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.

Northeastern North America

(1840 to 1851 CE): Epidemics, Industrial Development, and Social Reform

From 1840 to 1851, Northeastern North America experienced severe health crises, significant industrial expansion, transformative immigration patterns, and dynamic social and cultural movements. This era was characterized by devastating epidemics, burgeoning industries, powerful intellectual and artistic movements, and growing anti-slavery activism.

Epidemics and Public Health Crises

Cholera and Typhus Epidemics

In the early 1840s, cholera killed thousands in New York, a major destination for Irish immigrants. In 1843, a typhus epidemic originating from an earlier outbreak in Philadelphia claimed the life of the son of Franklin Pierce, future fourteenth President of the United States, in Concord, New Hampshire. Another severe typhus epidemic, from 1847 to 1848, resulted in more than twenty thousand deaths in Canada, primarily among Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Irish Famine. These immigrants contracted the disease aboard crowded "coffin ships," and health officials, unaware of effective sanitation and disease prevention methods, quarantined victims ineffectively. Additionally, the cholera outbreak of 1849–1850 claimed the life of former U.S. President James K. Polk in Nashville.

Industrial and Economic Growth

Bluestone Industry

The bluestone industry in Ulster County, New York, began with Silas Brainard recognizing the industrial potential of this deep-blue sandstone in the 1840s. By 1850, the local bluestone industry had become well-established, with significant quarries in Sawkill and Hurley, and major shipment points in Wilbur on the Rondout Creek and Malden on the Hudson. Bluestone from Wilbur, also known as Twaalfskill, notably paved the sidewalks of New York City. Before its commercial development, bluestone was utilized by natives and early settlers for tools and practical items such as chicken troughs, chimney caps, and tombstones.

Ice Harvesting and Brick Manufacturing

Ice harvesting continued to thrive along the Hudson River, with ice blocks preserved year-round in warehouses insulated with straw, serving as a rudimentary form of refrigeration for local communities including Rondout, Kingston, and Wilbur. Concurrently, large brick-making factories emerged near these shipping hubs, complementing the growing local economy.

Immigration and Canadian Developments

Irish and Scottish Immigration

Immigration resumed significantly after the War of 1812, with over nine hundred and sixty thousand arrivals from Britain to Canada between 1815 and 1850. These included refugees from the Great Irish Famine and Gaelic-speaking Scots displaced by the Highland Clearances. The influx of these immigrants deeply affected the demographic and cultural landscape of Canada and Northeastern United States.

Canadian Political Union

The Act of Union in 1841 merged Upper and Lower Canada into the Province of Canada, establishing responsible government across British North America by 1849. This union aimed to stabilize political tensions and foster more coherent governance, following earlier rebellions and demands for reform.

Social Reform and Abolitionism

Abolitionist Movement

The abolitionist movement intensified during this period, particularly under influential figures such as William Lloyd Garrison, who published the radical anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, and Frederick Douglass, who began writing for Garrison’s newspaper around 1840 before founding his own abolitionist paper, North Star, in 1847. While radicals like Garrison considered slavery a sin demanding immediate eradication, moderate abolitionists, including future president Abraham Lincoln, regarded slavery as a regrettable social evil rather than a religious transgression.

Transcendentalist Movement

The Transcendentalist movement, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, emphasized personal freedom, individualism, and a belief in the inherent goodness of people. Influenced by Romantic ideals, Transcendentalists sought to reconcile individual spirituality with empirical scientific understanding, profoundly shaping American thought and culture.

Artistic and Cultural Developments

Hudson River School

The Hudson River School of painting flourished, reflecting themes of discovery, exploration, and settlement, and depicting the American landscape as a harmonious pastoral setting where humans and nature coexist peacefully. These artists, inspired by European masters such as Claude Lorrain, John Constable, and J.M.W. Turner, portrayed nature as a divine manifestation, capturing both the idyllic agricultural landscapes and rapidly disappearing wilderness. Their work complemented contemporary literary voices like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Artists associated with the Hudson River School, such as members trained under the Düsseldorf school of painting and German painter Paul Weber, often composed their scenes from multiple observations made during arduous travels, creating realistic yet idealized landscapes.

Legacy of the Era (1840–1851 CE)

From 1840 to 1851, Northeastern North America navigated a transformative period defined by devastating epidemics, significant industrial and economic developments, dynamic immigration, robust abolitionist and reform movements, and profound artistic and intellectual achievements. These developments reshaped the region's cultural and social identity, set the stage for intensified sectional tensions, and further entrenched industrialization as a defining feature of American society.

A typhus epidemic that had broken out in Philadelphia in 1837 kills the son of Franklin Pierce (fourteenth President of the United States) in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1843.

There is real concern by the 1840s about preserving Cuba's colonial status.

Still fearful of a slave rebellion, or even an actual end to slavery forced on a weak Spain by Britain, the plantocracy looks toward the United States for a possible permanent relationship.

Painfully aware of the problems in the British Caribbean since the abolition of slavery and its impact on sugar production, the property owners see in the United States, particularly in the southern states, a slave-owning society similar to Cuba's own plantation economy.

A series of slave revolts in Cuba in the early 1840s increases apprehension and the desire for a permanent relationship with the United States.

United States interest in Cuba and in its strategic location grows, particularly after the war with Mexico and the acquisition of California.

Northeastern North America

(1852 to 1863 CE): Epidemics, Industrial Expansion, Cultural Flourishing, and the American Civil War

From 1852 to 1863, Northeastern North America faced severe public health crises, rapid industrial expansion, significant cultural achievements, and intensifying national tensions culminating in the American Civil War. This era witnessed serious epidemics, urban growth, booming industrial activities, and the peak of artistic movements, all occurring amid escalating debates over slavery, states' rights, and national identity.

Epidemics and Public Health

Cholera and Typhus Epidemics

In 1854, a severe outbreak of cholera struck Chicago, resulting in about thirty-five hundred deaths, around five and a half percent of the city's population. Cholera also devastated New York, exacerbated by crowded conditions due to a major influx of Irish immigrants. Concurrently, a typhus epidemic originating in 1837 continued into the 1840s and 1850s, killing thousands of Irish immigrants in Canada, who had fled the Great Irish Famine aboard overcrowded ships.

Industrial and Economic Expansion

Bluestone Industry Flourishes

The bluestone industry reached new heights, with extensive usage for sidewalks, curbstones, building foundations, and architectural adornments in cities such as New York and Kingston. Shipped from significant distribution points like Rondout and Malden on barges and tugboats owned by entrepreneur Thomas Cornell, bluestone became a defining feature of urban infrastructure. Notably, Kingston’s sidewalks and curbstones were predominantly made from bluestone. Architectural landmarks such as Kingston's Old Dutch Church, designed by Minard Lefever and built between 1850 and 1852, and an Italian villa constructed in 1858 by leather tanning entrepreneur Henry Samson on West Chestnut Street, exemplified the widespread architectural use of this distinctive stone.

Ice Harvesting and Brick Manufacturing

Ice harvesting along the Hudson River expanded, providing year-round ice preserved in straw-insulated warehouses for critical refrigeration in communities like Rondout, Kingston, and Wilbur. Simultaneously, large-scale brick manufacturing factories near these shipping hubs further strengthened local economies.

Indigenous Trade and Relations

Arapaho Trade Networks

The Arapaho actively traded with farming villages of the Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa along the upper Missouri River, exchanging meat and hides for corn, squash, and beans. Known as the "Colored Stone Village People" by the Arikara, possibly due to gemstones from the Southwest among traded items, and as E-tah-leh or Ita-Iddi ("bison-path people") by the Hidatsa, the Arapaho played a critical role in regional indigenous economies and relations.

Artistic and Cultural Peak

Hudson River School

The Hudson River School of painting reached its artistic zenith during this period, profoundly influencing American culture and aesthetics. Led by artists such as John Frederick Kensett, George Inness, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Doughty, Jasper Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and Frederick Edwin Church, the school was deeply inspired by Romanticism. Paintings from this period captured sublime landscapes of the Hudson River Valley, Catskill Mountains, Adirondack Mountains, and White Mountains of New Hampshire, emphasizing themes of exploration, settlement, and harmonious coexistence with nature.

Rising Tensions and the American Civil War

Political and Social Struggles

Tensions over slavery intensified, driven by abolitionist activism and political debates over states' rights. Radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator, and former slave Frederick Douglass, who published the influential newspaper North Star, heightened public awareness and resistance against slavery. These debates significantly polarized American society.

Outbreak of the Civil War

By 1861, conflicts between Northern free states and Southern slave states erupted into the American Civil War, fundamentally altering the nation. The Northeast mobilized extensive resources, both industrial and human, contributing significantly to Union efforts. The war demanded major shifts in manufacturing, infrastructure, and transportation, laying foundations for future industrialization and urbanization.

Legacy of the Era (1852–1863 CE)

From 1852 to 1863, Northeastern North America navigated an era defined by industrial growth, severe public health crises, cultural expression, and the deep national trauma of the Civil War. These events profoundly shaped the region's economy, culture, and social structure, with legacies that would influence American identity for generations.

United States interest in Cuba and in its strategic location grows, particularly after the war with Mexico and the acquisition of California.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Presidents James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan attempt unsuccessfully to purchase Cuba from Spain.

In 1854 three United States ministers to Europe signed a secret report, later known as the Ostend Manifesto, which calls for the United States purchase of Cuba or, if this fails, the forceful wresting of the island from Spain.

The power struggle in Belize between the superintendent and the planters in the 1850 tcoincides with events in international diplomacy to produce major constitutional changes.

In the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, Britain and the United States had agreed to promote the construction of a canal across Central America and to refrain from colonizing any part of Central America.

The British government interprets the colonization clause as applying only to any future occupation, but the United States government claims that Britain is obliged to evacuate the area, particularly after 1853, when President Franklin Pierce's expansionist administration stresses the Monroe Doctrine.

Britain yields on the Bay Islands and the Mosquito Coast in eastern Nicaragua, but in 1854, Britain produces a formal constitution establishing a legislature for its possession of the settlement in present-day Belize.

The first Harvard–Yale Boat Race—and the first American intercollegiate sporting event—takes place on August 3, 1852.

On May 24, 1843, with the arrival of the shell Whitehall in New Haven, Yale University had founded the first collegiate crew in the United States.

A year later, Harvard founded their boat club.

These boat clubs served primarily a social purpose, until Yale's 1852 issuance of a challenge to Harvard "to test the superiority of the oarsmen of the two colleges".

In this two-mile (3.2 km) contest, Harvard's Oneida prevailed over Yale's Shawmut by about two lengths, with Yale's Undine finishing third.

The first place prize is a pair of black walnut, silver-inscribed trophy oars.

The trophy oars are awarded to Harvard by General Franklin Pierce who in 1853 will become the fourteenth President of the United States of America.

Today the 1852 trophy oars are the oldest intercollegiate athletic prize in North America.

The incumbent Millard Fillmore, who had acceded to the presidency after the death of President Zachary Taylor in 1850, is one of three presidential candidates of a divided Whig Party in its last national election in 1852.

Due to Fillmore's support of the Compromise of 1850 and his enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, he is popular in the South but opposed by many Northern Whigs.

On the 53rd ballot of the 1852 Whig National Convention, Scott defeats Fillmore to clinch the party's nomination.

The Democrats are divided among four major candidates, who had trade leads through the first forty-eight ballots of the 1852 Democratic National Convention.

On the 49th ballot, dark horse candidate Franklin Pierce had won his party's nomination.

The Free Soil Party, a third party opposed to the extension of slavery into the territories, nominates Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire.

Pierce, a political unknown, sports side-whiskers more modest than those worn by the elderly Scott. 

Democrat Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire defeats Whig Winfield Scott of Virginia in the U.S. presidential election of November 2, 1852.

With no major policy differences between the two major candidates, the election had become a contest of personalities.

Though Scott had been the top U.S. general in the Mexican–American War and had had a long and distinguished military career, Pierce had also served in the Mexican–American War.

The Whigs are badly divided between their Northern and Southern wings, and Scott's anti-slavery reputation had further damaged his campaign in the South.

A group of Southern Whigs and a separate group of Southern Democrats had each nominated their own tickets, but both efforts failed to attract support.

Pierce and his running mate William R. King win by a comfortable majority in the popular vote and carry twenty-seven of the thirty-one states, while Scott wins 43.9% of the popular vote.

Pierce has won the highest share of the electoral vote since James Monroe's uncontested 1820 re-election.

In the aftermath of this overwhelming defeat the Whig Party will rapidly collapse as a national political force as internal tensions regarding the issue of slavery cause mass abandonment of the party.