Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. II.djvu/230

180 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS Mr. Pierce sustained President Jackson in oppos ing the so-called internal improvement policy. In 1837 he was elected to the U. S. senate. He was the youngest member of that body, and had barely arrived at the legal age for that office when he took his seat. In January, 1840, he spoke upon the Indian war in Florida, defending the secretary of war from the attacks of his political opponents. In December of the same year he advocated and carried through the senate a bill granting a pension to an aged woman whose husband, Isaac Davis, had been among the first to fall at Concord bridge on April 19, 1775. In July, 1841, he spoke against the fiscal bank bill, and in favor of an amendment prohibiting members of congress from borrowing money of the bank. At the same session he made a strong speech against the removal of government officials for their political opinions, in violation of the pledges to the contrary which the Whig leaders had given to the country in the canvass of 1840. During the five years that he remained in the sen ate it numbered among its members Benton, Bu chanan, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Woodbury, and Silas Wright, an array of veteran statesmen and intellectual giants who had long been party lead ers, and who occupied the whole field of debate. Among such men the young, modest, and compara tively obscure member from New Hampshire could not, with what his biographer calls "his exquisite