January 6

On the 6th in 1853, as President-elect Franklin Pierce was traveling to Washington, D.C. for his inauguration, tragically the train he and his family were traveling in derailed. The tragedy was not that Pierce and his wife were shaken up; the tragedy was that they watched helplessly as Benjamin, their 11-year old son was crushed to death when the train left the tracks near Andover, Massachusetts. When he was taking the oath of office, Pierce chose to ‘affirm’ rather than swear and he did so on a law book, not a bible as had been customary. He was the first president to do so. Pierce was also the first president born in the nineteenth century and the only one to date to come from New Hampshire.