Defender of the Old North



The Fourteenth President of the United States, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, died on this day in 1869. Pierce aficionados are few and far between, but the Man from Hillsborough deserves a better fate. A hard-working Bowdoin graduate and one of New England's finest attorneys, Pierce came to the presidency in an impossible time. He tried to conserve the Union, the Constitution, and the laws when Americans showed alarmingly little attention to all three.

Historians have long written on the Old South. But Pierce embodied and defended the Old North, the Jeffersonian North of small towns and small farms pushed aside by Whig (and then Republican) industrial cities and factories. As the country descended into Civil War, he turned to drink and died in Concord, NH this day.