Franklin Pierce enters the presidency like a man who has already used up his share of good fortune and would spend his mandate trying to keep the country from noticing the same thing about itself. He is small-boned, soft-spoken, vain about a certain smoothness that reads, to friendly eyes, as grace and to suspicious eyes as glaze. He is born in New Hampshire, schooled at Bowdoin among minds that will leave long shadows—Hawthorne, Longfellow—and trained in the old New England art of becoming important without frightening the neighbors: read law, memorize names, master the grammar of local gratitude. He rises quickly because he is attentive rather than brilliant, convivial rather than doctrinaire, and because his politics fit a moment when northern Democrats discovered that loyalty to the Union could be rented out as sympathy for the South. In the  ...