In the Wake of His Last Living Child’s Gruesome Death in a Tragic Train Accident, President-elect Franklin Pierce Writes the City of Boston Withdrawing His Agreement to Attend a Reception in His Honor

He also touches on the same themes, and articulates his same feelings about the Union, as in his upcoming inaugural address

 

“But I would not be understood as supposing that your courtesies are extended to me on account of any personal claims upon your regard. It is gratifying to me to feel that they spring from a nobler motive and that you proposed to receive me as the representative of a principle that is uppermost in our hearts. The basis of that principle is the sacredness of the Union.”

 

This is the first letter we have ever seen in which Pierce specifically mentions the “tragedy” of son’s death, and a search of public sale records going back forty years fails to turn up even one

Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire won the Democratic nomination for president in 1852, and then won the election against Whig Winfield Scott. As president, he was widely considered a doughface (a Northerner sympathetic to the South and slavery in the years before the Civil War), and for supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which angered northerners and heightened pre-Civil War tensions by repealing the Missouri Compromise. But before Pierce even took office, as he planned for his inauguration, the president-elect and his wife Jane were hit with a personal disaster. On January 6, 1853, Pierce, his wife, and their 11-year-old son Benny, were traveling by train from Andover, Massachusetts back home to Concord, New Hampshire. The family, having been in Andover for a funeral, boarded the train around 1 p.m. But just five minutes after settling in their seats, tragedy struck.

The train entered the first bend in the line near Andover. Suddenly, an axel on the rail car broke in two, causing the car to be thrown from the tracks at forty miles per hour, careen down a 20-foot embankment, and land in a pile of wreckage. The Huntington Globe reported that the car was “crushed to atoms.” The New York Times, in its account of the wreck, said the train “broke in pieces like a cigar box.” Both Pierce and his wife Jane were severely bruised, and several other passengers in the car sustained serious injuries. But Benny, who was standing by a window, was hit on the head by falling wood and killed instantly in front of his horrified parents. His head was crushed and he had been nearly decapitated. Jane Pierce was so broken that she didn’t accompany her son’s body to Concord for the burial.

Benny was the third son Pierce and his wife had lost, and was their last surviving child. The boy, whom Pierce “almost idolized while living,” was intellectual, kind, and agreeable. Benny’s death took a steep emotional toll on Pierce, who refused to swear on the Bible during his inauguration because he was convinced God was punishing him for past sins by killing his son. Jane Pierce, who was enveloped by anguish, did not attend her husband’s inauguration.

Pierce continued to grieve even on the day of his inauguration, evident in the opening line of his inaugural address: “It is a relief to feel that no heart but my own can know the personal regret and bitter sorrow over which I have been borne to a position so suitable for others rather than desirable for myself.” Pierce thus became President of the United States “nervously exhausted,” according to a White House historian. In addition, his wife Jane was so heartbroken that she did not attend the ceremony and stayed at home in New Hampshire. Mrs. Pierce abhorred politics and especially disliked Washington, D.C., creating a tension that would continue throughout their marriage. She was unhappy when her husband decided to run for president, seeing this as a form of vanity that was offensive to God. She forever blamed her husband’s office-seeking for her son’s death, saying that Bennie’s death was payment to God for Franklin’s ambition. She remained a reclusive first lady for the entirety of Pierce’s presidency.

Pierce would eventually fail to win his party’s nomination for the 1856 election, losing to future President James Buchanan. Jane Pierce died of tuberculosis in 1863, and Franklin Pierce, who turned to heavy drinking at the end of his life, was shunned in the North when he declared his sympathy for the Confederacy. He contracted cirrhosis and died in 1869. Though the tragic train wreck left Pierce with only minor bruises at the time, surely the emotional lacerations were eternal.

Autograph letter signed, three pages, Concord, January 21, 1853, just two weeks after the accident, to Benjamin Seaver, the Mayor of Boston, withdrawing his acceptance of the city’s invitation for a reception, because of the tragedy that befell his family. In it, he also touches on the same themes, and articulates his same feelings about the Union, as in his inaugural address, which he was then pondering or in fact composing. “When the committee of the city government of Boston personally presented to me the official resolution, and also your very kind and gratifying letter, inviting me to accept on my way to the seat of Government the hospitalities of the city, I expressed verbally my thanks and acceptance, stating at the same time that my own inclinations would prompt me to desire that my journey might be performed without any public demonstrations or considerations. After the event which has recently fallen upon me with such crushing weight, it will of course be expected that I will proceed to the post of duty as quietly and privately as the modes of public travel will admit.

“I am by no means insensible to the kindness with which you proposed to receive me. You will do me the justice to believe that I fully appreciate the evidences of friendly estimation I have received from the citizens of Boston, and that I deeply feel the sentiment of confidence contained in your invitation. But I would not be understood as supposing that your courtesies are extended to me on account of any personal claims upon your regard. It is gratifying to me to feel that they spring from a nobler motive and that you proposed to receive me as the representative of a principle that is uppermost in our hearts. The basis of that principle is the sacredness of the Union.

“As with you it will forever be inseparable from the revered and grateful memory of your foremost man, so it will be cherished by all while any adequate love of our common country exists in the Republic. Whatever anxieties will yet be in store for me, whatever obstacles may interpose in the way of duty, I have an undying faith that I shall never falter in my devotion to this object, and I look with fearless confidence for the support of all patriotic men of whatever party in my endeavors to preserve that union of the hearts, and supremacy of the laws, which are the surest guarantee of the happiness of the present and the future.

“Permit me to repeal my sense of obligation to you…”, he ended, withdrawing his acceptance of the city of Boston’s invitation.
On the versos, Mayor Seaver has endorsed the letter: “In Board of Mayor and Aldermen. Jan. 24, 1853. Read and referred to the Committee of Arrangements for the intended occasion. Sent down for concurrence.” The committee concurred.

This is the first letter we have ever had or can recall seeing in which Pierce specifically mentions the “tragedy” of son’s death, and a search of public sale records going back forty years fails to turn up even one. That it is written just weeks after the tragedy is extraordinary. It is also noteworthy that he uses the same themes as in his inaugural address that followed just six weeks later, making this letter all the more unique and significant.