Franklin Pierce, born November 23, 1804, in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, and died October 8, 1869, served as the fourteenth President of the United States from 1853 to 1857. A Democrat, he signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise's ban on slavery in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase territory and let settlers in the new Kansas and Nebraska territories decide the question themselves, a decision that triggered violent conflict in Kansas and deepened national divisions over slavery ahead of the Civil War. His unpopularity and the divisions within his own party cost him renomination in 1856.
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