"It was while in the lower house of Congress that Franklin Pierce took that stand on the slavery question from which he has never since swerved a hair’s breadth."

"He fully recognized, by his votes and by his voice, the rights pledged to the South by the Constitution.... [W]hen the first imperceptible movement of agitation had grown to be almost a convulsion, his course was still the same. Nor did he ever shun the obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue the northern man who dared to love that great and sacred reality — his whole, united, native country — better than the mistiness of a philanthropic theory.... With his view of the whole subject, whether looking at it through the medium of his conscience, his feelings, or his intellect, it was impossible for him not to take his stand as the unshaken advocate of Union, and of the mutual steps of compromise which that great object unquestionably demanded.... Those northern men, therefore, who deem the great causes of human welfare as represented and involved in this present hostility against southern institutions, and who conceive that the world stands still except so far as that goes forward,— these, it may be allowed, can scarcely give their sympathy or their confidence to the subject of this memoir. But there is still another view, and probably as wise a one. It looks upon slavery as one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream. There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end; but the progress of the world, at every step, leaves some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose, could never have found the way to rectify."

From "The Life of Franklin Pierce" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, consulted on the occasion of the University of New Hampshire's idea that maybe it ought to rename its Franklin Pierce Law School.

"The phrase well-rounded derives from phrenology..."

I'm reading that in "Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians," by Justin Martin:

Whitman haunted the Phrenological Cabinet of Fowler & Wells.... On July 16, 1849, Whitman paid three dollars to have his skull read by Lorenzo Fowler. On a scale from 1 to 7, Whitman rated an exemplary 6.5 on such traits as benevolence, self-esteem, and firmness. He received one of his lowest marks for acquisitiveness, the pursuit of money and material gain. The low rating sat fine with Whitman, struck him almost as a veiled compliment. In his report, Lorenzo noted, “Size of head large . . . a certain reckless swing of animal will, too unmindful, probably, of the conviction of others.” He added, “You are yourself at all times.” Overall, Fowler painted a flattering picture of Whitman, casting him as a well-rounded modern man. (The phrase well-rounded derives from phrenology and is based on the notion that an actualized person has a nicely shaped head, without any distortive bumps.) The results greatly pleased Whitman.

Is that really true? I'm seeing in the OED that "well-rounded" to refer to visible objects like trees and horse's hooves is very old, but in reference to a person's character it does go back only to the mid-19th century when phrenology was was the rage. The oldest quote comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — "There was something so complete and well-rounded in his life." Longfellow was loathed by Whitman, enough so that — according to the above-linked book — Whitman once insulted a man by calling him "a young Longfellow." Whitman's crowd understood:

The jibe was brief, pithy, and a direct hit: where Poe was this crowd’s patron saint, Longfellow was its bête noire. As a sentimental poet, Longfellow was anathema to many in the Pfaff’s set. They snidely referred to him as “Longwindedfellow.” 

By the way, here's how Whitman (in 1856) insulted the President of the United States: "The President eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on The States."

Here's an article in The Atlantic — "The Shape of Your Head and the Shape of Your Mind" — that reinforces the claim that the term "well-rounded" comes from phrenology:

The national obsession with head size and shape... infected daily conversation. Many modern phrases trace their roots to phrenology, including “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” “well rounded,” and “shrink” (as in “shrinking” certain undesirable qualities). “Getting your head examined” also has phrenological roots. Though generally considered an insult today, in the past, it was just what most people wanted.....

ADDED: Pfaff's:

"Pfaff’s was the Andy Warhol factory, the Studio 54, the Algonquin Round Table all rolled into one."

Wait. I thought the Civil War was inevitable and no President could have averted it.

"Just before Franklin Pierce took office, in 1853, his son died in a train accident, and Pierce’s Presidency was marked by the 'dead weight of hopeless sorrow,' according to his biographer Roy Franklin Nichols. Morose and often drunk, Pierce proved unable to defuse the tensions that precipitated the Civil War."

So writes Evan Osnos in a New Yorker article that considers, among other things, whether the 25th Amendment procedure (for removing a President who is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office") could be used against a President with a psychiatric disorder.

But last week, Trump was sneered at as ignorant (if not racist) for saying that Andrew Jackson, if he'd been around "a little later" would have prevented the Civil War.

Jim Grossman (American Historical Association): [Trump] starts from the wrong premise - the premise that the Civil War should somehow have been avoided, and that someone more skilled on the White House could have avoided it. If one sees the Civil War as a war of liberation, which is what it was, then it shouldn't have been avoided. Had you compromised out the differences between the government and the confederacy, or between anti-slavery forces and southern slaveholders, the victims would have been the enslaved people of the south. If the president has the notion that it would be desirable to compromise that out, without emancipation, it is frightening.

David Blight (Yale): If it reflects anything, it reflects a kind of great man idea of history, that if you just have the right man with the right strength you can change the course of history. And that is plain nonsense.

In that view, what's the problem with hopelessly depressed, drunk Franklin Pierce?

By the way, the historians were also contemptuous of Trump's statement that Jackson "was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War."

Grossman: Jackson died 16 years before the Civil War began. You can quote me on that.

Blight: He was dead even before the compromise of 1850 for God's sake. He was dead at the time of the Mexican war....

This contempt led me to read "AMERICAN LION: Andrew Jackson in the White House." Here are a few excerpts that show people in Jackson's time speaking of civil war:

Bill Clinton — doing his first rally for Hillary — talks about Franklin Pierce and Abraham Lincoln and the need for a President who fits the spirit of the times.

I jumped in somewhere in the middle, when he was reminiscing about his early years with Hillary, drawing from what was meant to seem like a wellspring of emotion. Tears didn't come, but tears were at least implied. What a humble servant of the poor young Hillary was, he wanted us to know.

Then he shifted, for the ending, into some theory of the presidency, about how Presidents succeed when they are right for the time. He talks about Franklin Pierce, who, he tells us, couldn't possibly have succeeded in his time, and then Abraham Lincoln, who, he informs us, wouldn't have been a great President if he'd served in the 1950s. Lincoln was "gripped with crippling depression," and that would not have been successful in the 1950s, but it was just the frame of mind, he tells us, to suit the Civil War.

I don't know if Bill thought that theory up on his own or got it from some American history scholar, but of course, it led to the conclusion that Hillary is what goes with the particular time that we are in now. What exactly is it about Hillary and our time that fit together so well? I don't think he explained it.

Were we supposed to infer that the other candidates, whatever their positive attributes, are somehow not what is needed for our time? I don't know if Bill meant us to think about that, but it called to mind for me something Donald Trump said in his "Face the Nation" interview yesterday:

[O]ur country has no spirit.... But I would be very enthusiastic, like I am right now, toward the country. We need spirit. We need a cheerleader. President Obama is a bad cheerleader. I thought he would be a good cheerleader. I thought he would be a great cheerleader, actually. That's the one thing I thought, is that he was going to be a great cheerleader. He was really a big divider. We need cheerleading.

"Before President Obama, whose brown eyes are opaque when you look into them, presidents have been more known for blue eyes…."

"The ones with brown eyes, Richard Nixon and L.B.J., came a cropper."

And:

George Washington, blue-gray eyes; John Adams, blue; Thomas Jefferson, hazel; James Madison, brown; James Monroe, blue-gray; John Quincy Adams, black; Andrew Jackson, blue (Old Stonewall-blue eyes?); Martin Van Buren, blue; William Henry Harrison, brown. John Tyler, blue; James Polk, gray; Zachary Taylor, hazel (it figures); Millard Fillmore, blue; Franklin Pierce, gray; James Buchanan, blue; Abraham Lincoln, gray (huh?); Andrew Johnson, black; Ulysses S. Grant, blue. Rutherford B. Hayes, blue; James Garfield, blue; Chester A. Arthur, black (of course); Grover Cleveland, blue (but only once); Benjamin Harrison, blue; William McKinley, blue-gray; Theodore Roosevelt, blue (come on); William Howard Taft, blue; Woodrow Wilson, blue-gray; Warren G. Harding, gray. Calvin Coolidge, blue; Herbert Hoover, hazel (stop laughing); Franklin D. Roosevelt, blue; Harry Truman, blue; Dwight D. Eisenhower, blue (I know, I didn`t believe it, either); John F. Kennedy, blue; Lyndon B. Johnson, brown; Richard Nixon, brown; Gerald Ford, blue; Jimmy Carter, hazel (don't say it); Ronald Reagan, blue.

ADDED: I didn't really mean for this to be a separate post, but I accidentally published what was the draft of a comment to go in the "Eye Implants" thread, where I said something hyperbolic about blue eyes and got called on it. I don't delete posts. Ever. Not in 10+ years.

Put in charge of shoveling the hill of manure.

"[T]he campaign biography is an American tradition dating as far back as 1852, when Nathaniel Hawthorne put aside his nobler duties to produce a piece of unfortunate hackwork dedicated to spreading the gospel of Franklin Pierce."

(Hawthorne had known the candidate since their days together at Bowdoin College in the 1820's and was thus able to look beyond Pierce's spectacular weaknesses -- his unwillingness to oppose slavery, notably -- and produce a work of gaseous flattery.)

We've come a long way, baby. No self-respecting writer would deliver such a polemic today....

"Today" was March 2000. I'm quoting a NYT review of some damned book about Al Gore (which the reviewer informs us is "evenhanded"). Who cares about a 2000 book about Al Gore? I'm interested in