#14 Franklin Pierce

1853--1857

--Franklin Pierce was the first elected president not to be renominated by his own party after his first term. Afterwards, he was quoted as telling a friend, “There is nothing left to do but get drunk.”

--His reputation was destroyed during the American Civil War when he declared some support for the Confederacy, and personal correspondence between Pierce and Confederate President Jefferson Davis was leaked to the press (Davis had been Pierce's Secretary of War when he was in office, and the two remained friends).

--Pierce's presidential run was helped by the success of a book written by his college roommate, Nathaniel Hawthorne, called "The Life of Franklin Pierce", which came out a few months before the election.

--Pierce's VP, William King, died just 45 days after Pierce took office. For the rest of Pierce's term he had no acting vice-president.

--Ever since he was a small boy, Franklin Pierce's greatest fear was that he would some day be consistently ranked by historians as one of the worst U.S. presidents.