Major presidential contenders included Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, William Marcy of New York, Sam Houston of Texas, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, and Lewis Cass of Michigan, the latter of whom had been the party's 1848 nominee.

After the 48th ballot, North Carolina Congressman James C. Dobbin delivered an unexpected and passionate endorsement of Pierce, sparking a wave of support for the dark horse candidate.

[15] Pierce, the youngest man to be elected president to that point, chose to affirm his oath of office on a law book rather than swear it on a Bible, as all his predecessors except John Quincy Adams had done.

[15] In the address he hailed an era of peace and prosperity at home and urged a vigorous assertion of U.S. interests in its foreign relations, including the "eminently important" acquisition of new territories.

He anchored his Cabinet around Attorney General Caleb Cushing, a pro-compromise northerner, and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who had led Southern resistance to the compromise in the Senate.

To appease the Cass and Buchanan wings of the party, Pierce appointed Secretary of the Interior Robert McClelland of Michigan and Postmaster General James Campbell of Pennsylvania, respectively.

[17] Pierce's Cabinet notably lacked a prominent Southern unionist such as Howell Cobb, and also did not include a representative from Stephen Douglas's faction of the party.

[25] Douglas and his allies instead proposed a bill to organize the territory and let local settlers decide whether to allow slavery, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820, as most of land in question was north of the 36°30′ parallel.

[28] It was tenaciously opposed by Northerners such as Ohio Senator Salmon P. Chase and Massachusetts' Charles Sumner, who rallied public sentiment in the North against the bill.

Many Northerners had been suspicious of the Pierce's expansionist foreign policy and the influence of slaveholding Cabinet members such as Davis, and they saw the Nebraska bill as part of a pattern of southern aggression.

The New England Emigrant Aid Society assisted anti-slavery farmers to move to Kansas, and John Brown and his sons soon proved themselves the most memorable of these immigrants.

The new legislature subsequently adopted laws that criminalized reading Free Soil literature, disenfranchised those who refused to uphold the Fugitive Slave Act, and barred non-slave owners from holding public office.

"[34] Several northern states enacted personal liberty laws designed to prevent the kidnapping of free blacks and to make it more difficult to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.

[45] In Pierce's home state of New Hampshire, hitherto loyal to the Democratic Party, the Know-Nothings elected the governor, all three representatives, dominated the legislature, and returned John P. Hale to the Senate.

Pierce declared his full opposition the Republican Party, decrying what he saw as its anti-southern stance, but his perceived pro-Southern actions in Kansas continued to inflame Northern anger.

[53] Secretary of War Davis, at Pierce's request, led surveys with the Corps of Topographical Engineers of possible transcontinental railroad routes throughout the country.

The Democratic Party had long rejected federal appropriations for internal improvements, but Davis felt that such a project could be justified as a Constitutional national security objective.

Davis also deployed the Army Corps of Engineers to supervise construction projects in the District of Columbia, including the expansion of the United States Capitol and building of the Washington Monument.

[65] During Pierce's presidency, relations with the United Kingdom were tense due to disputes over American fishing rights in Canada and U.S. and British ambitions in Central America.

[69] Like many of his predecessors, Pierce hoped to annex the Spanish island of Cuba, which possessed wealthy sugar plantations, held a strategic position in the Caribbean Sea, and represented the possibility of a new slave state.

[76] During the Pierce administration, Commodore Matthew C. Perry visited Japan (a venture originally planned under Fillmore) in an effort to expand trade to the East.

To soften the blow to Pierce, the convention issued a resolution of "unqualified approbation" in praise of his administration and selected his ally, former Kentucky Representative John C. Breckinridge, as the vice-presidential nominee.

[84] Pierce endorsed Buchanan, though the two remained distant, and the president attempted to resolve the Kansas situation by November to improve the Democrats' chances in the general election.

In his final message to Congress, delivered in December 1856, he blamed anti-slavery activists for Bleeding Kansas and vigorously attacked the Republican Party as a threat to the unity of the nation.

[92] In the final days of the Pierce administration, Congress passed bills to increase the pay of army officers and to build new naval vessels, also expanding the number of seamen enlisted.

[99] The failure of Pierce, as president, to secure sectional conciliation helped bring an end to the dominance of the Democratic Party that had started with Jackson, and led to a period of over seventy years when the Republicans mostly controlled national politics.

[101] Historian Kenneth Nivison, writing in 2010, takes a more favorable view of Pierce's foreign policy, stating that his expansionism prefaced those of later presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, who served at a time when America had the military might to make her desires stick.

"American foreign and commercial policy beginning in the 1890s, which eventually supplanted European colonialism by the middle of the twentieth century, owed much to the paternalism of Jacksonian Democracy cultivated in the international arena by the Presidency of Franklin Pierce.

He failed utterly to realize the depth and the sincerity of Northern feeling against the South and was bewildered at the general flouting of the law and the Constitution, as he described it, by the people of his own New England.

His inability to cope with the difficult problems that arose early in his administration caused him to lose the respect of great numbers, especially in the North, and his few successes failed to restore public confidence.