The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  Clearly there were limits to politicking on the House floor. Extended debates on fine points of legislation were difficult at best. Declaratory speeches were easier, assuming that you had mastered the acoustics and weren’t banking on the room’s rapt attention; often such efforts were aimed at a home audience. Group efforts were more effective. Tag-team obstruction was part of the parliamentary game and backup usually was right at hand. Anyone making a proposal, refuting a ruling, or hungry for a few extra minutes of speaking time only had to call out for the help of “political friends,” as did Francis Rives (D-VA) when denied a chance to refute an accusation; when he asked, “have I no friend in this House that will move a suspension of the rules, in order that I may be heard?” a “political friend” immediately did just that.50

  Sometimes the hubbub was handy. If you played the acoustics right, you could confer quietly around the edges of the chamber without being overheard. And if you lowered your voice to just the right pitch, you could threaten someone on the sly. In 1840, Daniel Jenifer (W-MD) suddenly dropped his voice in the middle of a speech to deliver what must have been either a threat or an insult; witnesses didn’t know what he said, but they saw its impact on the victim’s face.51

  This spat went no further, but that wasn’t always the case. Given conditions on the floor, it’s easy to see how angry words could spark a chain reaction. Colleagues on left and right were little more than an elbow away, some routinely wore weapons, many had short fuses (growing shorter all the time given the working conditions), and it was an easy slide from hard words to jostling, clenched fists, shoving, punching, and bowie knives.

  The House floor didn’t always feel safe, and in fact it sometimes wasn’t; standing up for yourself meant running a risk. In 1837, when Committee on Ways and Means member Richard Fletcher (W-MA) asked John Quincy Adams (W-MA) if he should respond to a “coarse and abusive” verbal assault by Democratic committee-mates, Adams advised silence. The attack was a “party movement to bully down” Fletcher, he thought, and resistance would result in a fistfight or worse.52 Not only did Fletcher remain silent, but he resigned from the committee. As far as the Democratic bullies were concerned, it was a job well done.

  The Senate chamber was a very different place, though it had some of the same problems. It was noisy, though to a lesser degree. (French was put out by the “buzzings” of ladies admitted on the floor, as they were from time to time.)53 And the heat and foul air did their damage. Sweating profusely in his shirtsleeves one July afternoon, the normally good-humored John Parker Hale was the absolute “picture of discomfort,” noted a colleague. Hale considered the Senate “the most unhealthful, uncomfortable, ill-contrived place I was ever in in my life.”54

  Hot air of all kinds to the contrary, the Senate was generally calmer than the House. Smaller in size, with its acoustics in working order and its members a little older, more established, more experienced, and sometimes higher on the social scale, it was a true forum for debate as well as a proving ground for future presidential hopefuls. There was less competition to be heard on the floor; every senator had the right to speak for as long as his lungs could carry him. And there was more of a sense of community: senators put down roots because they served for six years, as opposed to the two-year terms in the House.

  Debate in the Senate was thus more of a dialogue—long-winded, agenda-driven, and something of a performance, but a dialogue just the same. This doesn’t mean that the Senate was a haven of safety. It wasn’t. There were plenty of threats and insults on the floor. Henry Clay (W-KY) was a master. His attack in 1832 on the elderly Samuel Smith (J-MD), a Revolutionary War veteran and forty-year veteran of the Senate, was so severe that senators physically drew back, worried that things might get ugly.55 Clay called Smith a tottering old man with flip-flopping politics; Smith denied it and countered that he could “take a view” of Clay’s politics that would prove him inconsistent; and Clay jeered, “Take it, sir, take it—I dare you!” Smith defended himself, but when he later sought the advice of John Quincy Adams (clearly, Fight Consultant Extraordinaire), Smith was so deeply wounded that he was on the verge of tears.56

  The Senate chamber in 1846. This composite of daguerreotype portraits—all of them taken for this image—was four years in the making. (United States Senate Chamber by Thomas Doney, after James Whitehorn. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

  Some such exchanges escalated into duel challenges, which were far more common in the Senate than in the House. Not only were formal duels more likely among the Senate’s somewhat more elite membership, but they preserved its sense of community by channeling violence off the floor. Even senatorial fistfights often took place elsewhere—on the streets or in boardinghouses or hotels.57

  The different spirit in the two chambers was readily apparent in the wake of a fight. Clashes in the House triggered calls to the Speaker for protection; clashes in the Senate led senators to appeal to one another and their shared sense of respect.

  “THE DAMP DUNGEONS OF THE CAPITOL”

  Of course, there were other working spaces in the Capitol, some public, some private. The library and the lobbies were in the former category. The library was available for milling about of all kinds. Tourists wandered through while congressmen chatted about doings in the chambers or bided time to avoid a vote, and pages dashed in to fetch books for congressmen. The lobbies, as one might expect, were for lobbying as well as lingering, and typically were filled with tourists, reporters, people who wanted to hear the debates but were crowded out of the galleries, and assorted others (“lobbyists”) demanding things of congressmen. In later years, when French had lost his clerking job due to the shifting tides of politics, he tried to bank on his congressional connections by earning a living as a lobbyist, without much success.58

  But some things weren’t fit for the open air; some topics needed closed-door privacy, frank unhurried conversations, and, in the case of the House, decent acoustics. Thus the importance of committees. Not only did they allow for the practice of politics by other means, but they shunted work off the floor, a growing necessity given the increasing complexity and quantity of congressional business; for many scholars, the rise of a committee system marks the modernization of Congress.59 Much of the institution’s real work took place in committees, particularly in standing committees overseeing ongoing concerns such as foreign relations or military affairs. As one congressman put it, committees were appointed “to facilitate and mature business” for the body as a whole; they shaped legislation, conducted investigations, and collected information, among other things. In essence, committees were legislatures by proxy, though their recommendations were more likely to be challenged on the floor than their equivalent today.60

  Yet they were legislatures with a difference: committee-room doors were firmly closed. Private rooms where men could hash things out, they had the look and feel of gentleman’s clubs, with plush Turkish rugs, deep leather chairs, bookshelves filled with spillover from the congressional library, and sideboards stocked with whiskey and cigars.61 Their privacy served a purpose. As one congressman put it, he “had said many things in committee which he could not say” in the House.62

  And yet closed doors weren’t always an advantage. Off-limits to both the public and the press, documented only by formal reports that were often biased and selectively censored, committee meetings were dark voids where anything could happen. Short-term select or special committees were especially problematic; often focused on sensitive matters of immediate concern, their members bound to work together for only a short time, they could be dangerous terrain.63 If he were ever unfortunate enough to be involved in a brawl, observed one congressman in 1840, “he would never consent to be tried in the damp dungeons of the Capitol by any committee.”64

  Finding out precisely what happened in these “dungeons” isn’t easy. Their closed-door policy was so effectively maintained that even today it’s hard to get past it; you have to f
ind a leak. Daniel Jenifer (W-MD) spilled the truth in the House in 1840. Outraged at a biased report from the Committee on Elections concerning a contested election, he ranted for days, insisting that Democrats on the committee had bullied two Northern Whig members into accepting the report (and thus, new Democratic congressmen). The Democrats succeeded because the Northerners were easy targets who wouldn’t “resent an injury done them”—meaning, they didn’t abide by the code of honor and wouldn’t fight back.65 Jenifer’s charges were so inflammatory that the Globe didn’t record them, reporting only that he “spoke with great acrimony”; they appeared in print only when a Democrat refuted them.66 When Henry Wise (W-VA) mentioned a committee member who had threatened to pummel whoever disagreed with him, he was promptly scolded for exposing “the secrets of the prison house … before the world.”67

  Wise caused his own share of problems in committee-rooms. That same year, he took part in an armed showdown. To slap at President Jackson, Wise and his friend Balie Peyton (W-TN) had pushed for a House investigation of the president’s “pet banks” (state depositories for public funds that replaced what Democrats called the “Monster” Bank of the United States). In the days before testifying to the investigative committee, an agent for several of those banks, Reuben M. Whitney, had called Peyton a liar in the press. So when Whitney sneered at Peyton during his testimony, all hell broke loose. Peyton jumped to his feet and threatened to kill Whitney; Wise, who had been regaling committee members with amusing anecdotes on a couch across the room, caught the drift, rushed over, and joined in. At this point, Whitney jumped to his feet, Peyton reached for his gun, and Wise positioned himself within firing range of Whitney, his hand on his gun, his gaze fixed on Whitney’s hand in his pocket.

  If Whitney had moved his arm one inch as if to pull a pistol, Wise later admitted, he would have killed him on the spot. (Had Whitney “but fingered his ‘gold boys,’” joked a reporter, he would have been a dead man.68) Although Wise eventually saved the day, calming Peyton long enough for Whitney to escape, he never lived it down. French told a Wise joke two years later: the Virginian had lost his luggage—containing his pistols—on the way to Washington, so a committee that he served on couldn’t meet, because he couldn’t shoot the witnesses.69

  Guns, threats, insults, and bullying: a lot was happening behind closed doors. There was a reason why congressmen called committee-rooms the “black holes of the Capitol.”70 They also called them barrooms, again for good reason; not only were they stocked with liquor for committee meetings, but during evening sessions they were on call for the House and Senate chambers—“[c]onverted into a bar-room,” as one senator put it.71 (Not all of those howling Democrats on the last night of the session in 1835 got drunk over dinner.) Rumor had it that more than one page got his drinking legs from “contraband” liquor filched from committee-rooms.72

  Nor was that all as far as booze was concerned. There were two bars in out-of-the-way corners of the Capitol, one near the House, and the aptly named “Hole in the Wall” behind the Senate post office.73 There was also a “refectory” serving food and drink of all kinds, and beginning in 1858, a members’ dining room that served hard liquor to those in the know; rumor had it that if you wanted gin or whiskey in the refectory, you should ask for “pale sherry” or “Madeira,” neither one a “spirituous” liquor.74 If you were friendly with Daniel Webster, he might invite you to his “Wine Room,” a private wine cellar of sorts in a small room on the Capitol’s third floor, just above the Senate chamber.75 And then there were the whiskey jugs stashed in clerks’ offices.76 All told, rivers of liquor flowed through the Capitol, and had been flowing for quite some time. As early as 1809, the Senate was billing a hefty supply of “syrup” to its contingent fund, an expense laughingly pointed out by a Senate committee on contingent expenses in 1874.77 Of course, this was an age of remarkably heavy drinking, every day, all day, all the time. There were well over one hundred ways to call someone drunk, including long-lost classics such as has a pinch of snuff in his wig; clips the king’s English; takes a lunar; and chases geese.78 In this sense, Congress was indeed representative.79 The temperance movement had a point.

  Attempts to stem the flow of liquor didn’t do much. The Congressional Temperance Society was a fine idea with little influence.80 Even after an 1837 joint rule banned the sale of “spirituous liquors” in the Capitol or on its grounds, the problem persisted; there were too many loopholes—in an assembly of lawyers.81 Thus the remarkable precision of the 1867 amendment to the joint rule; it prohibited “spirituous or malt liquors or wines” from being “offered for sale, exhibited, or kept within the Capitol, or any room or building connected therewith, or on the public grounds adjacent thereto.”82 But even this didn’t fully dry out the Capitol.83 With the institutional equivalent of a wink and a nod, Congress essentially sanctioned drinking, yet another factor contributing to the unpredictability of the House and Senate floors.

  There are no boozy congressmen in the Globe, though there’s plenty of denial. Whenever some brave soul raised the issue, he was invariably called a liar. The chorus of outrage (Liquor? What liquor?) greeting Massachusetts Republican Henry Wilson’s charges about booze in the Capitol in 1867 is laughable alongside his detailed account of precisely what liquor was kept where.84 Along similar lines, when Henry Wise (W-VA) claimed that Democrats were drunk at the close of the 1835 session, an outraged Democrat immediately denied it and demanded that Wise name names. “The gentleman might feel unhappy” if he did, Wise wryly replied.85

  “IF THE WHOLE PEOPLE … KNEW AS MUCH AS I DO ABOUT THESE SESSIONS…”

  Of course, Congress was not a pit of abandon. It was a working institution doing its job: creating and debating legislation, considering and acting on petitions, attending to ongoing business and special circumstances in committees, and more. This is the Congress that we know and (occasionally) love.

  And yet the potential for dramatic confrontations and violence could have a profound impact. It certainly filled the galleries; the likelihood of a showdown packed them full. Debate “great measures of policy” and the galleries were empty, complained Franklin Pierce (D-NH) in 1838. But hint at the chance of “personalities” the next day, and the galleries and lobbies were “crowded almost to suffocation,” the halls and doorways “literally blockaded.” As long as the public craved such things, it was useless to assume that their elected representatives would behave any differently.86 Gallery rubberneckers reflected public opinion, and the public seemed to glory in congressional clashes, a hunger that would bear bitter fruit with passing decades.

  It was another reality of being a congressman: the constant presence and overriding influence of the American public in the galleries and beyond. Sitting above the members’ heads was a watchful audience, studying their actions, listening to their words, and forming their own opinions. Sitting alongside them were people who were trying their best to shape those opinions: the reporters of the American press. Congressmen ignored this audience at their peril. In the same way that the Capitol’s art and architecture expressed Congress’s symbolic meaning, and the rug-level realities of its working spaces shaped congressional proceedings, the galleries imposed the influence of Congress’s ultimate judges and juries: the public and the press.

  French’s diary is littered with references to them: the mumbling, “buzzing,” whispering gallery-sitters of the House and Senate.87 Members on the floor could see who was up there. Sometimes they scanned the crowd for familiar faces.88 People in the galleries did the same looking down at the assembly below. But they couldn’t see everything—certainly not the worst of it, as French well knew. Irritated at a proposal to start the next session early to avoid undone business at its close, he felt sure that the House could finish “every whit” of business if members would stop wasting time on selfish whims and fancies, like figuring out how to buy themselves books with government funds. If the “whole people of this Union knew as much as I do about these sessions of
Congress,” he fumed, they might actually try to “reform their representation.” But instead, they were “outrageously humbugged by their representatives.”89

  French had a point. Even looking down from the galleries, onlookers missed a lot. Mostly, they saw heads—not heads of state, but rather foreheads and hair. The noted British traveler Harriet Martineau was struck by the sight; entering the Senate galleries in the 1830s, she immediately concluded that she had never seen “a finer set of heads.”90 American writers were no less impressed. Daniel Webster’s brow seemed uniformly awe-inspiring. “The forehead is remarkable,” enthused one magazine writer. “You follow its bold curve with fear and trembling.”91 John C. Calhoun, on the other hand, had “a frizzly head, and an eye like a hawk” with a “mouth partly open,” not quite as awe-inspiring a sight as “Black Dan”.92 Foreheads were humbler in the House. Henry Wise sadly lacked “the Shakespearian pile of forehead,” and Vermonter Samuel S. Prentiss’s (AJ-VT) head was “large and out of proportion to the rest of his frame,” though somehow “not ugly.”93 Americans who encountered Charles Dickens after his Washington visit had the same strange obsession, repeatedly asking if the legislators’ heads had impressed him. Given that some of them belonged to bullying slaveholders, he wasn’t much moved.94

  In part, this focus on congressional heads reflects the period’s faddish interest in phrenology, the pseudoscience of determining a person’s character by studying the shape of his skull.95 French had his skull read in 1841 and found the reading eerily accurate: he was sensitive, “inclined to literature,” a good neighbor and a good friend, “liked a good dinner & a glass of wine & enjoyed company,” and was “rather disposed to be indolent,” though he could work hard when he felt like it. His one qualm was the phrenologist’s claim that he didn’t remember people; he remembered the names and faces of congressmen better than anyone he knew. Of course, any phrenologist who met French and noted his stout build and good humor would have given the same reading; clearly, this was a man who relished dinners with friends. Even so, French thought there was “something in it.”96