The Field of Blood
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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
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To my students past and present: They have given me more than they know
That blood would flow,—somebody’s blood,… before the expiration of your present session on that field of blood, the floor of Congress, I have fully expected.
—John T. Sargent to Charles Sumner, May 25, 1856
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The eleven volumes of French’s diary
French at the age of thirty-eight, 1838
Washington, as seen from Capitol Hill, 1834
The Capitol as seen from Pennsylvania Avenue, 1834
The crowded House floor, 1857
The Senate chamber, 1846
Members of the Thirty-sixth Senate, 1859–61
Detail from an Anti-Slavery Society broadside, 1836
Caricatures of Western, Northern, and Southern congressmen, 1858
John Dawson of Louisiana, 1844–45
A bowie knife of the sort worn by congressmen in the 1830s
Jonathan Cilley, ca. 1838
William Graves, ca. 1840
The rifle used by Cilley
French’s drawing of the dueling ground, 1838
Cartoon mocking Courier and Enquirer editor James Watson Webb, 1838
An anti-dueling broadside, 1838
Draft of the House’s second gag rule, December 21, 1837
John Quincy Adams, 1843
Henry Wise, 1840
“The Gladiators of the Senate! The Bulley’s of the House,” 1852
Joshua Giddings, ca. 1855–65
Henry Foote, ca. 1845–60
Thomas Hart Benton, ca. 1845–55
A cartoon depicting the Benton-Foote scuffle, 1850
Franklin Pierce during his presidential campaign, 1852
A cartoon mocking Pierce’s joint proslavery and antislavery reputation, 1852
Charles Sumner, ca. 1855–65
Preston Brooks, ca. 1856 (allegedly taken shortly after he caned Sumner)
Arguments of the Chivalry, 1856
“Democratic Platform Illustrated,” 1856
Lawrence M. Keitt, 1859
Galusha A. Grow, 1859
“Members of Congress Discussing the Kansas Question,” 1858
“A Scene in Congress—Spectator’s Gallery,” 1858
“Life in an American Hotel?,” 1856
Benjamin Brown French, ca. 1855–65
Union troops in front of the Capitol, May 13, 1861
Speaking platform on the day of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 1863
View of Washington, 1861
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Writing this book was an emotional process. Immersing myself in extreme congressional discord and national divisiveness at a time of extreme congressional discord and national divisiveness was no easy thing. At various points, I had to walk away and get some distance. At other points, unfolding events sent me scurrying to my keyboard to hash things out. Of course, there are worlds of difference between the pre–Civil War Congress and the Congress of today. But the similarities have much to tell us about the many ways in which the People’s Branch can help or hurt the nation.
Many years ago, when I began researching this book, it was far less timely and far more puzzling. There seemed to be so much violence in the House and Senate chambers in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Shoving. Punching. Pistols. Bowie knives. Congressmen brawling in bunches while colleagues stood on chairs to get a good look. At least once, a gun was fired on the House floor. Why hadn’t this story been told?
That question is answered in the pages that follow, which reveal for the first time the full scope and scale of physical violence in Congress between 1830 and the Civil War. Yet even knowing that answer, I didn’t fully grasp how such congressional fireworks could remain undercover until last year. In a long and intimate Politico interview, former House Speaker John Boehner revealed that some time ago, during a contentious debate over earmarks (items tacked onto bills to benefit a member of Congress’s home state), Alaska Republican Don Young pushed him up against a wall in the House chamber and threatened him with a knife.1 According to Boehner, he stared Young down, tossed off a few cusswords, and the matter ended. According to Young, they later became friends; Boehner was best man at Young’s wedding. And according to the press reports that addressed the incident, it wasn’t the first time that Young pulled a knife in the halls of Congress. In 1988, he reportedly waved one at a supporter of a bill that would have restricted logging in Alaska. (He also angrily shook an oosik—the penis bone of a walrus—at an Interior Department official who wanted to restrict walrus hunting in 1994, but that’s an entirely different matter.) Two of these confrontations made the papers when they happened, but only recently has the Boehner showdown come to light. Remarkably, even in an age of round-the-clock multimedia press coverage, what happens in Congress sometimes stays in Congress.
From a modern vantage point, it’s tempting to laugh—or gasp—at such outbursts and move on, and sometimes that’s merited. (The oosik incident is definitely worth a chuckle.) As alarming as Young’s knife-play seems, it says less about a dangerous trend than it does about a somewhat flamboyant congressman.
And yet congressional combat has meant much more than that—especially in the fraught final years before the Civil War. In those times, as this book will show, armed groups of Northern and Southern congressmen engaged in hand-to-hand combat on the House floor. Angry about rights violated and needs denied, and worried about the degradation of their section of the Union, they defended their interests with threats, fists, and weapons.
When that fighting became endemic and congressmen strapped on knives and guns before heading to the Capitol every morning—when they didn’t trust the institution of Congress or even their colleagues to protect their persons—it meant something. It meant extreme polarization and the breakdown of debate. It meant the scorning of parliamentary rules and political norms to the point of abandonment. It meant that structures of government and the bonds of Union were eroding in real time.2 In short, it meant the collapse of our national civic structure to the point of crisis. The nation didn’t slip into disunion; it fought its way into it, even in Congress.
The fighting wasn’t new in the late 1850s; it had been happening for decades. Like the Civil War, the roots of congressional combat ran deep.3 So did its sectional tone and tempo; Southern congressmen had long been bullying their way to power with threats, insults, and violence in the House and Senate chambers, deploying the power of public humiliation to get their way, antislavery advocates suffering worst of all. This isn’t to say that Congress was in a constant state of chaos; it was a working institution that got things done. But the fighting was common enough to seem routine, and it mattered. By affecting what Congress did, it shaped the nation.
It also shaped public opinion of Congress. Americans generally like their representatives far more than they like the institution of Congress.4
They like them all the more if they are aggressive, defending the rights and interests of the folks back home with gusto; there’s a reason why Don Young’s constituents have reelected him twenty-three times. The same held true in antebellum America; Americans wanted their congressmen to fight for their rights, sometimes with more than words.
This was direct representation of a powerful kind, however damaging it proved to be. The escalation of such fighting in the late 1850s was a clear indication that the American people no longer trusted the institution of Congress to address their rights and needs.5 The impact of this growing distrust was severe. Unable to turn to the government for resolution, Americans North and South turned on one another. The same held true for congressmen; despite the tempering influence of cross-sectional friendships, they, too, lost faith in their sectional other.6 In time, the growing fear and distrust tore the nation apart.
Toward the start of my research, I discovered poignant testimony to the power of congressional threats and violence. It took the form of a confidential memorandum with three signatures on the bottom: Benjamin Franklin Wade (R-OH), Zachariah Chandler (R-MI), and Simon Cameron (R-PA).7 And it told a striking story.
One night in 1858, Wade, Chandler, and Cameron—all antislavery—decided that they’d had enough of Southern insults and bullying. Outraged by the onslaught of abuse, they made a difficult decision. Swearing loyalty to one another, they vowed to challenge future offenders to duels and fight “to the coffin.” There seemed to be no other way to stem the flow of Southern insults than to fight back, Southern-style. This was no easy choice. They fully expected to be ostracized back home; in the North, dueling was condemned as a barbaric Southern custom. But that punishment seemed no worse than the humiliation they faced every day in Congress. So they made their plans known, and—according to their statement—they had an impact. “[W]hen it became known that some northern senators were ready to fight, for sufficient cause,” the tone of Southern insults softened, though the abuse went on.
The story is dramatic, but what affected me most when I first read it was the way the three men told it; even years later, they could barely contain themselves. “Gross personal abuse” had an impact on these men, and it was mighty. Not only did it threaten “their very manhood” on a daily basis, but by silencing Northern congressmen, it deprived their constituents of their representative rights, an “unendurable outrage” that made them “frantic with rage and shame.” To Wade, Chandler, and Cameron, sustained Southern bullying wasn’t a mere matter of egos and parliamentary power plays. It struck at the heart of who they were as men and threatened the very essence of representative government. They had to do something. And they did.
These men were doing their best to champion their cause and their constituents in trying times, and they said so in their statement. They had written it “for those who come after us to study, as an example of what it once cost to be in favor of liberty, and to express such sentiments in the highest places of official life in the United States.” They were pleading with posterity—with us—to understand how threatened they had felt, how frightened they had been, how much it had taken for them to fight back, and thus how valuable was their cause. In a handful of paragraphs, they bore witness to the presence and power of congressional violence.8
When I first read their plea, it brought tears to my eyes. It was so immediate and yet so far away. It was also stunningly human, expressing anger and outrage and shame and fear and pride all in one. Not only did it bring the subject of this book to living, breathing life, but it showed how it felt to be part of it. By offering a glimpse of the emotional reality of their struggle, Wade, Chandler, and Cameron opened a window onto the lost world of congressional violence.
The lessons of their time ring true today: when trust in the People’s Branch shatters, part of the national “we” falls away. Nothing better testifies to the importance of Congress in preserving and defining the American nation than witnessing the impact of its systemic breakdown.9
Joanne B. Freeman
January 11, 2018
INTRODUCTIONS
TOBACCO-STAINED RUGS AND BENJAMIN BROWN FRENCH
Charles Dickens was intrigued by many things during his 1842 visit to America, but in Washington one thing stood out: tobacco chewing. The practice repulsed him wherever he found it, but it was “in its full bloom and glory” in the nation’s capital, “the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva.”1 Looking on from a seat of honor on the House floor, he found it “remarkable … to say the least, to see so many honorable members with swelled faces,” their chairs tilted back and their feet on their desks, shaping a “plug” with their penknives, “shooting” the old plugs from their mouths “as from a popgun” and “clapping the new one in its place.” And heaven help anyone who dropped something on the spit-spattered floor. “I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the floor,” he advised, “and if they happen to drop anything … not to pick it up, with an ungloved hand on any account.”2
It’s a striking image that’s all the more striking because it was true.3 Congressmen habitually tilted back their chairs and put up their feet—at least in the House. When Representative John Farnsworth (R-IL) did so during a visit to the Senate in the 1850s, a page reprimanded him. “You’re more dignified over here,” Farnsworth joked. (He “was certainly right about that,” the page later huffed.)4 And the floors were revolting. Although there were well over a hundred spittoons scattered around the House and roughly half that number in the Senate, congressional chewers often missed their mark—in part, because they could.5 Covering the carpets only made matters worse because congressmen didn’t think twice about dirtying the mats.6 Dickens was describing just what he saw.
The tobacco-juiced rugs of the House and Senate are an apt metaphor for Congress in the decades before the Civil War. Yes, there was soaring oratory on occasion. Yes, there were Union-shaking decisions being made. But underneath the speechifying, pontificating, and politicking was a spit-spattered rug. The antebellum Congress had its admirable moments, but it wasn’t an assembly of demigods. It was a human institution with very human failings.
This is a far cry from its conventional image as a lofty pantheon of Great Men like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. The names alone call forth images of staid men in black frock coats striking classical debating poses, one finger thrust in the air in emphasis. Even their contemporaries arrived in Washington expecting a string of bravura performances, particularly in the Senate. Writing home to his wife, the freshman representative David Outlaw (W-NC) declared himself disappointed; most speeches didn’t even stand up to stump speeches back home.7 The average member of Congress was just that: average. We forget that when we highlight the standouts.
Even if Congress had been filled with Clays and Websters, the times were demanding in ways that weren’t always awe-inspiring. Nations don’t tear themselves in two accompanied by poetic strains of eloquence alone. Congressional proceedings in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s weren’t pretty. The high-stakes political struggles of those decades were accompanied by insults and brawls as often as they were quieted—temporarily—by strategic compromises. Even the worthiest of congressional worthies had their ugly moments; swearing, blustering, threats, and personal insults (known as “personalities”) were coin of the congressional realm, and fisticuffs were common enough to seem routine. (“This session is like all other sessions that I have seen—except there has, as yet, been no fighting,” noted one onlooker, the “as yet” showing that he fully expected it.)8
To some degree, violent outbursts in the antebellum Congress are no surprise. These were violent times. There was the expulsion of Native Americans from their native lands and sweeping massacres of their people. There was rampant mobbing for a whole host of reasons: anti-abolitionism, racism, nativism. Between July and October 1835 alone, there were 109 riots nationwide.9 There was the war with Mexico between 1846 and 1848, a battle that enflamed the nation’s slavery problem and stoked secti
onal passions, laying the groundwork for violence to come. In the 1850s there was the murderously brutal fight over slavery and statehood in “Bleeding Kansas”; western expansion forced a national reckoning with slavery’s future that was bloody and fiercely fought. And of course, there was the institution of slavery itself and the violence and cruelty at its core.
Politics was also violent.10 There was hand-to-hand combat and rioting at polling places. On one memorable occasion in Washington in 1857, three nativist gangs—the Plug Uglies, the Chunkers, and the Rip-Raps—joined forces to terrorize immigrants casting votes, causing a riot. When the panicked mayor called in the Marines, the three gangs hauled a cannon into play, though they never fired it. By the time the brawl subsided, several people had been killed.11 State legislatures also erupted into uproars from time to time. In 1857, there was an all-out row in the Illinois legislature featuring “considerable wrestling, knocking over chairs, desks, inkstands, men, and things generally.”12 In 1858, state assemblies in both New York and Massachusetts dissolved into fisticuffs. “[T]here was a most heavenly time in the House for an hour or two,” gushed a New York Times reporter about the Boston outbreak. It “would have made a sensation even in Congress.”13 The Arkansas House deserves special mention. In 1837, when a representative insulted the Speaker during debate, the Speaker stepped down from his platform, bowie knife in hand, and killed him. Expelled and tried for murder, he was acquitted for excusable homicide and reelected, only to pull his knife on another legislator during debate, though this time the sound of colleagues cocking pistols stopped him cold.14
Congressional violence was of a piece with this world. As I researched this book, I discovered that between 1830 and 1860, there were more than seventy violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers or on nearby streets and dueling grounds, most of them long forgotten.15 This isn’t to say that all such fighting has vanished from view. Many studies of the coming of the Civil War note a surge of fighting in Congress in the 1850s. Most such books—and many more besides—offer a vivid account of the most famous violent incident: the caning of the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) in 1856.