[1] Pearce wrote a bill that granted Texas $10 million in compensation for agreeing with the state borders charted by the government.

[3] When he turned four years old, his mother died; his father moved to Louisiana to become a sugar planter, leaving his son in Alexandria to the care of grandparents.

He graduated in 1822 at the age of seventeen with honors and started studying law in Baltimore under Judge John Glenn and attorney David Hoffman (1784–1854), an American legal ethics pioneer and author of Fifty Resolutions in Regard to Professional Deportment (1836).

In 1825, Pearce moved with his father in Louisiana, and briefly engaged in sugar planting business, then he returned to Kent County, Maryland, in 1828, where he started the practice of law in Chestertown.

Pearce was again elected as a Whig to the United States Senate in 1843, and was re-elected in 1849, 1855, and 1861, the last time as a Democrat, and served from March 4, 1843, until his death in 1862.

In the Senate, Pearce served for nineteen years as chairman of the Committee on the Library (Twenty-ninth through Thirty-seventh Congresses).

In doing this he excluded all works calculated in his opinion to engender sectional differences, and when the Atlantic Monthly was established he refused to order it for the Library.

[10] Pearce wrote a bill that granted Texas $10 million in compensation for agreeing with the state borders charted by the government.