My archival digging revealed much more. (See Appendix B for details on the digging.) I found canings, duel negotiations, and duels; shoving and fistfights; brandished pistols and bowie knives; wild melees in the House; and street fights with fists and the occasional brick.16 Not included in that number is bullying that never went beyond words. Therein lies a problem, because the threat of violence had an enormous impact on congressional debate, but proving that someone has been bullied into silence is no easy matter. Some such episodes appear throughout the book, but only when substantiated by concrete evidence. There was far more bullying than appears on these pages. There was also more violence. The words that people used to describe these fights and showdowns—thrashing, bullying, pistoleering, stampeding—offer a revealing ground-level glimpse of the antebellum Congress. They expose the tobacco-stained rugs.
Detecting those rugs can be difficult; politics is often Janus-faced, presenting a composed public face to the world while masking a less savory private one. This was especially true in the first half of the nineteenth century. Washington newspapers had a tangled relationship with Congress; many of them survived on government printing contracts, and Congress did the granting, so local newsmen were well advised to make Congress look good by not recording the gritty details of congressional threats and violence. Describing congressional rumbles was also dangerous for reporters; record an insult the wrong way—or the right way—and you might become entangled in an honor dispute and get pounded by a congressman. As a result, when it came to fighting, the Washington press offered bare-bones details when it mentioned it at all, showing plenty of bravado but few fists and weapons. For a time, these partially censored newspaper accounts were the nation’s main news source for congressional proceedings, and the basis of the Congressional Globe, the period’s equivalent of the Congressional Record. Not until the rise of a commercially independent national press brought out-of-town reporters to Washington in large numbers was congressional violence reported in some detail, gaining its maximum impact through new technologies such as the telegraph in the 1850s—just as the nation’s slavery crisis began to peak.
Given such subterfuge, uncovering Congress’s rough realities isn’t easy. It requires an on-site witness. Yet not just any witness will do. To be of value, he must be a congressional insider, but not too far inside because he needs some perspective. He needs to be observant, with an eye for detail, an ear to the ground, and a flair for saying the unsaid. He needs to focus his attention on Congress and congressmen, routinely and religiously. And he needs a sense of humor and some self-awareness, two necessary gifts in the art of gaining insight into human nature. Benjamin Brown French was all of these things.
A House clerk from New Hampshire, French arrived in Washington in 1833 at the age of thirty-three to take up his job, and though he initially expected to stay only for a year or two, he ultimately made the nation’s capital his home. French wasn’t new to politics or to clerking; a loyal Democrat, he had been a clerk in his state senate and a member of his state house. Nor was he unschooled in the ways of the world; remarkably good-natured (“the king of pure drawling good nature,” according to one acquaintance), he made friends easily.17 French had a sense of humor and some self-awareness, and his job required them; first as a House clerk and then as the House Clerk, he spent his time serving congressmen, not all of them hail fellows well met.
In his new post, French was a professional Congress-watcher. He spent most of his working hours recording the House’s proceedings along with roughly ten other clerks. At first, his main job was copying documents.18 Promoted to assistant clerk in 1840, then elected Clerk of the House in 1845, French did less copying and more organizing, monitoring, record-keeping, and vote-tabulating, becoming a renowned expert on parliamentary points of order. He also spent lots of time in the House chamber, often at the Speaker’s table, reading reports or documents aloud, taking notes, and watching. Always watching.
In all of these ways, French is an ideal witness: a likeable insider with a sense of perspective, a deep and abiding interest in politics, and a job that forced him to focus on Congress. But there’s more. French was a writer. In New Hampshire, he edited a newspaper; in Washington, he published poetry, songs, and newspaper articles, and—most significant of all for our purposes—he kept a diary for much of his adult life. And not the kind of diary containing personal reflections and little else. French recorded what he did and described what he saw: the goings-on in the Capitol, the mood on the House floor, the stories that he heard, the tics and quirks of congressmen, and the choreography of their brawls, sometimes offering blow-by-blow narratives complete with sound effects (the pounding of the mallet, the Speaker’s cries of “order—order,” the countercries of “Damn him … Where are your Bowie knives?… Knock him down,” and the Clerk of the House screaming, “Order gentlemen, for God’s sake come to order”).19
The eleven volumes of French’s diary (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Although he missed stretches of time, French was a dedicated diarist. Between 1828 and 1870, he filled eleven volumes—more than 3,700 pages. At first, in New Hampshire, he kept a diary to remember things, but like most people who vow to keep a diary, he had his doubts. (“God only knows how long this fit will last. I may journalize this once & never more.”20) Alone in Washington without his wife, he wanted his diary to enable them to “live over again together the time that was passed in separation.”21 After his wife joined him, he used his diary to organize his thoughts and—he hoped—his life.22 Eventually, he realized that a “faithful journal” would be “a transcript of his life,” and from that point on, he was committed to it.23 (French’s twelve-year-old son Francis tried to live up to his father’s example with mixed results: “Thursday, February 7. I’ll be gaul darned if I know what I did today.”)24
For thirty-seven years, this self-described “journalizer” was surrounded by congressmen. During his first five years in Washington, he shared a boardinghouse with more than a dozen of them, first on his own and then with his wife. Later, as a house-renter and then a home-owner, he wined and dined them.25 (In a strange twist of historical fate, French’s house was torn down in 1895 to make way for the Library of Congress, which now houses his papers.) Always up for a friendly chat, he dropped in on congressional friends after hours. He even had a few short-term congressional boarders.26 And of course, during his fourteen years clerking in the House, French’s workday revolved around congressmen. Even after he lost the clerkship in 1847, he remained in Congress’s orbit, clerking for committees, filling in as a House clerk when needed, and, for a short time, struggling to earn a living as a lobbyist.27
It’s hard to imagine a better guide. French shows us a Congress of friendships and fighting; of drinking and dallying; of the passions of party and the prejudices of section and how they played out on the floor. He reveals the human dynamic of debate and the interaction of personality, partisanship, and policy. He shows how life in Washington affected politicking in Washington, and personally demonstrates how that politicking was advertised throughout the nation through the vehicle of the press.
He also shows how Congress and the nation changed over time, because he embodied those changes, most dramatically in his gradual conversion from a loyal Democrat eager to appease Southern allies to a devoted Republican with a deep-seated hatred of the Southern “slaveocracy.” By 1860, this most genial of men was armed and ready to shoot Southerners, a change of mind and heart experienced throughout the North.
French’s diary shows what fueled that transformation. It shows him kowtowing to Southerners to save the Union and serve himself; the gains of party dominance could be sweet. It shows him learning—gradually and with difficulty—how Southerners were all too willing to abandon Northern allies for the sake of slavery. It shows the grating impact of the threats and violence that Southerners deployed to get their way.
It was a hard lesson for Northerners, but a lesson well learned. Particula
rly concerning the charged issue of slavery, you needed to think twice before messing with a slaveholder. Not only did slaveholders have an advantage of numbers through the U.S. Constitution’s Three-fifths Compromise, but they had a cultural advantage that extended their influence. Northerners who ranted about a despotic Slave Power dominating the national government were not delusional. There was a domineering block of slaveholders at the heart of the national government who strategically deployed violence to get their way.28 The tobacco-stained rugs are even more apt as a metaphor; the floors of the Capitol were fouled with the yield of a Southern cash crop cultivated by the enslaved. Slavery tainted everything.
As we will see, French doesn’t merely describe these rough realities; he explains how they felt, and in so doing, bears witness to the human reality of the antebellum Congress and the emotional logic of disunion.29 French’s evolving fears and growing sense of betrayal show that the breaking of national bonds wasn’t a detached argument about sovereignty and rights. Disunion wasn’t born of cool appraisal. Nor was it a product of events in the 1850s alone. The rending of the Union was a long and painful process that spawned jarring instabilities and vast unknowns. It was a wrenching experience for those who lived through it, shaped by habits, resentments, and assumptions that built up over decades. Sectional fighting had a history, and that history mattered.30
At the core of French’s experience was the emotional power of the Union and all that it represented; French’s love of the Union was profound. He fretted about it in his diary, sang about it in campaign songs, and praised it in poetry. His heartfelt concern for the Union colored the fabric of his life. Born of a compromise and sustained by bonds of brotherhood, the Union wasn’t an abstract political entity in antebellum America. It was a state of being, and all the more fragile because of it. Today, we take the Union for granted as a structure of government. In antebellum America, it was more of a pact, grounded on conceptions of rights, fairness, and equal membership. Pacts are inherently vulnerable and unstable, open to reinterpretation by different peoples at different times; western expansion and the spread of slavery exposed and intensified those tensions. Thus the shared sense of political crisis throughout this period as the nation’s founding compact was questioned and renegotiated time and again.31
The Democratic Party had an equally powerful hold on French’s emotions, embracing his entire worldview. Structured national parties first rose to power in this period, inspiring the intense devotion of a cause.32 Party membership was more than a label; it was a kind of pledge, a statement of loyalty to a political worldview that bound men together in reputation and purpose. Manhood and honor were fundamental to this band-of-brothers form of politics, particularly in the public forum of Congress. And abuse of one party member potentially abused them all. Fighting was more complex than throwing a punch.
It was also inspired by more than outrage. For the most part, political principles fueled congressional combat. In the 1830s, most fighting centered on party differences. In the 1840s and 1850s it became slavery-centric, sparked by western expansion; Congress was the nation’s proving ground on the issue of slavery, the only institution capable of outlawing the interstate slave trade and abolishing slaveholding in the District of Columbia and western territories. Trace patterns of congressional violence and you expose the nation’s shifting fault lines. Congress was a representative institution in more ways than one.
But French wasn’t thinking of fault lines when he lost faith in Southerners. He was thinking of rights. For Northerners, Southerners, and Westerners alike, having one’s rights within the Union challenged was a form of degradation that required resistance; fighting for those rights was a test of manhood. This was as true for congressmen as it was for their constituents. As tempting as it is to blame disunion on blundering politicians—as some historians did a generation ago—congressmen were bound to the folks back home in purpose and feeling.33 Nothing shows this link more dramatically than people who sent guns to their representatives in the late 1850s.34 They wanted their representatives to fight for their rights. And fight their representatives did. Reporters who branded some of these fights “battles” were more accurate than they knew; in a sense, the first battles of the Civil War were waged in Congress itself.35
It was French’s fate to rise to national politics during this crisis-ridden period. A time of unsettled, unbalanced, and unpredictable politics, the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s were uneasy decades of national unknowing. To fully grasp the meaning of that moment, we need to understand the process of discovery of those who lived through it. We need to view events “in forward motion, as they were lived,” with their contingency intact.36 Looking through French’s eyes reveals these eventful decades as they unfolded, removing them from the shadow of a war yet to come.
For all of these reasons, in the ensuing chapters, French will be our guide to the sometimes familiar, often alien world of the antebellum Congress; his emotional arc forms the core of this book and his lived experience structures it. There are risks to this book’s approach. More important men might have broader perspectives. But precisely because French wasn’t exceptional, his vantage point has value. However likeable he was and however useful he proved to be, French was an ordinary man who found his way into national politics like thousands of people before and after him, experiencing these turbulent decades from a front-row seat. His feelings and reactions are larger than the limits of his life.
THE RISE OF BENJAMIN BROWN FRENCH
If you met French, you may well have liked him. Most people did. Stocky in build, with an easy laugh, he enjoyed people, had a good sense of fun, and loved a zesty round of cribbage. His diary is filled with dinners and picnics, whiskey punch and good cigars. It’s also filled with his family. Widowed once and married twice, he was miserable without his wife and sons, Frank and Benjamin. Home alone for a few weeks in 1838, he hid their things—his wife’s pincushion, Frank’s pillow with “the exact print of his little head in it”—because they made him weepy.37 He chided himself for being sentimental, but so he was.38
Before coming to Washington, French had been living an exceedingly local life—like most Americans—eking out a living in small New Hampshire towns with friends and family close by.39 His travels were bumpy jogs on rickety stagecoaches (in one case led by a blind horse, a broken-down nag, and two colts who had never before been harnessed to a carriage; after jumping out of the coach in a panic more than once, French ended up walking most of the way).40 He had never been south of Boston. Antebellum America was a large-scale nation of small-scale horizons.41 Other regions were faraway places filled with strange people with strange habits.
Benjamin Brown French at the age of thirty-eight. Friends and family called him “the Major” due to a stint in the state militia. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Chester, French’s birthplace, was a small farming town of 2,000 people in 1800, the year that French was born.42 His father, Daniel, was a big fish in that small pond: a wealthy lawyer (he bought the town’s first “cooking stove”), the state’s attorney general during the War of 1812, and “quite a farmer,” as a town history described him.43 French’s mother, Mercy, was the daughter of the town’s leading merchant, Benjamin Brown; she died eighteen months after her son was born, at the age of twenty-three.44 Daniel married twice more in coming years, expanding his brood exponentially. All told, Benjamin had four half brothers and seven half sisters; he was close to most of them for most of his life.
Daniel French was a difficult man; a contemporary described him as fair and faithful to his legal clients, but “rather sharp in his practice.”45 Benjamin thought him harsh. But raising the younger French was a challenge. The good-natured sense of fun that earned him countless friends as an adult was more of a rebellious streak when he was young. (Offered gin for the first time at the age of fourteen, Benjamin didn’t just take a sip; he guzzled mouthfuls, got “gloriously drunk,” and pitched “head foremost into a snowbank, as I then
thought ‘just for fun.’”)46 Sent to Maine for much of his schooling (he had an uncle and a grandfather in North Yarmouth), by his own account he studied “deviltry” more than anything else, until he clashed with a “drunken tyrant” of a teacher. As French later recalled it, he told the man “exactly what I thought of him” and then “marched out of the Academy, never again to enter it, or any other school.” Back in Chester, his father pushed him to study law, but after two years, at the age of nineteen, French ran away to go to sea; unable to find a berth on a ship, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. It took his family months to track him down and bring him home.47 However harsh his father was, French mused in later years, “I do not doubt I deserved it.”48
Although he went back to studying law after his military adventures, French hadn’t yet started to practice when—at the age of twenty-four—he married Elizabeth Richardson, five years his junior. Her father, William Richardson, chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, was a formidable no-nonsense man with a chilly disposition, literally as well as figuratively; during brutally cold New England winters, he was miserly with firewood and never wore gloves. One of his law clerks, noting how the ink froze in the inkwells in Richardson’s law office, described him as “somewhat puritanic.” The more charitable French said that he had “stern integrity,” though once French got to know him, he thought him kind.49
Richardson disapproved of French’s courtship, which wasn’t surprising given that French had no job or income. So the ever-impulsive French eloped with the no-less-impulsive “Bess”—a thickset brown-haired groom and his wisp-thin brown-haired bride—and they kept the marriage secret for six months. (Family legend has it that the frightened newlyweds revealed the truth to Bess’s father by placing their marriage certificate on a windowsill and waiting for him to find it.)50 Once the secret was out, the couple set up house in the rustic little town of Sutton, forty miles northwest of Chester, with the idea that Benjamin would practice law—the first lawyer in town.51
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