Franklin Pierce (1804 – 1869), the 14th President of the United States, served from 1853 to 1857. Pierce was a well meaning, but tragic figure that had a difficult marriage, and all 3 of Pierce’s sons died before adulthood. He was a New Hampshire politician and lawyer and the only President from that state. Pierce also served in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. He was one of the most handsome and the youngest president to take office to that point. Pierce was a Democrat and a "doughface" (a Northerner with Southern sympathies). He was a brigadier general in the Mexican-American War. Later, he was nominated for president as a dark horse candidate on the 49th ballot at the 1852 Democratic National Convention. Shortly before assuming office, Pierce and his family were in a train wreck. The parents survived, but their last living child, an 11-year-old son, died in the accident. He entered the presidency grief-stricken and exhausted, and his wife was unable to attend the inauguration. As President, Pierce's popularity in the North declined after he came out in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, repealing the Missouri Compromise and reopening the question of the expansion of slavery in the West. His credibility was further damaged when several of his diplomats issued the Ostend Manifesto, a rationale for the United States to purchase Cuba from Spain, although, Spain refused (Southern expansionists called for Cuba's acquisition as a slave state). Both policies brought an avalanche of public criticism. Abandoned by his party, Pierce lost the Democratic nomination to run in the 1856 presidential election. After his presidency, he received more public condemnation during the Civil War when he declared support for the Confederacy. Combined with ill health, the death of his wife, Jane Means Appleton Pierce, in 1863, and death of his lifelong friend, author Nathaniel Hawthorne, in 1864, brought on a deep depression. He died a a lonely and tragic figure and from cirrhosis of the liver due to alcoholism.