Pierce Inauguration Falsely Claims Slavery Question Settled While Planning Expansion

Franklin Pierce delivered his inaugural address on March 4, 1853, after defeating Winfield Scott in a landslide with 254 electoral votes to 42 as a pro-slavery Northern Democrat. Pierce expressed hope that the Compromise of 1850 had permanently settled the slavery question, stating “I fervently hope that the [slavery] question is at rest.” This was either profound self-deception or deliberate misrepresentation, as Pierce would soon become the most aggressive presidential advocate for slavery expansion in the territories. The divisions within the Whig Party over slavery enforcement had come to a head in the 1852 election, with Scott’s crushing defeat signaling the party’s imminent collapse and the Slave Power’s tightening grip on federal institutions.

Pierce’s rhetoric about sectional peace concealed the administration’s actual agenda of facilitating slavery’s territorial expansion through the doctrine of “popular sovereignty.” Within fifteen months, Pierce would sign the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which obliterated the Missouri Compromise’s 36°30′ prohibition on slavery in northern territories that had stood since 1820. The Act, drafted by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and signed by Pierce on May 30, 1854, declared that citizens of each territory—not Congress—would decide whether to allow slavery. This represented a fundamental shift in constitutional doctrine that many northerners viewed as evidence of the Slave Power’s “hostility to the North.”

The political fallout from Pierce’s support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act was immediate and catastrophic for the Democratic Party. In the congressional elections of 1854-1855, Democrats lost 66 of the 91 seats they held before passage, and of the 44 northern Democrat representatives who voted for it, only seven won reelection. The alienation of northern Democrats from the southern wing was hardly the “solidification and unification” Pierce intended. Anti-slavery Whigs and independent Free Soilers joined to form the Republican Party, a broad anti-slavery coalition opposing slavery’s extension and the Slave Power’s control of politics. Pierce is now “irrevocably associated with the Kansas-Nebraska Act and ‘Bleeding Kansas,’” and ranked by many historians as among the worst presidents in American history.