Jane Pierce entered the White House in deep mourning. In January 1853, just weeks before her husband Franklin’s inauguration, their son, Benjamin, was killed in a tragic train accident. He was their third and last child. The couple had lost their first son, Franklin, Jr., three days after his birth, when his father was away serving in Congress, and their second, Frank Robert, to typhus when he was only four. Now “Bennie,” age eleven, was gone as well.
When she became first lady, Jane understandably avoided events in a White House shrouded in black bunting, but her personal losses and dislike of politics have cast her as an absent first lady who harmed her husband’s political prospects. What history has largely missed is how, even in grief, Jane Pierce quietly shaped one of the most consequential struggles of the antebellum era. Too often, accounts of her tenure as first lady focus narrowly on her long-term ill health, depression, unusual behaviors, and emotional detachment. Grief narrowed Jane Pierce’s public presence, but it sharpened her moral clarity.
Jane Means Appleton was born in New Hampshire in 1806, the third child of a Congregational minister – later president of Maine’s Bowdoin College – and a mother from a wealthy New England textile-manufacturing family. Raised in a strict Calvinistic environment, Jane was often told not to mourn losses because they were God’s will. After her father’s death when she was thirteen, the family relocated to her mother’s home in Amherst, New Hampshire, where she later met Bowdoin graduate and lawyer Franklin Pierce in 1826. She was twenty; he was twenty-two. Her family opposed the relationship because of Franklin’s political leanings and his affection for alcohol. The son of a New Hampshire governor, Pierce was drawn to political life and soon served in the New Hampshire legislature, later spending nine years in Congress.
Eight years after meeting, Jane stood her ground and married Congressman Franklin Pierce, moving with him to a boarding house in Washington, DC. She did not adjust well to Washington’s political and social world and returned home during her first pregnancy. She later wrote, “Oh how I wish he was out of political life! How much better it would be for him on every account!” And, unwritten but understood, how much better it would be for her.