Hesperian Trivia #3
This one may be more challenging than last week's.
Question: Who became a delegate to the Constitutional Convention more or less by accident, was one of the most vocal advocates of small states’ interests, opposed the adoption of the Three-Fifths Clause, annoyed James Madison, left Philadelphia early, opposed ratification of the Constitution with or without a Bill of Rights, and in later years became a ferocious Federalist?
Hint #1: He was one of the leading lawyers of his time, was his state’s longest serving attorney general ever and argued forty or so cases before the Supreme Court. His oral arguments were admired for their mastery of technical issues but also tended to be intolerably long, packed with tedious detail and in many cases too spirited.
Hint #2: His verbose encomiums to the charms of his most famous client’s married, 24-year-old daughter led to gossip that he, a 59-year-old widower, was infatuated with her. Her father, however, showed no sign of taking offense.
Hint #3: He lost his second most famous case in the Supreme Court, although he quoted in support of his position a past statement by the Justice who wrote the adverse opinion.
Hint #4: If he had lost his third most famous case, the ineffable Sheldon Whitehouse would be a happy man.
Hint #5: In his declining years, when, in the words of a sympathetic contemporary, “His vast learning was hidden within the oblivious darkness of an extinguished intellect”, the legislature of his home state imposed a tax on lawyers to fund a pension for him.
Last week’s question and answer:
Which U.S. President has four counties (not five, despite superficial appearances) named after him, none of them in his native state?
FRANKLIN PIERCE
Pierce was born New Hampshire, which he represented in both Houses of Congress. His father, Benjamin, served twice as the state’s governor. Georgia, Nebraska, Washington and Wisconsin have Pierce Counties named after President Pierce. A fifth Pierce County, in North Dakota, gets its name from a different Pierce: Gilbert Pierce, territorial governor and later senator.
Hint #1: The membership of his Cabinet remained the same throughout his time as President.
The seven members of the Pierce Cabinet, exquisitely balanced among the geographical and ideological factions of the Democratic Party, were quickly confirmed by unanimous Senate votes. All stayed in their posts from start to finish. Two died within months after leaving office: Secretary of State William L. Marcy in July 1857 and Secretary of the Navy James C. Dobbin in the following month.
Hint #2: His Vice President had the shortest term of office of any VP who didn’t succeed to the Presidency on the incumbent’s death.
The Democratic Party nominated Senator William Rufus King of Alabama, a Southern moderate with extensive diplomatic experience in Russia, Italy and France, for Vice President. The choice was designed as a sop to backers of the senator’s close friend James Buchanan, who succeeded Pierce as President and shares historians’ low esteem. King has the distinction of being the first Senator ever nominated for the Vice Presidency and the first (and so far only) President or Vice President to be sworn into office outside the United States. Suffering from tuberculosis, he traveled to Cuba before Inauguration Day in hopes of recovery. Congress enacted legislation to allow him to take the oath in Havana. He did, but his health did not improve. He returned to Alabama, where he died on April 18, 1853, having served for 45 days. Only John Tyler and Andrew Johnson had shorter terms, and they got to be Presidents at the end of theirs. King County, Washington, adjacent to Pierce County, was named after Vice President King, although the eponym was altered a few years ago to honor Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hint #3: The achievements of his Administration, which included administrative reforms in the Executive branch and important treaties with Britain, Japan and Mexico, were overshadowed by his controversial domestic policies. As a result, his party refused to nominate him for a second term.
The Pierce Administration’s foreign policy successes included the Gadsden Purchase, which fixed the southern boundaries of Arizona and New Mexico, a reciprocal free trade and navigation agreement with Britain, and the Treaty of Kanagawa (1854), the first pact between a Western nation and Japan’s Tokugawa Shogunate. Less successful was an offer to purchase Cuba from Spain, which the Spanish government rejected. Felix culpa, for possession of that island would doubtless have been as troublesome to the United States as it was to Spain.
On the domestic front, the Pierce Cabinet introduced the first Civil Service examinations, reformed the ramshackle operations of the Treasury and Interior Departments, and surveyed prospective routes for a transcontinental railroad (a particular project of the Secretary of War, one Jefferson Davis).
Unhappily for his later reputation, the President did not limit himself to such “good government” initiatives. He was persuaded against his better judgment to sign the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and left the question of slavery in the newly formed Kansas and Nebraska territories to “popular sovereignty”. “Bleeding Kansas” followed. Pierce further antagonized Northern public opinion by rigorously enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, a policy that he saw as essential to preserving the Union. In the 1854/55 mid-term elections1 the Democrats lost more than 60 House seats north of the Mason-Dixon Line, shrinking from 150 to 83 members. It was less than a surprise that Pierce lost the Democratic nomination in 1856, the only incumbent President ever to seek reelection and be rejected by his own party.
Historians are unanimous in declaring Pierce to have been one of the worst Presidential failures, a judgment made easy by our distance from his time and knowledge of what came after. He certainly was the wrong man for a critical period: indecisive, alcoholic and weighed down by personal tragedies. It isn’t obvious, though, that a stronger-willed President in perfect physical and mental health would have done a great deal better.
Hint #4: Although he wrote nothing of note himself, he made a significant contribution to American literature.
Pierce met Nathaniel Hawthorne when both were undergraduates at Bowdoin College, and they became lifelong friends. Hawthorne authored Pierce’s Presidential campaign biography, and Pierce was present at Hawthorne’s death bed; it fell to him to inform Mrs. Hawthorne of her husband’s passing. In 1853, he appointed his friend to the plum post of U.S. consul in Liverpool, enabling him to travel in Europe, where he gleaned the material for his last completed novel, The Marble Faun.
In those more leisurely days, the new Congress didn’t rush to assemble. The first session of the 34th Congress (1855-1857) convened on December 3, 1855. Elections were held as early as August 1854 and as late as November 1855.