Franklin Pierce is elected a U.S. Senator…

Franklin Pierce is elected a U.S. Senator in 1837 and takes his seat as the Senate’s youngest member, after having  been elected to the U.S. House of representatives in 1833 and, after serving two terms in Congress.

Staunchly partisan, he is also firmly opposed to abolition. (In 1853, Pierce is to become the fourteenth president of the United States.)

The New Hampshire lawyer had begun his political career in 1828, when he was elected, at twenty-four, to the lower house of the New Hampshire General Court, the New Hampshire House of Representatives, is a Democrat and a "doughface" (a Northerner with Southern sympathies).

A Bowdoin College graduate, he is the son of New Hampshire’s twice-governor Benjamin Pierce.

Both the Pierces had joined the Jacksonian party; Franklin, who had soon emerged as the party’s state leader, served as New Hampshire’s House speaker in 1831.