What's a prez to do? Pierce and Bleeding Kansas

Sometimes the best thing a president can do is nothing at all. Sometimes it's not. Franklin Pierce had to decide which was which, knowing that on his decision hung the future of his presidency, his party and his country.

He could blame Stephen Douglas for putting him in this position. Douglas, an Illinois Democratic senator whose ambition so outstripped his physical stature that he was dubbed the Little Giant, was bent on overthrowing three decades of settled law on the most unsettling question in America, the future of slavery in the federal territories. In 1820 Congress had approved the Missouri Compromise, which divided the trans-Mississippi west into a forever-free north and a presumptively slave south. Douglas proposed to tear up the compromise and relitigate the issue.

In particular, he would create territorial governments for Kansas and Nebraska, under the principle of popular sovereignty regarding slavery. As Douglas explained it, popular sovereignty was nothing more than the application of democracy to the slavery question. The people of Kansas and Nebraska, when numerous enough to qualify their territories for statehood, would draft constitutions for the new states. The people at that time would decide on slavery. Kansas would enter the Union as a free state or a slave state, according to the wishes of the Kansas voters. Likewise Nebraska. Who could complain at this, asked Douglas?

Opponents of slavery in the North, to name several million. For thirty years they had been led to believe that the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase was off limits to slavery and would always be. Now Douglas was throwing that large region up for grabs.

He had his reasons. First, he wanted to hold the Democratic party together at a time when the opposition Whigs were falling apart. Second, he hoped to become president, which would be possible, even likely, if the Democrats did hold together. Third, he sought to promote the construction of a railroad to the Pacific, which would greatly benefit from territorial governments in Kansas and Nebraska. The eastern end of the railroad would probably be in Chicago, in Douglas's home state.

The question for Franklin Pierce was how to respond to Douglas's plan. He could support it, he could threaten to veto it, or he could do nothing.

Pierce's temperament and demeanor fit the model for 19th century presidents. He was less a leader than an administrator, less a decider than one who executed others’ decisions. The executive branch was called the executive branch for a reason, he noted. He preferred to leave the drama to others.

Drama abounded when Douglas introduced his bill in Congress. Northerners screamed betrayal; southerners responded with scorn, contending that the Douglas bill didn’t go far enough in securing the rights of slaveholders. But Douglas, who had cut his teeth in the fight for the Compromise of 1850, knew how to court and count votes. His bill passed. 

Pierce had been skeptical. Slavery wasn’t a big issue in his home state of New Hampshire, and Pierce didn’t want it to get any bigger in the country at large. He suggested creating territorial governments for Kansas and Nebraska without reference to slavery. Reopening the question of slavery in the territories would alienate northern Democrats and tear the party asunder, he said.

Douglas rejoined that this wouldn’t satisfy the South. Southerners had been chafing at the Missouri Compromise since the day it was adopted. Free-state settlers could go anywhere in the federal territories and take their property with them; slave-state settlers should be able to do the same, even if their property included slaves. Pierce’s secretary of war, Mississippian Jefferson Davis, seconded Douglas, contending that the Democrats would be torn apart by the southerners if Douglas’s bill did not include popular sovereignty.

Pierce let himself be persuaded. He signed the Douglas bill, which became the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Whereupon hell broke loose. Settlers poured into Kansas from the slave South and the free North. Some intended to plant roots and stay; others intended to remain only long enough to vote for the Kansas constitution. Meanwhile, the pro-slavery settlers tried to scare off the anti-slavery settlers, and vice versa. Fighting broke out between militias drawn from the opposing sides. Abolitionist John Brown led a small band of followers who descended upon a hamlet on the banks of Pottawatomie Creek; in the dead of night they pulled five pro-slavery settlers from their beds and hacked them to pieces with broadswords. The intended message was that other pro-slavery men who came to Kansas would meet a similar fate.

“Bleeding Kansas,” the territory was called. Some Americans in other parts of the country applauded the fighters, contributing money and weapons to the opposing causes. A larger number shuddered at what the civil war in Kansas appeared to portend. 

Pierce’s political career was collateral damage. He became the first elected president refused renomination by his own party. (Unelected president John Tyler had been rejected by the Whigs in 1844.) Pierce returned to New Hampshire and lived long enough to watch the fire lit in Kansas nearly consume the Union.