The authoritative text of The Life of Franklin Pierce is the edition published by the Ohio State University Press as part of the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, approved for teaching purposes by the Modern Language Association. That text does not include Pierce's war diary, which was edited but not written by Hawthorne.
Because that edition was copyrighted, we could not use it as the basis for this hypertext. Instead, we use the text of the first American edition, published in in Boston in 1852 by Ticknor, Reed and Fields, and subsequently reprinted, and thus now in the public domain.
We have reproduced the text here without regard to the original layout or pagination. Em dashes are rendered as "--" (two hyphens or minus signs) without spaces on either side. The text is not justified to the right margin as in the original. Words orginally hyphenated at the ends of lines have been divided by hyphens or not, according to our best suppositions. Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation have not been modernized. In particular, what we would now call "Democratic Party" has not been capitalized. The original text is typographically undistinguished, with only a few words emphasized. Italic headings for Pierce's Mexican journal entries are rendered with the <em> tag, which shows as italic in many browsers.
Although HTML does not preserve page numbers, we have embedded "pb" tags in the source to indicate pagebreaks in the original. You can also jump to anchors at the beginning of paragraphs in each chapter. For example, "fp03.html#g05" links to the fifth paragraph of the third chapter of the book.