After graduating from Harvard College at the head of the class of 1801, he returned to Salem and entered the India trade with his father.
Neither a mercantile nor a political life satisfied Pierce, and in 1826 he accepted the position of Librarian at Harvard.
He left in manuscript part of a History of Harvard University, from its foundation, in the year 1636, to the period of the American Revolution.
Quincy, in his History of Harvard, describes the book as "of great merit and usefulness, possessing the traits of that soundness of judgment and accuracy of investigation so eminently his characteristics."
His son Benjamin Peirce was a distinguished mathematician, and for many years Perkins professor of astronomy and mathematics.