Early Life and Education
Franklin Pierce was born on November 23, 1804 to Anna Kendrick and Benjamin Pierce in Hillsborough, New Hampshire at the Franklin Pierce Homestead. Franklin was the fifth out of eight children between Anna Kendrick and Benjamin. The father Benjamin Pierce was a frontier farmer who had been a Revolutionary War soldier and a state militia general. Benjamin Pierce was elected twice as Democratic-Republican governor of New Hampshire when Franklin was a young man.
Pierce's parents began schooling their children early on because they wanted them to have a better education than they had. Pierce attended school at Hillsborough Center and later transferred to the Hancock Academy in Hancock at the age of 11. While in the public schools, Pierce would often stay in school during recess to help his fellow students with their studies. He transferred to Francestown Academy in the spring of 1820. Friends recalled that just after he entered the school, he became homesick and returned home barefoot. Soon the boy walked the seven miles back to school. Later that year he transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy to prepare for college. In fall 1820, Pierce entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he joined literary, political, and debating clubs.
At Bowdoin he met the writers Nathaniel Hawthorne, with whom he formed a lasting friendship, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also met Calvin E. Stowe, Seargent S. Prentiss, and his future political rival, John P. Hale, when he joined the Athenian Society, a group of students with progressive political leanings.
In his second year of college, Pierce had the second lowest grades in his class, but he worked to improve them; he ranked third among his classmates when he graduated in 1824. In 1826 he entered Northampton Law School in Northampton, Massachusetts, and he later studied under Governor Levi Woodbury and Judge Edmund Parker in their practice in Amherst, New Hampshire.
Pierce was admitted to the bar and began a law practice in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1827.
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