Charles Gordon Atherton (1804 - 1853)
Born at Amherst (NH); died at Manchester (NH).
Lawyer, state and national legislator.
Portrait by A. Gilbert, 1842.
Presented to the State by Mrs. Atherton, 1875.

Charles Atherton entered Harvard College at age fourteen, and graduated with the Class of 1822. The son of a famous New Hampshire lawyer, Atherton studied law in his father's law office for three years and was admitted to the New Hampshire Bar in 1825.

Atherton married (Ann Clark) in 1828. The couple lived in Dunstable, and in 1830 the Dunstable voters chose Atherton to be their State Representative. He served as Clerk to the State Senate (1831/32), then was reelected to the State House of Representatives for four successive one-year terms (1833/36). For three of those four years Atherton was Speaker of the House.

Atherton ran for national office. A Jackson Democrat, he was elected three times to the U.S. House of Representatives (served 1837/43). In 1843 he was elected to the United States Senate. He was defeated for reelection in 1849, but won in 1853, when President-elect Franklin Pierce made every effort to help Atherton in his campaign. He died at the beginning of his second term as a U.S. Senator, in 1853.

Atherton shared with his fellow Democrats a great unease over the issue of slavery. December 11, 1838 he introduced resolutions in the House that said in effect that Congress had no jurisdiction over slavery in the several states. His attitude was shared by many Americans, who saw slavery not as a moral question, but as a question of states' rights. For the rest of his political career he was known as "Gag" Atherton because of his effort to push the slavery issue under the rug. [Ultimately the issue split the Democratic Party and then the country, resulting in the formation of the new Republican Party and the Civil War.]

An intense political partisan, Atherton lost his 1849 bid for his second U.S. Senate term, but won in 1853. In 1853 the President-elect, New Hampshire's Franklin Pierce, wanted Atherton in his administration. Pierce was said to have engineered Charles Atherton's election to a second U.S. Senate term.

References: Charles H. Bell, The Bench and Bar of New Hampshire (1894); Edward F. Parker, History of the City of Nashua, NH (1897).