Conjuring Jane Pierce

 

Imagine Jane Pierce in her black gown and mantilla. She sits on a slipper rocker in her second-floor bedroom in the White House. Clutching her Bible and a sheath of letters, the tubercular First Lady dwells in her memories. As usual, she does not feel well.

It is 1852.  

Entering and departing the world in just 57 years, Mrs. Franklin Pierce lived an antebellum life of grief and despair. Seeking answers, she agonized through illness, chronic insomnia, and the deaths of three young sons.

The deaths she attributed to her husband’s political career and their years in Washington, D.C., 1837 to 1842, when he represented New Hampshire in the U.S. Senate.

The city was a den of iniquity, she insisted in letters back home. In her Calvinistic assessment, she included the 3^rd Street boarding house near Capitol Hill where she and Mr. Pierce resided after their arrival in Washington and paid a few extra dollars for a rocking chair in their room.

 

Newspaper sketches, 1850s

Politics was a raucous business pursued in taverns and hotel lobbies where every glass  overflowed with whiskey. Men flocked to cockfights; arguments led to deadly duels. Although Dolley Madison, approaching 80, still presided over polite society, Washington’s sharp-tongued hostesses competed cattily for supremacy.   

Jane found the city intolerable, especially compared to the quiet New England towns from whence she came. Modern manners, outré fashions, and heavy drinking offended her delicate sensibility. She could hardly bear parties and public events and never stopped hoping that Franklin would leave politics for good.   

A temperance advocate, she anguished over his uncontrollable alcohol consumption.

Franklin Pierce was a Southern sympathizer. As president, he signed into law the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which reversed the Missouri Compromise and launched the nation toward civil war.

Yet Pierce possessed a spirited interest in the wide world, political and military ambitions, and a jovial temperament. Only the losses of his sons seem to have transformed him, temporarily, into the reverent man Jane wished him to be. 

 

 

***

 

If she had not been the wife of a president, her afflictions would not merit a second glance.

Still, considering how much attention has been showered on other First Ladies, Jane Pierce may deserve greater scrutiny—especially since so many of them were depressed.

 

Jane Pierce doll,
First Ladies of the White House 
by Mary Ann Horneman (1941)

Her biographers have been few, with research hampered by a missing diary which belonged to Jane’s Aunt Abigail, who lived in the White House between 1853 and 1855 and kept company with her disconsolate niece.*

Eventually the diary entered the possession of a descendant who happened to be a professor. Surely he was aware of the importance of sources. After his death in 1957, however, his wife lost or hid the diary. By now, experts agree, it is gone.

Fortunately, a few people had the chance to review the diary, and excerpts are sprinkled through a few books. One line that has always grabbed me is: “. . . gloom engulfed her and she sat for the rest of the day in a stupor.”

Jane Appleton was reared in a puritanical home where God’s will was believed to determine every facet of existence, and salvation was not guaranteed. Such an environment would certainly induce anxiety.

In her time, women of her socio-economic class and race conformed to four values: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. These constituted the “cult of true womanhood” as defined by the scholar Barbara Welter in 1966. 

Jane exemplified those virtues. Still, even if she felt trapped and rebellious, as did many women like her, it would not fully explain her intractable despondency.

Tuberculosis has destroyed billions of lives, having originated more than 70,000 years ago. The bloody cough, the exhaustion, the high fever—all contributed to but probably did not cause Jane’s wretched emotional state.

 

Jane Pierce pictured in an early guide
to the Smithsonian's First Ladies Exhibition

Her father, a minister, died when she was 13. Her first son died in infancy and the second at age four. Eleven-year old Benny died before his parents’ eyes during a horrific train derailment.

No one recovers from the deaths of children.

Yet Jane Pierce was incapacitated by lifelong anguish. She came into the world and exhaled misery.

I wish that diary would turn up.

 

 

 

*Abigail Kent Means

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2025/06/conjuring-jane-pierce.html

The First Lady is upstairs today

Now that the White House has celebrated Halloween, Melania Trump will retreat once more to the second-floor family residence.  Apart from the turkey pardon and Christmas parties, she probably will appear infrequently in public until 2019. 

From the start, this First Lady has been unusually remote; socially and emotionally unavailable to the American people.  She does not wish to conform to the modern conventions associated with the First Lady, which emerged around 1902 during the Theodore Roosevelt administration.

Edith Roosevelt became the first president’s wife to grant routine press coverage of herself and her children.  Such access increased over time.  During the past three decades, as the media grew and the realm of First Ladies scholarship intensified, historians have drawn ever greater attention to the role of the president’s wife, raising expectations that the women will engage fully with the public.

             

But now, nearly 20 months into the Trump presidency, we must conclude that the First Lady is most interested in engaging with a very small circle of friends and family.  

Historically, she is not alone. For antecedents, look to the dark, rainy first half of the nineteenth century.  One might not recognize the names outright, for the women are obscure. Just like Melania Trump, they were reluctant to leave the second floor of the White House.

             

The women were Margaret Taylor, Abigail Fillmore, and Jane Pierce, three ladies who never wanted their husbands to run for president and definitely didn’t care to move to the capital city that was flourishing at the edge of a swamp.

Margaret Taylor

          

Not everyone regarded the city with dread.  By 1850, notwithstanding the summertime mosquitoes and damp winter chill in the president’s house, Washington, D.C. captivated many a visitor. None other than the vivacious Dolley Madison (wife of the fourth president) made things sparkle. She hosted brilliant salons and encouraged the White House ladies who followed her to step lively.

             

Dolley died in 1849, the year before Margaret Taylor arrived at the executive mansion.  But it mattered not to Margaret, Abigail and Jane, who brushed off society and politics and participated in few White House events.

             

To be sure, they had reasons.

             

Margaret grieved for her daughter, the first wife of Jefferson Davis, who died of malaria while visiting Louisiana during “fever season.”

Jane Pierce

          

Jane mourned the loss of her 11-year old son who died before her eyes in a train accident less than two months before her husband was sworn in as president.

             

Abigail’s health was poor.

In turn, the three women stayed upstairs, read the Bible, and welcomed a few friends to the parlor.  They sent their daughters and nieces downstairs to receive visitors and preside over dinners.

             

The wives of presidents Taylor, Fillmore and Pierce were cast from the antebellum feminine ideal that historians refer to as “the cult of true womanhood,” which was fostered by a patriarchal system. The ideal virtues were piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.

Abigail Fillmore

           

Melania Trump conforms, in part, to the type. Her adventures in modeling took her where no First Lady has gone before, so one might cross off purity. Her manner is largely compliant, however, and she prefers to be at home.

             

And so there exists an odd affinity on the second floor of the White House. 

On one hand, here is a woman who owes her rise to the twenty-first century’s lack of inhibitions.  On the other hand, there are three Victorian ladies dressed in black gowns with stiff lace bodices, bent over their embroidery and asking for smelling salts.   

Antebellum White House

 
Melania montage by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/10/the-first-lady-is-upstairs-today.html

First Lady Afternoons

First Ladies Hall pamphlet, 1968.
(Note that Mrs. Johnson's gown, far left, is the most recent dress on display.)

She must have been in her early 50s but seemed ancient to me with her gray hair, wavering voice, and thick eyeglasses.

I’m sure that she offered a snack but the real treat lay spread out on a large table: intricate drawings of the First Ladies’ gowns, which were then displayed on mannequins in vast glass cases in the Smithsonian Institution, along with the muslin patterns she was creating.

Going back to a 3rd grade homework assignment, First Ladies completely, utterly fascinated me. But during the 1960s, just a few anthologies contained brief sanitized biographies of the women. Bottom line: if you were interested, it was largely about the gowns.

Mrs. Sally Taft had been commissioned by the collection’s curator to preserve the designs and details of the dresses that were starting to fall apart after years of being exhibited under bright hot lights. A very fine seamstress, she had worked in couture at some of New York’s best department stores. Her correspondence with the curator, which resides in the Smithsonian’s archives, suggests that she came to the project through a mutual acquaintance at Julius Garfinckel’s, an exclusive women’s clothing store in Washington, D.C.

One of my mother’s friends had arranged the visits with Mrs. Taft. Thrilling! Every few months during my last years of elementary school, instead of walking home from school I went over to her house. I knew a great deal about the First Ladies and she knew everything about the dresses. We found lots to talk about. 

The ladies who followed Eleanor Roosevelt into the modern era, along with Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and Dolly Madison, held little interest for me. They were far too popularized. But the mournful mid-19th century women whose husbands were military heroes (of a sort), who never wanted to come to Washington, rarely saw visitors, holed up on the dark second floor of the White House – very intriguing. Perhaps unbalanced, too, although I didn’t quite know the word.

One of my clearest memories is of Mrs. Taft describing how the gowns exuded the ancient odor of perspiration.

So many years later, the Smithsonian’s exhibition smartly focuses on role and image with minimal whitewash. Some gowns and memorabilia are also displayed. The staff includes experts in chemistry and textiles as well as historians.

Sally Taft’s muslin patterns are history, too. It’s hard to argue with technology. What I love most about this story, though, is that in 1966 the Smithsonian curator didn’t think the job called for an academic. She was just looking for the best dressmaker she could find.

*Mrs. Sally Taft was not related to President Taft.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/first-lady-afternoons.html