While looking something up in the Journal of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era, I came across this item, from the latest issue.

“History has rendered its verdict upon him”: The Franklin Pierce
Statue Controversy
Michael J. Connolly

For thirty years after Franklin Pierce’s death, the ex-president’s
reputation remained low in the estimation of historians and the
public. Most saw Pierce and his successor James Buchanan as primary
culprits in the sectional discord leading to the Civil War. Between
1900 and 1915, however, Pierce’s reputation improved, with the
sectional healing represented by Blue-Gray reunions on former
battlefields like Gettysburg and the election of only the second
Democratic president since the war, Woodrow Wilson. This process of
healing was particularly difficult in Pierce’s home state of New
Hampshire. In a classic case of contested memory, the Grand Army of
the Republic repeatedly stymied Democratic attempts to raise a statue
to the state’s only president and criticized Pierce as a traitor and
Confederate sympathizer. The Democrats, however, took over the New
Hampshire governor’s chair in 1913, and the legislature voted to honor
Pierce with a statue. In that small early twentieth-century window,
Franklin Pierce became a beneficiary of hard-earned sectional
reconciliation.

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