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“History has rendered its verdict upon him”: The Franklin Pierce Statue Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2013

Michael J. Connolly
Michael J. Connolly*
Affiliation:
Purdue University North Central
*
mconnolly@pnc.edu
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Abstract

For thirty years after Franklin Pierce's death, the ex-president's reputation remained low in the estimation of historians and the public. Most saw Pierce and his successor James Buchanan as primary culprits in the sectional discord leading to the Civil War. Between 1900 and 1915, however, Pierce's reputation improved, with the sectional healing represented by Blue-Gray reunions on former battlefields like Gettysburg and the election of only the second Democratic president since the war, Woodrow Wilson. This process of healing was particularly difficult in Pierce's home state of New Hampshire. In a classic case of contested memory, the Grand Army of the Republic repeatedly stymied Democratic attempts to raise a statue to the state's only president and criticized Pierce as a traitor and Confederate sympathizer. The Democrats, however, took over the New Hampshire governor's chair in 1913, and the legislature voted to honor Pierce with a statue. In that small early twentieth-century window, Franklin Pierce became a beneficiary of hard-earned sectional reconciliation.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , April 2013 , pp. 234 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2013

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References

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30 Dedication, 30, 32, 34, 61–62; Metcalf and Abbott, One Thousand New Hampshire Notables, 503; the Oliver Cromwell example was used at the Gettysburg Reunion in July 1913 by U.S. Speaker of the House Champ Clark, as well. New York Times, July 4, 1913.

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