You are a shy, retiring woman, devoted to religion and intellectual pursuits, but your husband is an extrovert—smart, charming, and so very handsome. You have suffered crushing losses and want nothing more than a peaceful life centered on home, family, and, above all, your beloved and only surviving child. Unexpectedly, your country bestows upon your husband its greatest honor. You hesitate, but unwilling to deny him such a prize and recognizing what it could mean for your son’s advancement, you reluctantly embrace your spouse’s dream and with it a future of attention, fashion, protocol, criticism, and intrigue: all that you most hate.

Then, in an instant, before it has even begun,  it all turns to ashes.

Today marks the 209th birthday of Jane Means Appleton Pierce, the wife of President Franklin Pierce, First Lady of the United States from March 4, 1853, until March 3, 1857. First lady lore is full of tragedies and tragic figures. Mary Lincoln and Jacqueline Kennedy both lost children while residing in the White House and then saw their husbands murdered before their eyes, prematurely ending their tenures. Three first ladies, Letitia Christian Tyler, Caroline Scott Harrison, and Ellen Axson Wilson, died in the White House itself. Still, no president’s wife ever entered the Executive Mansion bearing more sorrow—and with less fortitude to endure it—than did Jane Pierce.

Jane Means Appleton was born in Hampton, New Hampshire in 1806, during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. Her father was a Congregationalist minister, and Jane, who spent most of her life in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts, embraced the religious worldview of early nineteenth-century New England. She was quiet, bookish, withdrawn, and prone to poor health, particularly tuberculosis. Her Puritan austerity, her somewhat forbidding manners, her reticence, eccentricity, and melancholy are all evocative of her younger and nearby contemporary, Emily Dickinson.

In 1834, Jane married Democratic New Hampshire congressman Franklin Pierce. A rising star in the Granite State, Pierce was convivial, stylish, and given to drink. Whether in Concord or Washington, he enjoyed socializing with a smart set of like-minded attorneys and politicians, and this often strained his relations with his shy and temperamental wife. Though spiritual and quite fatalistic, Jane Pierce did not cope well with loss, and she endured much of it. The Pierces’ first child, a son, was born in 1836, dying two days later. A second son came in 1839. By that time, Franklin Pierce had become a United States senator, the youngest in history to that time.

Every biographical feature written about Jane Pierce mentions how much she hated the capital. To be the wife of a powerful man in antebellum Washington was to endure an endless routine of labyrinthine visits, or “calls,” on the other wives, often to do nothing more than leave a card. At other times, the wives might be invited to the White House to participate in tedious “levees,” stiff and highly orchestrated events, dating to the Washington administration,  in which the president and his wife or official hostess “received” the visitors. In the late 1830s, when the young Pierces were active in congressional circles, Angelica Singleton Van Buren, the young and elegant daughter-in-law of the widowed President Martin Van Buren, presided over Washington society like a European queen. Only a few years earlier, the “Petticoat War,” had rocked the Jackson administration, demonstrating that, at high levels, issues of “society” could bring down a cabinet and unseat a vice president. This episode expanded the importance of “protocol” beyond all reason and helped turn Washington’s already complex social network into a minefield of deceit and intrigue. Though her husband shone in this milieu, Jane Pierce was singularly unsuited to such an unforgiving social atmosphere.

By 1842, the Pierces had two sons, a toddler, Frank, and an infant, Benny. Concerned about social expectations, her husband’s drinking, and the appalling physical environment of the city (Washington had been constructed on low ground, and stagnant, filthy Tiber Creek ran right past the White House), Jane pressured Franklin to resign his seat, return home to Concord, and practice law. He agreed. The Pierces went home, but the following year, Frank, their older son, died at age 4, leaving Jane broken in health and spirit. Foreshadowing the fate of the Russian Tsarina Alexandra in the twentieth century, Jane now merged her religious zeal with her love for her only remaining son, Benny, and became precariously obsessed with his health and happiness.

In 1846, Congress declared war on Mexico, and Franklin Pierce entered the army, rising, in that day of “political officers,” to the rank of brigadier general. Despite a mixed military record of brave leadership frustrated by repeated injury and illness, Pierce returned home to great acclaim and resumed his law practice. Though he had mostly given up alcohol to please his wife, Franklin was as popular and successful as ever, and Jane was raising Benny near family and home. The next four years are said to have been the happiest of the Pierce marriage.

By 1852, slavery and the potential spread of slavery to the vast western lands won from Mexico in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were tearing the United States apart, and the Democratic Party was similarly divided. At the party’s convention that summer, New Hampshire leaders introduced Franklin Pierce as a favorite-son candidate, but neither he nor they took the move very seriously. Eight years earlier, however, Tennessean James K. Polk had secured the nomination under similar conditions, emerging as the first “dark horse” candidate to win the presidency, so there was a precedent for a Pierce surge. When the delegates became deadlocked, Pierce began to win more and more votes. Finally, he won the votes of the necessary two-thirds of the delegates and became the nominee of the party.

Jane Pierce is said to have fainted when she heard the news of her husband’s nomination. The source of this story is not clear, but it could certainly be true. Knowing, somehow, that his mother would be miserable in Washington, young Benny, only 11, wrote her a touching note in which he expressed the wish that, for her sake, his father should lose the election. Franklin won the election, however, and though she must have blanched at the thought of herself at the pinnacle of Washington social life, Jane seems to have recognized that the presidency was too great a prize for her husband to reject and that Benny would now grow up with privileges and opportunities that he could never have had in New Hampshire. Resigned, Jane stood by her surprised and pleased husband, and the little family began to prepare for life in the White House.

“It often happens,” Oscar Wilde would later write,  “that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.” Such was the blow that swiftly fell upon Jane and Franklin Pierce. On January 6, 1853, eight weeks before they were to become the first family, the Pierces were traveling by train, returning home from a funeral and Christmas gathering. Near Andover, Massachusetts, an axle broke, and the president-elect’s car left the track and tumbled into a ravine. Accounts vary as to what happened next, and primary sources are scarce. The most detailed version has it that Franklin and Jane began to stir in the jumbled wreckage. They both looked at Benny, who was not moving, and whose face was covered by his cap. Thinking his son stunned or unconscious, and before he could consider what might lie beneath, Franklin snatched the cap from Benny’s face as Jane looked on. The boy’s head was crushed; several sources describe him as “nearly decapitated.” By most accounts, Benny Pierce, 11, was the only person killed in the January 6 derailment.

The telegraph and the newspapers spread the sad news throughout the country. From all quarters came an outpouring of sympathy for the president-elect and his stricken wife. None of this mattered to Jane Pierce. Throughout her marriage, she had indulged her husband’s wishes, and her resentment at his understated but insatiable ambition had simmered just below the surface. Now, though, it overwhelmed her, as her stark religiosity revealed the outlines of the “plan” that had taken her last child from her, a plan that involved her husband, the White House, and God himself.

As Jane Pierce well knew, the United States, in 1853, was a nation divided and seething with hatreds. In an effort to quiet the slavery controversy ignited by the Mexican War, Congress had passed the bills collectively known as the Compromise of 1850, but this package had included the Fugitive Slave Act, which, contrary to its intent, had driven thousands of previously indifferent northerners into the abolitionist camp. Southerners talked openly of secession; northerners smuggled runaways to Canada. While southern legislators banned and burned Harriet Beecher Stowe’s new novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, northern lawmakers passed “personal liberty laws,” forbidding state officials from assisting slave catchers as required by the federal statute. Still believing that slavery, the great contradiction of American life, could be smoothed over by mere law, President Millard Fillmore, meanwhile, sent troops to hold outraged northern citizens at bay, as their terrified black neighbors—some of them escaped slaves and some not—were arrested and taken south in chains.

From this tumult and the bitter calculus of her grief, Jane Pierce derived a solution that explained why Benny had died. The United States was in peril—serious peril. For his own inscrutable purposes, God wanted the United States to survive. God, himself, had chosen Franklin as its deliverer . . .

 . . . and God did not want Franklin to have any distractions!

And with that bitter epiphany, Jane Pierce began to disappear into her grief.

Lonely and heartbroken, Franklin Pierce parted from his wife and traveled to Washington alone to assume the presidency. On March 4, 1853, what should have been the most triumphant day of his life, Pierce, 48, the youngest president up to that time, “affirmed” rather than swore the presidential oath, recited from memory a melancholy speech in which he referenced his “bitter sorrow” on becoming president, and went to the White House. An artist later portrayed him plodding up the dark stairs, candle in hand.

After some time, President Pierce convinced Jane to join him, but doing so was not easy. When she did come, she wore black, and William Seale, the preeminent historian of the White House as a home and an institution, has documented the Executive Mansion’s expenditures for “black crepe” that she insisted be draped there in memory of Benny. Jane moved into a suite of rooms on the family floor of the mansion and rarely ventured out. Her aunt by marriage, Abigail Kent Means, traveled to Washington to look after Jane and to serve as Pierce’s White House hostess. Many writers have described Mrs. Pierce spending long periods alone, writing plaintive letters of regret to her dead children, especially to Benny. Tina Mion, an artist and writer on first ladies, painted a haunting portrait of Mrs. Pierce holding a box filled with mementos of her children. It can be seen here:  http://www.tinamion.com/ladies_first/pierce.html

In January 1855, nearly two years into the administration, Jane Pierce finally appeared at a formal White House event, garnering much attention from the Washington social set and the newspapers. According to Seale, President Pierce had grown very close to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and his charming and popular wife, Varina, and both the president and the capital elite began to turn to the Davises for “society.” This may have convinced Jane to put aside at least some of her mourning and take a more active role as first lady. After her social debut, Jane even showed a degree of interest in politics, regularly attending congressional committee hearings at the Capitol. Still, her health, both mental and physical, remained frail and an obstacle, and she never became a full-time White House hostess.

In 1856, the Democratic National Convention snubbed President Pierce, denying him its nomination. No other regularly elected president who sought renomination has suffered this indignity. Pierce’s administration had foundered on his disastrous support for and signing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. This law, which powerful members of Congress forced upon the wavering president, opened the Kansas and Nebraska Territories to public referenda on slavery, inciting terrorism and bloodshed in Kansas and Missouri and hastening the coming of civil war. With the country drifting toward disaster, Pierce, who had many southern friends, was derided as a “doughface,” a northern man with “southern principles.” Indeed, Pierce had long served as an apologist for slave interests, mostly on legal rather than ethical grounds, but neither the northern public nor the new Republican Party any longer recognized the distinction.

After James Buchanan became president on March 4, 1857, Pierce took Jane to the Caribbean and then to Europe, hoping to restore her health. She did not improve. After the couple returned home, the war that tore the country apart also divided the Pierces. Franklin, rooted in law and politics, continued to seek compromise, mostly on southern terms, and never stopped blaming his fellow northerners for their “abuse” of the South. Jane, true to her Yankee roots and the Transcendentalist intellectual atmosphere in which she felt most at home, became an abolitionist.

Though Pierce despised President Abraham Lincoln’s policies, he and Jane were deeply moved when the Lincolns’ twelve-year-old son, Willie, died in the White House in February 1862. Exactly nine years since he, with heavy heart, had assumed the burdens of the presidency after burying his own son, Pierce, on behalf of himself and Jane, wrote the president:

Concord N. H.

March 4 1862

My dear Sir,

The impulse to write you, the moment I heard of your great domestic affliction was very strong, but it brought back the crushing sorrow which befel me just before I went to Washington in 1853, with such power that I felt your grief, to be too sacred for intrusion.

Even in this hour, so full of danger to our Country, and of trial and anxiety to all good men, your thoughts, will be, of your cherished boy, who will nestle at your heart, until you meet him in that new life, when tears and toils and conflict will be unknown.

I realize fully how vain it would be, to suggest sources of consolation.

There can be but one refuge in such an hour, — but one remedy for smitten hearts, which, is to trust in Him “who doeth all things well”, and leave the rest to —

“Time, comforter & only healer
When the heart hath broke”

With Mrs Pierce’s and my own best wishes — and truest sympathy for Mrs Lincoln and yourself

I am, very truly,
Yr. friend
Franklin Pierce

It was, perhaps, his finest hour.

Still unresigned to the death of her son, Jane Pierce died of her old ailment, tuberculosis, on December 2, 1863, at the height of the great war her husband’s policies had helped to ignite. Franklin grieved his troubled companion of 29 years, with whom he had achieved so much and borne so many losses, and had her buried in Concord, next to little Frank and the lost Benny. Alone, the former president turned again to the bottle, his old vice that had so worried and distracted his wife, and which he had once abandoned to make her happy. The following spring, his closest friend, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, died in his presence. Overwhelmed by grief and addiction, Pierce began a steady decline. Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth president of the United States, died of cirrhosis of the liver on October 8, 1869. He was only 64 years old. As was customary, President Grant officially announced his death to the nation. There were few tears.

Today, Franklin Pierce has all but faded into the mists of time. Among elected presidents, he is, perhaps, the most obscure. It is not surprising, then, that his wife is little more than a footnote in history, another among a group of nineteenth-century presidential wives who sequestered themselves upstairs, leaving to others many of the social duties of the position. In her case, however, we can sense that there was more. There is a sad, frustrating realization that, were she living today, this frail, sad figure could be helped. As it was, she was left with only her husband, who sought to comfort her but who shared her worst demons and faced others all his own.

Jane Appleton Pierce was educated and refined. Her father had been the president of Bowdoin College and she had imbibed the rarefied intellectual air into which she was born. Had her children lived, this intelligent and probably interesting woman might have made, in her personality and tastes, the adjustments necessary to function as first lady of the United States, indulging, however reluctantly, the Washington social machine that made and broke political wives, including those of the presidents. Instead, she endured debilitating losses, including—nearly—herself, and became, in legend, the “ghost of the White House.” In the end, though, Jane Pierce managed, barely, to salvage a bit of who she was and give it to her husband, to the country, and to unforgiving history. Other less bereaved first ladies have crumbled in the face of the demands this unofficial post places upon its occupants. That Jane Appleton Pierce survived and contributed at all in her grief is, in itself, reason enough to remember her as more than merely our saddest first lady.

KB