miles of land from Mexico for $10 million to provide a route for the Transcontinental Railroad. This land would later become southern Arizona and New Mexico.

Under his presidency, Commodore Matthew Perry signed the Treaty of Kanagawa with Japan, which opened ports for United States trading and created a United States consulate in Japan. Pierce also attempted to purchase Cuba but was unsuccessful in doing so. One of his most controversial pieces of legislation was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed both states to enter the Union without defining their slave status beforehand. This directly refuted the Missouri Compromise and was another factor that led to the Civil War.

Franklin Pierce's legacy was one of growing division within the United States, between slave state and free state. As a Northern Democrat, Pierce came to see the abolitionist movement as the biggest single threat to the stability of the Union. Far from recognizing the limitless capacity of slavery to tear the country apart, not to mention its inherent wickedness, Pierce attempted to facilitate the institution's expansion into the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska.

The notorious Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, signed into law by President Pierce, was supposed to allow the people who lived in these territories to decide whether they would allow slavery within their boundaries. But in Kansas—"Bleeding Kansas" as it soon became known—this simply led to widespread political chaos and outbreaks of violent civil disorder, as each side accused the other of electoral fraud. Pierce, supposedly a supporter of states's rights, had no hesitation in sending in a detachment of Federal troops to quell the growing violence as well as forcibly dissolving the anti-slavery legislature.

Pierce's blatant partiality towards pro-slavery forces during his time in office created a lot of bad blood, which in turn drove North and South further apart than ever and hastened the nation's slide towards civil war.

Franklin Pierce was from New Hampshire, and was a college classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was considered very handsome, and was often referred to as "handsome Frank." He had two sons, one of whom died as a young man. He served in Congress for a short while, but at the behest of his wife and surviving son retired from politics. Later, when he was considering running for the Presidency, his wife and son (then eleven) begged him not to run. His wife warned him he would regret breaking his earlier promise. After he won the election and while on the way to Washington, the train on which he was travelling wrecked with only one casualty--his sole surviving son.  He was forced to take the oath of office after just suffering this tragedy. His wife never forgave him, did not participate in official White House functions; and remained secluded in the White House living quarters for most of his presidency.

During his presidency, the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico was completed, which secured the balance of the lower 48 states for the U.S. However, it was also during his Presidency that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed. Pierce's support for territorial expansion was deemed by many of his own party to be a move to support the expansion of slavery. As a result, his own party refused to renominate him for the Presidency in 1856. After this, he permanently retired from politics and finally died in 1869.

Franklin Pierce was the 14th President of the United States, serving from 1853-1857. He was a Democrat and was inaugurated at the age of 48, which was considered young for a president. Pierce was nominated by his party in 1852, chosen primarily due to his neutral stance on slavery. Yet he reintroduced the issue of slavery by supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed new states to decide whether slavery would be legal or not. The act was strongly objected to by the Northern states and resulted in small conflicts between groups for and against slavery in Kansas, which were collectively known as Bleeding Kansas. Pierce was unable to mitigate conflict between North and South, contributing to the outbreak of the Civil War between 1861 and 1865.