A self-made Jacksonian Democrat who became a Republican prior to the Civil War, Stephen Clark Foster was born in Machias, Maine on December 24, 1799.
After attending the common schools in Machias he learned the trade of blacksmith from which he evidently graduated to become a successful shipbuilder.
Foster was elected to the Maine House of Representatives from 1834 to 1837 and again in 1847. In between terms in the Maine House he served a term in the Senate, acting as its presiding officer in 1840.
Sometime in the 1850’s Foster joined the new Republican Party and was elected to represent Maine in the Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Congresses, serving from March 1857 to March 1861.
Evidently not a firebrand anti-slavery Republican, he attended the peace convention held in Washington in 1861 whose purpose was to find ways to avert the impending conflict.
He died in Pembroke, Maine on October 5, 1872, at the age of seventy-three.