Growing up in NH, and with a wife who taught NH history to fourth-graders for three decades, Franklin Pierce was always part of the furniture in discussing mid-1800s history. He's not part of your furniture, I know. But the homestead is a tourist attraction nearby, and his picture is on things. Just what you'd expect from a small state that has to date sent only one president to the White House. We do know that it would have been better if Daniel Webster had gone instead, but events at the time didn't allow that.
What the children are taught is that he was the 14th president, and his years, that he was a Brigadier General in the Mexican-American War, and the sad stories about his son and wife. Only later does it leak out to them that he was no friend to Abolitionists and drank too much in his later years. My overall impression is that he had been rather feckless.
I am reading Heyday with one of my book groups, and "feckless" would have been an improvement. Oh, we can't buy Cuba from the Spanish? Maybe we should encourage revolutions instead. In fact, let's take the whole Caribbean and half of Mexico to make new states. I'll bet cotton will grow there. Oh, those will be slave states? Tsk, tsk. You don't say. At least they won't be British. Maybe the Russians will help. This William Walker fellow seems just the trick.
2 comments:
It's pretty easy to convince yourself something along the lines of "we've got democracy, freedom, and prosperity, they've got oppression, dictatorship, and poverty. We;re actually doing the people of those countries a big favor by conquering them, and in the long run they'll thank us for it". I can't even tell you what's wrong with the concept in principle, I just know it has a very poor track record in practice.
That's a good way to put it.
Post a Comment