Franklin Pierce

His administration completed the continental United States through the Gadsden Purchase and pursued expansionist diplomacy, yet it is remembered chiefly for the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. By endorsing popular sovereignty and repealing the Missouri Compromise, Pierce unleashed the violence of “Bleeding Kansas,” helped destroy the Whig Party, and accelerated the rise of the Republicans. Denied renomination by his own party, he left office with the Union fracturing. In later years he opposed the Civil War effort and died in relative isolation. This concise, narrative biography presents Pierce as a personally decent man whose Jacksonian principles proved disastrously inadequate to the sectional crisis of the 1850s.