Youth and Early Career
Fessenden was born in Boscawen, New Hampshire. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1823, and then studied law. He was a founding member of the Maine Temperance Society in 1827. That year he was also admitted to the bar. He practiced with his father Samuel Fessenden, who was also a prominent anti-slavery activist. He practised law first in Bridgeton, Maine, a year in Bangor, and afterward in Portland. He was a member of the Maine House of Representatives in 1832, and its leading debater. He refused nominations to congress in 1831 and in 1838, and served in the Maine legislature again in 1840, becoming chairman of the house committee to revise the statutes of the state.
He was elected for one term in the United States House of Representatives as a Whig in 1840. During this term, he moved the repeal of the rule that excluded anti-slavery petitions, and spoke upon the loan and bankrupt bills, and the army. At the end of his term in Congress, he turned his attention wholly to his law business until he was again in the Maine legislature in 1845-46. He acquired a national reputation as a lawyer and an anti-slavery Whig, and in 1849 prosecuted before the United States Supreme Court an appeal from an adverse decision of Judge Joseph Story, and gained a reversal by an argument which Daniel Webster pronounced the best he had heard in twenty years. He was again in the Maine legislature in 1853 and 1854.
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