What he has done is of no importance, except as proving
what he can do. And it is on this score, because they see in his public
course the irrefragable evidences of patriotism, integrity, and courage,
and because they recognize in him the noble gift of natural authority,
and have a prescience of the stately endowment of administrative genius,
that his fellow-citizens are about to summon Franklin Pierce to the
presidency. To those who know him well, the event comes, not like
accident, but as a consummation which might have been anticipated, from
its innate fitness, and as the final step of a career which, all along,
has tended thitherward.
It is not as a reward that he will take upon him the mighty burden of
this office, of which the toil and awful responsibility whiten the
statesman's head, and in which, as in more than one instance we have
seen, the warrior encounters a deadlier risk than in the battle-field.
When General Pierce received the news of his nomination, it affected him
with no thrill of joy, but a sadness, which, for many days, was
perceptible in his deportment. It awoke in his heart the sense of
religious dependence--a sentiment that has been growing continually
stronger, through all the trials and experiences of his life; and there
was nothing feigned in that passage of his beautiful letter, accepting
the nomination, in which he expresses his reliance upon heavenly support.
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