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?m=1 

Tuberculosis

 

Montefiore Hospital's Country Home Sanitarium,
early twentieth century

A father and son, both stricken with tuberculosis, died 30 years apart.

Their cases were ruinous, and little could be done to save either man.

Sure, there were advances in treatment between 1905, when Jacob Olechowsky died, and 1935, when Bernard Olcott died. Yet the most reliable treatment remained rest and fresh air until the introduction of the antibiotic streptomycin after World War II.

In Bedford, N.Y., where Jacob convalesced at the Montefiore Country Home Sanitarium, and in Asheville, N.C., where Bernard was a patient at the Oteen V.A. Hospital, both men carried sputum jars and submitted daily to temperature and weight checks. 

Jacob lived to be 39 and Bernard, 38.

When Sarah—widow and mother—rode a bus south to visit her son at the V.A. hospital, passengers scolded her for offering her seat to a pregnant Black woman.

That was the story Sarah told upon returning home to her daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law. It was the early 1930s, the bottom of the Depression, as they sat at the kitchen table in their small apartment in New York City.  

I doubt that Sarah reported on her son. Her heart was a lock box, and she shared little. One of her secrets may have been that Bernard was not Jacob’s son. Jacob had left Russia and sailed on the ship Dania, from Hamburg to Ellis Island in 1895. Bernard was born two years later.

However, many immigrants fibbed about their ages on passenger manifests and naturalization papers.

When so much is obscured, how can one know the truth?

We know that Jews who fled the Pale of Settlement were not permitted to travel through Germany unless they had booked passage on a German ship from a German port.

In 1902 Sarah and her two children made the arduous trip through Austria and Switzerland and into Belgium to reach Rotterdam, where they boarded the Statendam.

Arriving in New York, they were met by Jacob and went to live at the farm in Queens where he worked. He already showed signs of TB and transmitted the disease to his seven-year-old daughter, Rose, as well as five-year old Bernard.*

After two or three years, Jacob became so sick that Sarah could not manage. She made her way through the complicated city, seeking social services.

She must have been quite desperate although certainly not alone in her plight. Public health was in crisis and tuberculosis the deadliest disease among Eastern European immigrants, exacerbated by small, crowded tenements and sweatshops.

Bedford Hills, N.Y. train station, 1900s.
Tuberculosis patients disembarked here and rode in a carriage
up a hill to the sanitarium. 

By the late nineteenth century, wealthy German Jews had established hospitals in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities. Now, Sarah hustled to get Jacob to Montefiore Hospital’s Country Home Sanitarium in Bedford, N.Y.

First, he was examined and diagnosed. He returned for various tests and a review of his “civic merits.” Finally, he boarded a train to Bedford where he was met at the station and driven to the sanitarium. Fed and bathed, he met with caseworkers to figure out a plan. I’m sure they all spoke in Yiddish.

Forty miles north of the city, the sanitarium had opened in 1897. Perched on a hill, it accommodated 170 early-stage patients who could look out the big windows at trees, sky, and sunlight. Many would become well enough to return home.

Recent picture of the Bedford, N.Y. train station

There also was room for 50 men with advanced tuberculosis, known as “incurables.” Jacob counted among them, I believe, because he appears to have died within a year after he arrived.  

With help from charities, Sarah placed her children in an orphans’ asylum until she could get back on her feet. A fine seamstress, she carried her sewing machine on her back and worked in the garment district.

By 1915, Sarah had retrieved her children, and they lived in Brooklyn. Rose, a high school graduate, was a bookkeeper and Sarah an operator in a coat factory. This data, typical of the time and place, repeats itself row by row in the urban census.

Unsurprisingly, Bernard enlisted in the army. It was a way out. He traveled to the Mexican border where General Pershing was in fruitless pursuit of the revolutionary, Pancho Villa.

I like to imagine Bernard leaving New York and going west by train. Desperate to assimilate, he had changed the family name to Olcoff. Now he could smoke and joke and become a man, having been reared in a household churning with female anxiety. 

During World War I, Bernard served in the Aisne-Marne, Saint-Mihiel, and Meuse-Argonne campaigns in western France. He worked in the engineer corps, building and blowing up roads and bridges. He didn’t see combat but was gassed and came home to the U.S. without a future.

It was 1920. 

The Army sent him to Tuscon where a sanitarium had grown from three to 86 buildings. The men lived in open-air cottages, hoping to recuperate. 

Bernard Olcott, Arizona, 1920s

In the early 1930s, betting on mountain air, the doctors moved Bernard to Asheville, N.C. He died there at Oteen, the government’s largest hospital devoted to treatment of TB.

Bernard smoked a pipe and liked to catch butterflies and mount them under glass.

I believe he was fixated on acculturation. He made sure that Olechowsky eventually became Olcott. 

 

Oteen Veterans Hospital, 1920s
(National Library of Medicine)

 

*It is possible that Jacob acquired TB on the farm, drinking unpasteurized milk or working with infected cows.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2024/10/tuberculosis.html?m=1