Once referred to by author Nathaniel Hawthorne as “that death’s head in the White House”, First Lady Jane Pierce was probably the most continually sorrowful individual of all the presidential wives.
Jane Means Appleton was born on March 12, 1806, in Hampton, New Hampshire. Her father, the Reverend Jesse Appleton, was a Congregational minister and president of Bowdoin College. Her mother was Elizabeth Means. Jane was their third child.
When she was 13, her father died and the family moved to the home of their wealthy maternal grandparents in Amherst, New Hampshire. Jane was a very shy girl and subject to bouts of depression. She had few friends, with the exception of an aunt, Abigail Kent Means, and a sister, Mary Appleton Aiken.
While living in Amherst, Jane met a young graduate of Bowdoin College, Franklin Pierce. Although the young lawyer immediately became devoted to Jane, the family opposed any match between the two. Franklin had political ambitions and Jane hated all the trappings associated with political life.
Finally, the opposition faded and Jane and Franklin were married in the parlour of her grandparents’ home at Amherst, in 1834, when she was 28. Her husband was already serving as a congressman and Speaker of the House.
Jane hated life in Washington. When their first son, Franklin Pierce, died at the age of three days, in 1836, she was heartbroken. A second son, Frank Pierce was born in 1839, and a third, Benjamin Pierce in 1841. After “Benny’s” birth, , Jane pressured her husband to give up politics and he did in 1842, leaving the Senate.
The next year, 1843, little Frank Robert died of typhus at home in Concord, New Hampshire.
Service in the Mexican war resulted in the rank of Brigadier and local fame for Franklin. In 1852, the Democratic Party chose him as its candidate for President. Jane fainted at the news. She prayed he would not be elected, but he was. The President-elect tried to convince his wife that having a father in the White House would be good for Benny’s success in the future.
Tragically, Benny was killed before their eyes, during a train accident shortly before the inauguration. The nation shared the parents’ grief. Jane did not attend the inaugural ceremony and there was no inaugural ball that year.
Always devout, Jane sought solace in prayer. Her aunt, Abigail Kent Means, took over the social responsibilities of First Lady for the first two years of Franklin Pierce’s term. Even when Jane resumed her social obligations as hostess, she usually wore black and a sombre expression at official soirees.
Although Nathaniel Hawthorn’s comment about Jane Pierce was less than complimentary, Mrs. Robert E. Lee wrote the following in a private letter:
“I have known many of the ladies of the White House, none more truly excellent than the afflicted wife of President Pierce. Her health was a bar to any great effort on her part to meet the expectations of the public in her high position but she was a refined, extremely religious and well educated lady.”
In 1856, Franklin Pierce declined his party’s nomination for a second term and he took his wife on an extended European vacation in an effort to restore her health. Jane carried Benny’s Bible throughout her trip. The attempt was unsuccessful. She contracted tuberculosis.
Her progressing disease, the beginning of the Civil War and her husband’s growing alcohol problem soured the final years of the marriage. Jane died of tuberculosis in Andover, Massachusetts at the home of her sister Mary Aiken, on December 2nd., 1863.
She is buried near Franklin and two of her children in the Old North Cemetery in Concord, New Hampshire.
