1852 U.S. presidential election

In 1852 Democrat Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a little-known former senator, won the presidency in a landslide with 254 electoral votes to 42 for Whig Winfield Scott, the general who had captured Mexico City. Pierce took about 51 percent of the popular vote and carried 27 of 31 states. Free Soil candidate John P. Hale won about 5 percent.¹

The Democrats needed 49 ballots to nominate Pierce as a compromise among their factions. Both parties pledged to accept the Compromise of 1850, including its harsh Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northern officials to help capture people who had escaped slavery. But the Whigs were split: Northern Whigs disliked the compromise, and Southern Whigs distrusted Scott as too close to antislavery leaders. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published that spring, was hardening Northern opinion. The Whig defeat was so total that the party never again ran a presidential nominee of its own. Two years later Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which shattered the peace he had promised.¹²