A Bodwell family story · Washington, D.C. · 1853–1857

A Less Than Esteemed Descendant

The Bodwell line to Franklin Pierce, 14th President of the United States

Not every famous descendant is one a family gets to be simply proud of. Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth President of the United States, is a genuine and well-documented Bodwell descendant — and he is also, by the consistent judgment of historians, one of the worst presidents the country has ever had. His single term did more than perhaps any other four years in the nineteenth century to hasten the country toward civil war. It's worth telling this connection honestly, background and all, rather than simply filing it under "famous relatives."

The country Pierce inherited

By the time Franklin Pierce took office in March 1853, the United States had spent thirty years papering over a widening crack between North and South. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had drawn a line across the Louisiana Purchase territory: slavery permitted below it, barred above. The Compromise of 1850, cobbled together after the Mexican-American War added vast new western territory, had bought a few more years of uneasy peace by admitting California as a free state while strengthening the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that compelled ordinary Northerners to assist in returning escaped enslaved people to bondage. Both compromises depended on both sides continuing to accept them. Pierce inherited a country where that acceptance was already running out.

A dark horse to the White House

Pierce was not the Democratic Party's first choice, second choice, or even obvious choice in 1852. He emerged after 48 exhausting ballots at the Democratic National Convention as a compromise "dark horse" candidate — a New Hampshire lawyer and former senator largely unknown outside political circles, but acceptable to both Northern and Southern factions of the party precisely because he had a Northern home state and consistently Southern-friendly views on slavery. He won the general election comfortably.

Then, two months before his inauguration, tragedy struck: Pierce, his wife Jane, and their eleven-year-old son Benjamin were in a train derailment near Andover, Massachusetts. Benjamin was killed instantly, crushed before his parents' eyes — the last of the couple's three children, all of whom died young. Pierce took the oath of office weeks later, reportedly still in deep grief, and delivered his inaugural address entirely from memory rather than reading a written text, one of the few genuinely admired moments of his presidency.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

The defining catastrophe of Pierce's term came in 1854. Senator Stephen Douglas, eager to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories partly to clear the way for a transcontinental railroad, proposed a bill that would let settlers in each territory decide the slavery question for themselves through a vote — a principle called "popular sovereignty." The catch was that this required repealing the Missouri Compromise's thirty-year-old ban on slavery in that part of the country. Pierce not only supported the bill, he used the full weight of his office to push it through Congress.

The result was immediate and violent. Pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers flooded into Kansas specifically to sway the vote, and the territory descended into years of armed conflict that came to be known as "Bleeding Kansas" — sacked towns, election fraud, and political killings, including the caning of Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate itself by a South Carolina congressman enraged over an anti-slavery speech. Pierce, who saw slavery chiefly as a question of property rights rather than morality, resisted sending federal troops to restore order for long enough that the violence became entrenched. The historian David Potter later called the Kansas-Nebraska Act one of the "two great calamities" of Pierce's administration. It also directly midwifed a new political party: the outrage it provoked among Northern Whigs, Free Soilers, and antislavery Democrats gave birth to the Republican Party within the year.

The Bodwells felt Bleeding Kansas at first hand. The Rev. Lewis Bodwell, a Free-State minister in Topeka, built a church by hand in the middle of it and narrowly escaped Quantrill's raiders in 1863. See Lewis Bodwell, Free-State Preacher.

Ostend, and a party's rejection

Pierce's foreign policy fared no better. In 1854, three of his diplomats secretly drafted a proposal — the Ostend Manifesto — recommending that the United States buy or, if necessary, seize Cuba from Spain, explicitly to add another slave state to the Union. When it leaked, Northern outrage was immediate, and the episode further destroyed what remained of Pierce's credibility. By 1856, his own Democratic Party declined to renominate him for a second term — the first time in American history a sitting elected president was denied renomination by his own party. He spent his remaining years a bitter, largely forgotten figure, and further alienated even his home region during the Civil War by remaining a public critic of Lincoln.

How the Bodwells connect

The line runs directly back to Henry Bodwell, the family's immigrant founder, through one of his daughters:

That makes Henry Bodwell the President's great-great-great-grandfather. The connection is documented in American Presidential Families by Hugh Brogan and Charles Mosley (Macmillan, 1993), and Henry Bodwell's profile is actively maintained by WikiTree's dedicated "US Presidents Project" specifically because of it.

• A single term, defined by one law.

  The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed a thirty-year-old ban on slavery north of the Missouri Compromise line and triggered years of armed conflict in Kansas.

• Rejected by his own party.

  In 1856, Pierce became the first elected sitting president denied renomination by his own party — a rare and unambiguous vote of no confidence from his fellow Democrats.

• Five generations removed.

  Henry Bodwell to Franklin Pierce runs through five generations and one marriage into the Merrill family — not a close relation, but a documented and traceable one.

Genealogy doesn't let a family pick and choose which descendants to claim. The same Bodwell line that produced Revolutionary War soldiers, a state governor, and a granite empire also produced, five generations on from Henry, a president whose central legislative achievement helped set the country on a direct path to civil war. It belongs on this site not as a boast, but as an honest and fairly humbling entry in the record — and as an invitation to see who else might turn up, once someone traces the other eleven children.