Jane Pierce

Jane Pierce had already experienced the deaths of two sons when her husband, Franklin Pierce, was elected president. Then, two months before the inauguration in 1853, their only surviving child, Benjamin, was killed before her eyes in a train accident. She never recovered from her loss. Desperate to communicate with her dead son, she had mediums hold a séance at the White House. It took her two years before she could fulfill her official White House hostess duties for her husband’s presidency. Though Jane disliked politics, she supported the abolitionist movement and disapproved of Franklin’s signing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.