have quite before. It's always easy to just hurry, hurry past them, look beyond them, and forget that they too had to live within Section Two of the Constitution, or in their own ways beyond it, and of course the presidency has grown enormous in powers because of war, industrialization, modernization, the 20th century, and into the 21st century. It's grown enormous in power because of, frankly, a kind of abdication over time of the U.S. Congress, and so on. So these so-called lesser presidents have much to tell us about how this office has been interpreted, used, defined, redefined, remade, partly ruined, partly recreated over time, and again, it leaves us understanding that there's nothing static about our institutions. They're always changing, growing, developing, hopefully still keeping a link, a rope back to that constitution, such as it works.
Colleen Shogan 42:23
David Blight, thank you so much for joining us on In Pursuit, and thank you for your wonderful essay on Franklin Pierce.
David Blight 42:30
Thank you, Colleen. It was a joy to do it.
Colleen Shogan 42:33
To read David Blight's essay on Franklin Pierce and to enjoy other great in pursuit essays and podcasts, visit in pursuit.org. In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan is a podcast by More Perfect. The series is written and produced by Jim Ambuske. Production services provided by Stand Together. Our theme music is Kleos by Charlie Ryan. Audio mixing by Curt Dahl of CD Squared. Please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast app, and tell us which Americans inspire you.
