Franklin Pierce enters the presidency like a man who has already used up his share of good fortune and would spend his mandate trying to keep the country from noticing the same thing about itself. He is small-boned, soft-spoken, vain about a certain smoothness that reads, to friendly eyes, as grace and to suspicious eyes as glaze. He is born in New Hampshire, schooled at Bowdoin among minds that will leave long shadows—Hawthorne, Longfellow—and trained in the old New England art of becoming important without frightening the neighbors: read law, memorize names, master the grammar of local gratitude. He rises quickly because he is attentive rather than brilliant, convivial rather than doctrinaire, and because his politics fit a moment when northern Democrats discovered that loyalty to the Union could be rented out as sympathy for the South. In the legislature he learns how to pass favors through committees; in Congress he learns the schedule by which outrage softens into votes; in the Senate he learns that position is not the same as power and that resignation can sometimes look like character when the truth is simply weariness. He marries Jane Appleton—delicate, devout, at war with the worldly noise that nourishes politics—and tries to stitch together a domestic peace stout enough to withstand the winds that follow ambition. Three sons are born; two die early; the third, Benjamin, will be taken from them in a wreck that drops a railcar down a snowy New England embankment between election and inauguration. The president-elect carries his child’s body out of the shattered carriage; the papers do not print the sounds he and Jane made in the snow. Jane becomes a shade moving quietly through the White House, her grief a permanent winter; Pierce becomes, in the eyes of those who knew him before and after that day, a man who could never again speak loudly enough to be heard over the noise inside himself.

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