Benjamin Pierce fought in the Revolutionary War, was a sheriff, state legislator, and a local hero. However, his lack of education made him hesitate from a life of politics. He encouraged his son Franklin to be a politician. At 14, Franklin Pierce was sent to boarding school, then to Bowdoin College two years after that.

He wasn’t enthusiastic about school and came in dead last on the list of student standings his first year. He determined to do better. During the summer he made some money teaching. When he returned to college, he formed a marching unit. Younger students Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow drilled under his command and became friends with him.

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Millard Fillmore was born in 1800 in a log cabin to a poor tenant farmer in New York. He was named Millard after his mother’s maiden name. His father and uncle had been sold a land title sight unseen. The land turned out to be hard clay not good for farming. On top of that, the title was faulty and they lost the land. They ended up moving a few miles south where the land wasn’t much better.

Fillmore grew up doing farm chores. He had four brothers and four sisters. His father considered hunting and fishing (“sporting”) to be a waste of time. When Fillmore was 14, he was apprenticed to an ill-tempered cloth maker. He quit after 4 months, but his father found him another cloth-making apprenticeship that he stayed at for years.

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Taylor was born in Virginia in 1784, not far from the home of his distant cousin James Madison. His father was an officer in the Revolutionary War and was head of one of Virginia’s prominent families. However, his family moved to Kentucky shortly after he was born.

He was a wealthy plantation owner, a gentleman farmer, businessman, slave holder, and soldier. There were apparently skirmishes with Native Americans early in his career that are largely unreported. A lot about Taylor has been lost since his personal papers were destroyed in the Civil War (his son was a major general in the Confederate Army).

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James Knox Polk was born in 1795 in a log cabin in North Carolina, within twenty miles of Andrew Jackson, who was 28 years older. His family was Presbyterian, but his grandfather became a deist and Polk himself wasn’t baptized due to his father getting into an argument with the local minister. His family moved to Tennessee in 1806.

Young James was sickly due to urinary stones. In 1812, when he was 17, he survived surgery to remove the stones. He started attending the University of North Carolina when he was 20. At the time, the university was staffed by a single administrator, a single professor, and a few tutors. He graduated in 1818, but was too frail to travel home right away.

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William Henry Harrison grew up in a Virginia mansion (although when he later ran for president, he claimed to have grown up in a log cabin). He was the youngest of seven children. His father was a governor of Virginia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His mother was a relative of Martha Washington and also came from a wealthy family.

During the Revolutionary War, the family mansion was sacked (the British took 40 of the family slaves and also stole furniture and livestock) and the overused soil was beginning to produce fewer crops. Harrison therefore didn’t attend William and Mary like his brothers, but rather the less expensive Hampton-Sidney College. He then went to the Medical School of Pennsylvania. His father died when he was 18 and the family couldn’t afford to continue schooling him, so he joined the army.

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