I still recollect his description of the feelings with which
he entered on his arduous duties--the feverish night that preceded his
taking the chair--the doubt, the struggle with himself--all ending in
perfect calmness, full self-possession, and free power of action when the
crisis actually came.
He had all the natural gifts that adapted him for the post; courtesy,
firmness, quickness and accuracy of judgment, and a clearness of mental
perception that brought its own regularity into the scene of confused and
entangled debate; and to these qualities he added whatever was to be
attained by laborious study of parliamentary rules. His merit as a
presiding officer was universally acknowledged. It is rare that a man
combines so much impulse with so great a power of regulating the impulses
of himself and others as Franklin Pierce. The faculty, here exercised
and improved, of controlling an assembly while agitated by tumultuous
controversy, was afterwards called into play upon a higher field; for,
during his congressional service, Pierce was often summoned to preside in
committee of the whole, when a turbulent debate was expected to demand
peculiar energy in the chair.
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