The inauguration of Franklin Pierce as the…
March 1853 CE
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney administers the presidential oath of office.
Pierce affirms the oath of office rather than swear it, and is also the first president to recite his inaugural address from memory.
Pierce's only surviving child had been gruesomely killed in a train accident in January.
King, ill with tuberculosis, is in Cuba in an effort to recover in the warmer climate, and is not able to be in Washington to take his oath of office on March 4.
By a Special Act of Congress, he will be allowed to take the oath outside the United States, and will be sworn in on March 24, 1853.
He is the only vice president to be sworn in while in a foreign country.
King will die forty-five days into his term, and the office will remain vacant for the balance of it. (Prior to ratification of the Twenty-fifth Amendment in 1967, no constitutional provision exists for filling an intra-term vacancy in the vice presidency.)
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