President Pierce, God, and Annoying Pastors

Well, well, well. You take a short vacation from the cornfields of Indiana and suddenly you are beckoned, lured, brazenly jostled out of your hiding place. As luck would have it, I am currently sitting roughly 10 miles from dear Frank Pierce's birthplace/father's home/pub in Hillsborough, New Hampshire. Back on the old rocky sod, God bless.

I haven't lost too much sleep in recent years on Pierce's religious proclivities, unless thoroughly lubricated with gin or wine (what better way to consider the sadly bibulous FP) and chatting with the O-man. Red Ted notes that the President (that's what we call him in our house) was a New England Episcopalian. Let me make a weak rejoinder based purely on memory, since I am away from all my books. He wasn't an Episcopalian when he was President. If memory serves, he professed the Episcopal faith in the 1860s, after his wife (a thorough-going old line Congregationalist like her father) died. He then began attending (and professed the faith at) St. Paul's Church in Concord, NH, across from the State Capitol. In fact, he was buried out of there in 1869. Before this, Pierce was a sort of loose Congregationalist out of respect towards his wife.

The President also had a lingering mistrust of American religion based upon the political pastors and reformers of the antebellum era, and this may have led to the lateness of his religious life. He blamed them for much of the strife of the 1840s and 1850s, claiming that God was on their side, and making what he considered political and legal matters into universals and ultimates. Frankly put (pun very much intended), he couldn't find a church or pastor that did not irritate the hell out of him. Yet the Episcopal pastor in Concord spoke of saving the soul and restoring all things in Christ, not making the American South look like Suffolk County, Massachusetts. Here, he finally felt comfortable and at home, not constantly henpecked on reformist politics. In so many ways, Pierce became an Episcopalian in reaction against abolition and the Civil War.

As to how Pierce compares to contemporaneous presidents (say, Jefferson to A. Johnson) in how they used religion, that is a very interesting and complicated question, one that I'll have to mull over a bit to cover it well.

You asked for it.