Purposes Just and Pacific: Franklin Pierce and the American Empire

The Administration of Franklin Pierce has frequently been the object of study for historians of antebellum domestic politics, but few have examined the contribution of the Administration's foreign policy initiatives and objectives. This paper demonstrates that Pierce's foreign policy drew from the same partisan well as his domestic politics: a strict interpretation of power under the Constitution and a strong sense of racial paternalism that had come to define the ideological core of Democratic Party by the 1850s. In the arena of foreign affairs, these two ideological principles worked at cross-purposes, as the adherence to small government hampered efforts to exercise paternalism abroad. Whilst Pierce and his lieutenants thus claimed few actual foreign policy achievements, they nonetheless provided a blueprint for an American empire founded upon racial paternalism that would emerge with a much larger and stronger American government at the close of the nineteenth-century.