Welcome to Blogging the Presidents: A Voting While Intoxicated™ Almost Original Series. We will be taking a serious look at the 42 men who have led our country and hopefully finding a few laughable details.
PART XIV
Pierce tore apart the Missouri Compromise that had established a sort of peace regarding slavery, establishing a sort of arbitrary line regarding allowing slavery and basically insisting on balancing between slave and free states. This was holding to some degree. However, Pierce, perhaps justifiably, decided to throw this out and leave slave status up to the voters. Ignoring that a majority should not be allowed to enslave a people, it has a certain democratic logic to it. Unfortunately, it led to streams of people moving to Kansas and Nebraska to tilt the balance for one side or the other, and fighting between these sides.
His foreign policy blunder was a leaked memo setting out the strategy of telling Spain to sell us Cuba or else. I can’t imagine the Spanish appreciated this and the Northerners were concerned that it was a plot to get a big slave state added. Bad policy, but yet, it would have been intriguing if we could have wrested Cuba away.
Pierce did not necessarily have bad intentions, but was clearly not up to the job. This fumbling performance led to him not being nominated for re-election, the only time that has happened to an incumbent already elected once (as opposed to rising to the position through succession).
Pierce’s Vice President, William King, died less than two months after they took office. He was never replaced. This may have been reckless lacking an established order of succession at that point, but it just goes to show that the idea of getting rid of the office of the Vice President probably makes a good amount of sense.
