The Health of the First Ladies: Medical Histories from Martha Washington to Michelle Obama (13 page)

Jane did not appear at the dining table when company was present. Neither did she give any attention to Washington society nor accompany the president to the customary ceremonial events. Only rare private outings with select intimate friends and her husband occurred.
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Instead Jane spent her time either in writing to her dead Bennie asking his forgiveness or participating in spiritualist activities in attempting to communicate with Bennie’s spirit. She may have held White House séances; there is an uncorroborated report that the infamous Fox sisters visited Jane to conduct a such a session. Reports also claim that she actually was successful in communicating with her three deceased children. A prior psychic premonition had warned that a tragic event would befall the family after Franklin Pierce was elected president. The death of Bennie fulfilled this prediction.
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Jane Pierce, wife of Franklin Pierce. Her White House years were marked by deep depression (Library of Congress).

Seventeen days after Bennie’s death, his distraught mother wrote: “Oh! You were indeed a part of mine and of your father’s heart. When I have told you dear boy how much you depended on me, and felt that you could not do without me—I did not say too much how I depended on you and oh! My precious boy how gladly would I recall all that was unreasonable—or hasty—or mistaken in my conduct toward you. I see surely and I did frequently see afterward that I had wronged you.—and would have gladly acknowledged if only that I feared it might weaken your confidence in me and perhaps on that account not be as well for you.”
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On New Year’s Day 1855, after two years of mourning, Mrs. Pierce finally made a social debut, receiving with her husband at the annual White House reception. In August she was well enough to travel to White Sulphur Springs for a week’s respite. She again received with her husband at the 1856 New Year’s reception. Jane finally had assumed her first lady responsibilities, but only as much as her physical and mental heath would allow.
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Jane Pierce’s psychotic depression while grieving Bennie’s death transpired amid a life of darkness, sadness and disappointment. She suffered from poor physical health, a strict New England Calvinist upbringing, and an austere childhood. In addition, her disappointments were major, including the early deaths of the Pierces’ first two sons, her marital mismatch with Franklin, and an alienation from the politics that were the core of her husband’s adult lie. Mrs. Pierce was chronically ill, from her childhood through her marriage, in the White House and beyond. Family letters mention her frailty, vulnerability to winter colds, digestive and eating disorders, melancholy, anxiety and sleeplessness. At the time of the Pierce’s 1834 wedding Jane was described as tubercular, frail, and in poor health.
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From the beginning, Jane Pierce hated the political life of Washington she was compelled to experience during Franklin Pierce’s terms as a U.S. congressman and a senator. Her customary reaction was immediate retirement to her room with a bad cold upon her Washington arrival. Her Washington stays were often marked by digestive complaints, vomiting and a lack of appetite. Respiratory infections with cough and fever were frequent. For a considerable part of the 1837–1838 congressional session she was ill, confined to her boardinghouse room. Mrs. Pierce complained at the time: “Oh. how I wish he was out of political life! How much better it would be for him on every account!” She did not recover until reaching “the refuge of the New Hampshire hills.”
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The only named physician who treated Mrs. Pierce during this Washington illness was Dr. Thomas Sewall, who, according to Jane, “did his best.” Sewall had previously attended both first lady Letitia Tyler and her husband, Franklin Pierce. Neither Sewall’s treatment nor his diagnosis is recorded. In retrospect Venzke proposed that Jane’s respiratory symptoms suggested tuberculosis. Though not a physician, Venzke’s diagnostic acumen was expert, since Jane died from tuberculosis in 1863.
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Away from Washington when Congress was out of session, Jane visited her sisters in Massachusetts to seek “modern medical treatments” for her physical ailments. One treatment was the application of leeches to remove her “blood toxins.” The use of leeches was common during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a form of bloodletting, much milder than either venesection or blistering and cupping. (Medical interest in leech therapy recurred in the 1980s with its use in reconstructive and plastic surgery.)
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There is no record of physicians or medical treatment during the Pierce presidency. After the Pierces left the White House they remained in Washington as the guests of William Marcy, Pierce’s secretary of state. In the summer, they visited several locations in New England. The death that same summer of Jane’s good friend and companion, Abby Means, added to her gloom.
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Back home in Concord, New Hampshire, Jane’s condition grew steadily worse and a diagnosis of tuberculosis was confirmed. At the time, the only treatment for tuberculosis was a change of climate and, after consulting with her physicians, the Pierces set out in search of a cure. They sailed for Europe in the fall of 1857 and stayed for six months on the Portuguese island of Madeira. For the next few years, they sought respite in Spain, France, England, and Italy. But even the most famous European spas could not restore Jane’s health and eventually they stopped in the Bahamas. “All during her travels, Jane thought of her dead children. She always carried a little box containing locks of their hair. She always kept Bennie’s Bible with her wherever she went.” She died on December 2, 1863, in her Concord home at the age of fifty-seven years, nine months.
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Jane Pierce was born into a strict Calvinist New England family. Her father was the pastor of the local Congregational church when, at age thirty-five, he was elected as the second president of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Jesse Appleton was driven by duty, first to God, then to the students and responsibilities at the college, and only then to his family. His mission was “to cultivate moral and religious feeling, and to lead them to the knowledge and acceptance of the Savior.” His life was austere, his diet sparse, and his sleep limited. He died from tuberculosis at age forty-three in 1815 when Jane was nine. Her mother, Elizabeth Means Appleton, “devoted herself solely to the severer aspects of her religion and to contemplation of the awful fate of those who died without due preparation for the judgment of God.” Jane Pierce was familiar with death at a young age, as both her young brother and father died. Her Calvinistic belief in predestination may have tempered her sorrow.
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In 1835 Jane was pregnant with the Pierces’ first child but was too frail to accompany her husband to Washington when he departed for the new term of Congress. On February 2, 1836, Franklin Pierce, Jr. was born, only to die just three days later. Congressman Pierce remained in Washington and never saw his son. On June 2, 1839, Jane’s younger sister Francis Packard died. At the time Jane, confined to a Concord rooming house, was pregnant with the Pierces’ second child. On August 27, 1839, when the Pierces’ second son, Frank Robert, was born in Concord, his father again was absent in Washington. Their third son, Benjamin (Bennie), was born on April 13, 1841. When Frank died from typhus at age four in Concord, Franklin was mostly absent, tied up with the U.S. Senate’s business in the nation’s capital. “The loss of their third and last son unquestionably caused the ultimate destruction of Jane Pierce as a functional member of society.”
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Jane Appleton was 28 years old when she married Franklin Pierce, a marriage described as a “disaster almost from the start. The couple was completely mismatched—she, a shy reclusive sickly introvert and he an outgoing robust extrovert.” The Pierce family was the polar opposite to the Appletons; the good humor of the Pierces contrasted with the Appletons’ somberness: “Her husband presented quite a contrast, buoyant, vain, and social, at home in political caucus and tavern…. They were ill-mated, but for thirty years they lived together.”
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Politics was completely incompatible with Jane’s retiring personality. Over her objections, Pierce was elected to the United States Senate and began his six-year term in 1837. Her importuning to abandon politics finally had success when her husband retired from the Senate in March 1842, one year before his term’s expiration. For the next ten years Jane was spared the disruption of shuttling with her children between the Pierce’s New Hampshire home and Franklin’s political responsibilities in Washington.
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Jane Pierce’s hatred and fear of politics restrained her husband from accepting attractive governmental opportunities. He turned down an appointment to return to the Senate when Levi Woodbury’s appointment to the Supreme Court created a vacancy. Subsequently he
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efused the nomination for governor of New Hampshire, a post his father had held. In August 1846, President James Polk invited Pierce to be attorney general of the United States. He took a week to think it over before he declined. At the time, Jane was in worse health than she had been when he left public life.
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Pierce’s quest for the 1852 Democratic nomination for the presidency was a shock to his wife, who fainted when informed of his nomination. She fervently prayed for his defeat. Pierce was haunted by his son Bennie’s response to the news of his nomination: “[I] hope that we won’t be elected for I should not like to be in Washington and I know you [his mother] would not either.” When Franklin Pierce was elected the 14th president of the United States “Mrs. Pierce could not stand it; the results were too dreadful.”
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The presidency of Franklin Pierce (1853–1857) has been universally considered a failure, due in great extent to his inability to prevent the secession of the Confederate states a few years later. Gara, in his history of the Pierce presidency, concluded: “In light of subsequent events, the Pierce administration can be seen only as a disaster for the nation.”
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The C-SPAN rankings of presidential leadership, according to 65 historians and professional observers of 42 presidents, rated Franklin Pierce number 40 and 39 in its 2009 and 2000 polls respectively.
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“Franklin Pierce … was bereaved and guilt ridden. This, of course, affected his ability to perform his official responsibilities…. [I]llness, both physical and mental, at times seriously interfered with Franklin Pierce’s Presidential duties and responsibilities…. As a result Pierce was a guilt ridden, vacillating and ineffective President. He was one of the least effective in our history [at a] period when strong and effective leadership was desperately needed.”
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The full extent to which Jane’s emotional and physical collapse contributed to President Pierce’s inability to thwart the rush to secession and war may never be known. By blaming their son’s death on her husband’s presidency, Jane caused Pierce to be preoccupied by guilt and sapped of any real motivation. Throughout his administration, as a result, Pierce lost all interest in the presidency and the burning issues of the day. His term unfortunately occurred during a critical and extremely grave period of sectional crisis. By failing to act, he allowed the country to drift toward civil war.
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“It is probable that he found difficulty dealing with many of the resulting problems, including his wife’s persistent depression and almost total withdrawal, exacerbation of his long- standing misuse of alcohol.” “Pierce forever had to face Jane’s bitterness that his presidency had been ‘purchased by the sacrifice of Benny.’”
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“There is something in this great, unsocial house which depresses my spirits beyond expression.”
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Louisa Catherine Johnson, the second of seven daughters (there was one son) of a prominent American expatriate family, married John Quincy Adams, the son of a sitting American president. The wedding was at London’s All Hallows Barking parish church on July 26, 1797. Louisa was twenty-two and had lived mostly in England and briefly in France. She was to set foot for the first time on United States soil in 1801 at age twenty-six. She is the only American first lady born abroad.
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