Born in 1804 in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce, a Democrat, was elected to the White House in 1852. As President, Pierce was faced with increasingly violent tensions over the issue of slavery in the new western territories acquired by the U.S. following the Mexican-American War. Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in hopes of stopping the violence. Failing to win his party's nomination in 1856, Pierce retired from public life and died in 1869.
