October 8, 1869: The Worst President Ever?

October 8, 1869: Franklin Pierce dies at his home in Concord, New Hampshire. He was 64. The 14th President of the United States died from cirrhosis of he liver.

Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and George W. Bush, and, to a lesser extent, Andrew Jackson, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon faced jokes and criticisms about their drinking. But Pierce may have been the only President who was an out-and-out alcoholic, including while he was in office.

Elected in 1852, as a Democrat, he signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. This led to serious bloodshed, which presaged, and helped to set up, the American Civil War. His economic policies led to the Panic of 1857, which happened right after he left office. His reputation is not helped by the fact that he appointed Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi to be his Secretary of War, and that he later served as the one and only President of the Confederate States of America. Pierce may have been the worst President America has ever had -- until Donald Trump, that is.

The biggest reason Pierce is not generally recognized as the worst is the man elected after him: James Buchanan. Such a distinction didn't seem likely in 1856: He had spent 2 years as a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, served Pennsylvania for 10 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and 10 more in the U.S. Senate, was U.S. Minister to Russia under Andrew Jackson, Secretary of State under President James K. Polk, and U.S. Minister to Britain under Pierce. Outside of John Quincy Adams, he may have been the most qualified candidate for President to that time. Then again, JQA didn't turn out to be a good President, either.

The only President who never married -- historians are divided on whether he was gay -- the problem wasn't what Buchanan did, it was that he seemed to be doing nothing, while the country collapsed in sectional strife and economic depression around him. Think of what you know about Herbert Hoover, and imagine that he also had an internal security problem as bad as his economic problem.

When Buchanan, also a Democrat, left office on March 4, 1861, Southern States had already begun to secede from the Union. He allegedly told someone, "I am the last President of the United States." He told his successor, Abraham Lincoln, "Sir, if you are as happy upon entering this office as I am upon leaving it, then you are a very happy man, indeed." Buchanan stayed out of public life, remaining at Wheatland, his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and died on June 1, 1868, at 77.

Ever since -- especially during the Administrations of Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush and Donald Trump -- when a sitting President is described as "the worst President ever," somebody pipes up and cites Buchanan. They should also cite Pierce, who, essentially, set Buchanan up for failure.

Pierce was played by Porter Hall in The Great Moment in 1944. The SS President Pierce was a transport ship that served the U.S. Navy from 1925 to 1941. Pierce has a statue at the New Hampshire State House in Concord. New Hampshire Route 9 is the Franklin Pierce Highway.

Franklin Pierce University was established in Rindge, New Hampshire. A Mount Pierce is in the State's White Mountains. There is a Pierce County in Georgia, and another in the State of Washington. And there is a Franklin Pierce High School in the Seattle suburb of Clover Creek, Washington.

Pierce Statue, State House,

Concord, New Hampshire

Since 1930, there has been a James Buchanan Memorial in Meridian Hill Park in northwest Washington, D.C. As befitting his historical reputation, it is over 2 miles from the National Mall, where there are official memorials to Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Peter Carlisle played Buchanan in the British TV miniseries Edward the Seventh in 1975. Buchanan had been U.S. Ambassador to Britain when King Edward VII was a teenager. René Auberjonois, who had previously played George Washington, played Buchanan in Raising Buchanan in 2019.

There are Buchanan Counties in Virginia, Missouri and Iowa. His hometown of Mercersburg, Pennsylvania named its high school James Buchanan High School. And on the 1970s ABC sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, the fictional high school was named for Buchanan. But only 1 U.S. Navy ship has been named the USS Buchanan, and it was named for an unrelated Admiral.

The wife of President George H.W. Bush, the former Barbara Pierce, was a member of Franklin Pierce's family. One of Bush's political rivals, newspaper columnist-turned-Presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan, is not related to James Buchanan.

The last surviving member of Pierce's Cabinet was James Campbell, his Postmaster General, who lived until 1893. The Postmaster General would also turn out to be the last surviving member of Buchanan's Cabinet: Horatio King, who served in that office for the last 21 days of Buchanan's Administration, and lived until 1897. (The Postmaster General stopped being a Cabinet post in 1971.)

Horatio King, a Maine native who rose through the ranks of the postal system, was not related to William Rufus DeVane King, who had the odd distinction of serving in both houses of Congress but from different States: North Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the newly-admitted Alabama in the U.S. Senate.

From 1834 to 1844, William R. King and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania not only served together in the Senate, but roomed together at a Washington boardinghouse. They became best friends and seemingly inseparable, to the point where Washingtonians then, and some historians since, thought they were a gay couple. But the available evidence is purely circumstantial.

In 1852, William R. King was nominated for Vice President on Pierce's ticket, as a North-South balance -- accepting the nomination after Buchanan told Delegates that he didn't want it. King accepted, and he and Pierce were elected. This is the closest any man called "King" has come to governing America since the British packed up and left after the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

But King was ill with tuberculosis, and died on April 18, 1853, just 45 days into the Pierce term, making him the shortest-serving Vice President ever. Under the law of the time, the next man in line for the Presidency was the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. So if something had happened to Pierce, the next President would have been:

* From April 18, 1853 to December 4, 1854: David Rice Atchison of Missouri, who had previously held that office under Presidents Polk and Zachary Taylor.

* From December 5, 1854 to January 6, 1857: Jesse Bright of Indiana.

* And from January 6 to March 4, 1857: James M. Mason of Virginia.

Another oddity: William R. King had also served as President Pro Tempore of the Senate, under Taylor and Millard Fillmore, and would have become President had Fillmore died in office between July 10, 1850 and December 20, 1852, when Atchison's Senate colleagues returned him to the post.

Pierce remains the only President born in or representing New Hampshire, despite the TV series The West Wing having depicted Martin Sheen as New Hampshire native Jed Bartlet. Buchanan remains the only President representing Pennsylvania, although Joe Biden has joined him among Presidents born in that State. William R. King remains the highest-ranking politician from Alabama.

NOTE: My cutoff date for this project is 1869, the year of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, the 1st openly professional baseball team, and the 1st American football game. I had managed to work in references to most pre-1869 Presidents. This was the only way I could think of to do it for Pierce, or for Buchanan.

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October 8, 1869 was a Friday. The only organized sport in America at the time was baseball, and no games were scheduled for this day.