Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857

The genial but troubled New Englander whose single-minded partisan loyalties inflamed the nation's simmering battle over slavery.

Charming and handsome, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire was drafted to break the deadlock of the 1852 Democratic convention. Though he seized the White House in a landslide against the imploding Whig Party, he proved a dismal failure in office.

Michael F. Holt, a leading historian of nineteenth-century partisan politics, argues that in the wake of the Whig collapse...