His only son, 11-year-old Bennie, was killed when their campaign train rolled off its tracks.
This happened to 14th President Franklin Pierce, who was born NOVEMBER 23, 1804.
Elected to Congress at age 29, Franklin Pierce was a Senator at 33.
He resigned from Congress during the Mexican-American War and enlisted as a private. He was eventually promoted to brigadier general.
Pierce's leg was crushed at the Battle of Churubusco.
Franklin Pierce ran for President against General Winfield Scott, whom he had served under during the War.
Before he died, Franklin Pierce was baptized in St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Concord.
Franklin Pierce was friends with the famous American writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the latter being with him the night he died.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in a biography of Franklin Pierce:
"Whether in sorrow or success he has learned...that religious faith is the most valuable...of human possessions...
With this sense, there has come...a wide sympathy for the modes of Christian worship and a reverence for religious belief as a matter between the Deity and man's soul."
President Franklin Pierce said in his Inaugural, March 4, 1853:
"It must be felt that there is no national security but in the nation's humble, acknowledged dependence upon God and His overruling Providence."
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