English entered politics at a young age, becoming a part of Jesse D. Bright's conservative faction of the Indiana Democratic Party. After four years in the federal bureaucracy in Washington, from 1845, he returned to Indiana and participated in the state constitutional convention of 1850. He was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives in 1851 and served as its speaker at the age of twenty-nine. After a two-year term in the state house, English represented Indiana in the federal House of Representatives for four terms from 1853 to 1861, working most notably to achieve a compromise on the admission of Kansas as a state.