In office, Pierce built a cabinet and a policy agenda that was decidedly pro-Southern and proslavery. His closest friend and advisor was his secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi. Many Northern Democrats thought Pierce would stand up to the “Slave Power,” but one Southern delegate at the convention had another attitude: “All admit that Pierce is as sound on all Southern questions as any Southern man.”
Pierce could have led the turbulent Congress and the country toward some sort of resolution of the slavery expansion question. Yet for Pierce and the nation’s political culture, that proved impossible. From 1853 to 1856, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and ensuing border civil war in the new territory over the future of slavery itself—“Bleeding Kansas”—ruined the Pierce presidency. In 1854, a new antislavery coalition party of Northerners, born of feverish resistance to the Kansas policy of Pierce’s administration, soon became the most rapidly successful third-party movement in American history: the Republicans.
That same year, after long months of planning and debate, Stephen Douglas led the Democrats’ quest for a law that would organize the vast new territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Douglas succumbed to Southern pressure and crafted a bill that repealed the 34-year-old provision from the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had eliminated slavery forever above the thirty-six-thirty degree parallel across the American West. For so many Northerners across party lines this meant a betrayal of a sacred pledge about the future of slavery in America. Yet the out-of-touch Pierce fully supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as well as further measures in the violent and corrupt politics of the vigilante war in Kansas. The president misread the new “free soil” ideology of many Northern immigrants and native-born Americans who saw the West as their opportunity of mobility for the common man, unencumbered by slaveholding oligarchies.
By 1856, Pierce’s proslavery leanings had made him so unpopular that he was defeated in his bid for renomination at Democratic convention—the first elected president to seek his party’s renomination and not receive it. The week he left office, the Supreme Court delivered the Dred Scott decision, in effect opening up the entire West to the possible expansion of slavery, thus placing the American experiment in dire jeopardy.
When the Civil War came in 1861, Pierce obstinately opposed the Union war effort by the Lincoln administration—even the recruitment of the Union armies. He opposed the Emancipation Proclamation and expressed only contempt for Abraham Lincoln, causing some to accuse him of disloyalty. He thought the Union war “cruel, heartless…” and driven by “madness and imbecility.”