The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  In this sense, heads were descriptive shorthand: describe a head and you described a person, character and all. But the head-centric accounts of the House and Senate also say something about a gallery-sitter’s perspective; literally and figuratively, it was only an overview. They heard a sampling of oratory, saw a smidgen of legislation-in-the-making, learned a bit about policy and party politics, got a sense of the hum of business, and had a glance at the people behind the names. Depending on their timing, they might also witness a congressional clash, though again from a distance, perhaps seeing some shoving in the House or hearing a deliberate insult in the Senate. Sometimes they didn’t hear anything at all. A self-described “Mechanic” told one congressman, “I felt … that I was listening to eloquence and was well content to wait for the words until I could see them in The Globe.”97

  Enter the press, a shaping influence on what happened on the floor. During testy proceedings, congressmen often looked up to the galleries and pleaded with reporters to be fair.98 If they weren’t “fair and impartial,” it would be near impossible for congressmen to “keep themselves erect before their constituents,” Francis Rives told reporters when he was accused of bullying people in a committee-room.99 Thomas Hart Benton made a similar plea in 1834 after insisting that the sergeant at arms arrest people hissing and cheering in the Senate galleries. Colleagues protested that arresting gallery sitters seemed to pit the Senate against the American public. Not surprisingly, Benton did some hasty backpedaling, pleading with onlooking reporters to report his meaning accurately.100

  Here we see the power of gallery-sitters and what they represented. Benton’s impulsive swipe at some gallery rowdies became a strike at the American public in the blink of an eye—a rather large leap, but a largely accurate one. In a sense, gallery onlookers did stand in for the public. They were doing on-site what others did from a distance: evaluating their representatives and registering their opinions, though with hissing and cheering instead of votes and petitions, and perhaps unintentionally with clumps of dirt; a sign on the Senate gallery door stated: “Gentlemen will be pleased not to put their feet on the board in front of the gallery, as the dirt from them falls upon Senators’ heads.”101

  Like the public writ large, all kinds of people looked on from the galleries. In addition to the press, the Washington gentility was there in force, as were tourists, visitors, and the general public, including French’s young son Frank in the 1850s.102 Women were there in such large numbers that they crowded men out.103 After being squeezed out of the Senate gallery, the legal scholar Francis Lieber (of “Lieber Code” fame) joked that he wanted to found the “Polite anti-ladies-thronging-poor-men-out-of-every-chance-of-seeing-anything-Society.”104 By the 1850s, there were also women reporters in the galleries. In Washington, women had a very public presence.

  Sometimes that presence was felt on the floor. Merely by sitting in the galleries, women occasionally discouraged bad behavior. Congressional combatants sometimes glanced at the galleries before throwing an insult or taking a swing, and managed to contain themselves if women were present (though in the 1820s, the erratic and eruptive Representative John Randolph [R-VA] doubled down on his insults when told that his victim’s wife was in the audience).105 Congressmen who sprinted to the galleries to shield women during brawls were drawing gendered lines in the sand, protecting allegedly fragile flowers from the rough-and-tumble of politics.106 The creation of a ladies’ gallery in both houses was more of the same, protecting women from lower-class men, though “gentlemen” who accompanied ladies were admitted.107

  This isn’t to say that women wanted protection. Men and women alike often came to the galleries explicitly for the fights, driven by the same urges that draw crowds to professional wrestling matches and hockey games: a love of sport and spectacle, and the thrill of a contained risk. (Wrestlers, hockey players, and congressmen rarely kill one another, though they make a good show of it.) People enjoyed cheering on their champions to fight the good fight. They loved the bold gesture, the cutting comment, the “personality” thrown down like a gauntlet; a rousing congressional brawl was the icing on the cake. As much as French recognized the dire implications of congressional chaos at key moments like session openings and closings, he perked up when he saw a good man-to-man brawl. It was one of the things that he liked about his job; when fists flew, he had a ringside seat. He reveled in what he called the “great fight” of 1841, which began when Edward Stanly (W-NC) and Henry Wise (W-VA) exchanged insults. When Wise slugged Stanly, “nearly all the members” rushed over and began pummeling one another in a wild melee. “[T]he Speaker & I had the best chance to see all the fun,” French wrote to his half brother, “& while he stood at his desk pounding & yelling, I stood at mine ‘calm as a summer’s morning’—enjoying the sport, and keeping the minutes of the proceedings!”108

  In this sense, one of the period’s much-used metaphors is strikingly apt: politics was a kind of war. We make that same link today when we speak of political campaigns, but given the routine electoral violence in antebellum America, it had the ring of truth.109 Some campaigns even featured mock soldiers on parade.110 Looking back in the shadow of the Civil War, such military fervor seems unfortunate, even ghoulish. But it captured the raw bluster and bravado of the period’s politics, and acknowledged—even celebrated—its violent undertow. As Franklin Pierce suggested, the American people had a passion for violent clashes of principle and purpose, including the kind playing out in the Capitol, one of many political battlefields.

  So when French gazed at the Capitol on that cold December day in 1833 and worried about the fate of the nation, he had good reason. Congress was the Union incarnate, for better and worse, and its collapse could bring down the nation in its wake. On December 10, 1839—six years later, almost to the day—he thought that his worst fears were playing out. For ten days, the House had been unable to elect a Speaker and organize, and the hall was in a state of chaos. At one point that afternoon, more than twenty men were on their feet screaming for order, for the floor, for attention, with all their might. When someone challenged the vote of a man whose election was contested, he was up in an instant, howling about his rights and waving his written commission so violently that French was surprised that it didn’t rip to shreds. At least once, he feared “personal violence.”111

  To French, this wasn’t just a momentary outbreak of congressional chaos. It was the state of the nation. It made the national government seem surprisingly fragile, and in so doing, it put the Union’s survival in doubt. Indeed, maybe this was the beginning of the end. Sitting at home at the end of the day, exhausted and losing hope, he confessed to his sister that he felt like “a mourner, following my Country to its grave.” Years from now, he imagined, when the Constitution was “a thing that was, the pen of the historian” would date “the commencement of its overthrow” to this congressional breakdown and all that it revealed. This was “an era in the history of our Country,” French thought, a period of enormous and eventful change.112 He was right in ways that he couldn’t even begin to fathom.

  2

  THE MIX OF MEN IN CONGRESS

  MEETING PLACE OF NORTH AND SOUTH

  French’s early years in Washington were full of firsts. Mingling with people from around the country, working to expand the national reach of his party, seeing the South and plantation slavery: all of it was new, and its impact was mixed.1 On the one hand, he felt the bonds of Union as never before. On the other hand, he saw firsthand how fragile those bonds could be. Such was the paradox of political life at the national center: sectional differences were never as apparent as when Northerners, Southerners, and Westerners lived, worked, and played side by side.

  Party loyalties sometimes bridged such divides, particularly the divide over slavery. When it came to the South’s “peculiar institution,” many a Northern Democrat like French was more than willing to appease Southern allies for the sake of the Union, their party, and their careers; the South
reigned supreme in Washington in more ways than one. Such negotiations were part of the business of Congress. There—as nowhere else—French saw the working reality of the complex shifting balance of section and party that kept the Union as one.2

  French’s Congress was a sprawling mix of men. Spawned by the rise of the Jacksonian “common man” and all that came with it, a wide range of people found their way into Congress, many of them figures of local prominence who served a term and then went home, sometimes vanishing from public life and even from the public record, often without a single portrait or photograph left behind. They are literally faceless names long gone. Scene-stealers like Henry Clay make it easy to forget the mass majority that profoundly shaped the human reality of the antebellum Congress.3

  Given the brisk turnover, both houses were filled with a shifting cast of freshmen, particularly the House with its two-year terms; roughly half of every House was new.4 Regardless of their talents, these men mattered. They registered their opinions, defended the rights and interests of their constituents, supported their party, and countered their foes. Some of them threw an occasional punch. They were a center of gravity in Congress, an anchoring reality beneath the highfliers, a shaping influence on the texture and tone of congressional proceedings, and, through sheer force of numbers, the ultimate arbiters of what got done. It is impossible to fully understand the antebellum Congress without acknowledging their presence and influence.

  Photographs are a good starting point; these men were part of the first generation to be captured on film. To French, history itself was like a photograph. A good historian should produce “a daguerreotype of the times he writes about,” he thought, preserving on paper realities great and small—the “minutia of existence.”5 Photographs capture some of this minutia, revealing very real people in the clothing, postures, and attitudes of a very different time.

  Yet photographs can be deceiving; they show how congressmen wanted to appear. Taken collectively, they form a parade of self-importance, jaws set, faces unsmiling, dressed in black almost to a man, with starched white collars and cravats tied at the neck. A few strike a Napoleonic pose, one hand thrust in their vest. Many try for grim dignity and achieve it. Some have their life experiences etched on their faces. Others show a flash of the charisma that won them office. A few are simply homely. (According to acquaintances, Globe editor Francis P. Blair’s charms far outweighed his looks.)6 They all convey a certain congressional gravitas, forward-looking, farseeing, serious of purpose: the “National Statesman” that each wanted to be.

  So much for the image of the antebellum congressman. What of the reality? Demographics help to fill this gap. Collect and analyze broad sweeps of data and you find that between 1830 and 1860, the average member of both houses was a college-educated lawyer in his forties with experience in public office. In the House, roughly half the members fit this description; in the Senate, significantly more.7

  A composite photograph of the members of the Thirty-sixth Senate (1859–61) from the work of the famed photographer Mathew Brady (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  There aren’t many surprises here. But demographics can be deceptive; they tend to sacrifice gritty human realities in favor of assembled portraits, and when studying past peoples whose lives and habits are dramatically different from our own, minutiae matter. For example, take John B. Dawson (D-LA). Forty-three when he entered the House in 1841, he was a college-educated planter and newspaper publisher from a well-to-do family with an unsuccessful run for governor, fourteen years as a parish judge, and two years of state legislative experience; he served two terms in Congress. Demographically speaking, Dawson is the virtual embodiment of the typical representative. But look for him in Congress and you find a man who routinely wore both a bowie knife and a pistol, and wasn’t shy about using them in the House chamber, threatening to slash one man’s throat and cocking his pistol at another, among his many moments of congressional glory.8 Dawson—the hands-down winner of the Frequent Weapon Wielder award—is a reminder that tidy demographics can mask messy realities.

  Look beneath that mask and you can see it: the mix of men in the antebellum Congress. In addition to sons of privilege who attended Ivy League schools, you see men who were schooled at local academies and colleges, as well as men with catch-as-catch-can educations with little more than a few years at the local “common” school, like 98 percent of all white American men.9 French’s hodgepodge education was typical of many; he bounced from ill-equipped tutors (his father’s law clerks), to the local common school, to a “commoner, if possible” local academy (“taught by a numbskull named Johnson”), to his preoccupied uncle Revevend Francis Brown, and ultimately to an academy in Maine, picking up some grammar here, some ancient history there, a splash of Latin someplace else.10 Education was patchy and erratic in early America, ranging from the systematic order of New England to some virtually unschooled portions of the South and West.11 Some virtually unschooled men found their way into Congress.

  So did men who worked with their hands before entering politics, like the wagon maker Charles Bodle (J-NY), the gunsmith Ratliff Boon (J-IN), and the iron furnace operator Martin Beaty (AJ-KY). Statistically speaking, there weren’t many such congressmen, and they’re often hard to spot in demographic studies, which tend to lump people into broad bucket categories: farmers, lawyers, merchants.12 But they were there. So were growing ranks of newspapermen. Include the many men like French who served stints as editors in their youth, and the congressional contingent of newsmen is yet more striking.13

  Even the teeming multitude of lawyers holds surprises. While there were accomplished scholars such as Senator Rufus Choate (W-MA)—“he knew everything,” French marveled—there were far more men who fell into the law as the path of least resistance. Legal education requirements collapsed amid the democratic upsurges of Jacksonian America; by 1851, four states had no educational requirements at all, simply declaring that any citizen of good moral character with a minimal amount of study could be admitted to practice.14 For an ambitious young man searching for a livelihood with some prestige, lawyering was the answer, particularly if he had political ambitions; given the vast number of lawyer-politicians, a law career was a virtual bid for political power. The 1830s was the first decade in which at least 60 percent of new House members were lawyers; in the Twenty-third Congress alone—French’s first—69 percent of the House were lawyers, as were 83 percent of the Senate.15 Of the fifteen men in French’s boardinghouse, only one wasn’t a lawyer. He was a newspaper editor: Isaac Hill. “He is a bitter enemy to the gentlemen of the bar and often abuses them very unreasonably,” French noted, adding wryly, “Every gentleman who boards at this house, except him, is a lawyer.”16 Clearly, Hill lived something of an uphill life.

  For every Choate in Congress there was a ream of less-educated and sometimes less-polished members from a wide range of backgrounds—men like Senator Thomas Morris (J-OH), an Indian fighter, store clerk, and lawyer with only a few months of common schooling. Morris sprinkled his speeches with verses from the Bible, one of the few books in his childhood home. Like many of his congressional colleagues, he went from humble beginnings to the practice of law, to his state legislature, to Congress.17

  Highborn and not-so-highborn, educated and not-so-educated, gruff and crude, sophisticated and worldly: increasingly in the 1830s and beyond, all of these men found their way into political office, broadening their horizons through the national power networks of their party and in some cases finding their way into Congress. The nation’s political elite was more diverse than facts and figures let on.

  A CITY OF EXTREMES

  Of course the city of Washington was even more diverse. In fact, its sectional diversity was its hallmark, and people had high hopes that it would unify the nation. The “social collisions” of living in Washington would “erode sectional prejudices,” enthused one writer, “and the East and West, the South and North, thus brought into closer intimacy, become cem
ented by more enduring ties.”18 Even regional accents seemed likely to fade. As the linguist George P. Marsh (W-VT) put it, “Many a Northern member of Congress goes to Washington a dactyl or a trochee, and comes home an amphibrach or an iambus.”19 Bringing together peoples and customs from throughout the nation, Washington was a city of cultural federalism.20

  It was also a city of extremes. In part, this was a product of drunkenness. Much like the Capitol, Washington was awash in alcohol.21 In 1830 alone, the city granted almost two hundred liquor licenses.22 French saw liquor everywhere he looked. There were saloons on almost every corner, stinking of “tobacco smoke[,] bad cabbage & unmentionable mixtures of villainous smells.”23 Porter houses, hotel bars, dram shops, and groceries: they served liquor too, the latter two in handy gulp-sized portions. (The grocery near the Capitol did a particularly brisk business.)24 Even the lobby of the National Theater seemed like little more than a drinking hole. “If Heaven should be located here,” French thought, “there would certainly be a grog shop in one corner!” Everything in Washington seemed “contaminated by haunts of dissipation—even the Capitol itself has not escaped.”25

  French’s father had feared as much when his son headed south. “You are now stationed in a land of trials & temptations beyond your [vaunted] experience,” he warned not long after his son arrived in Washington. “Theatres, Balls, gambling tables, riots … & unlawful assemblies are all before you.” Knowing full well his son’s rebellious streak, the elder French could only pray: “God grant that your choice shall obtain the smiles of an approving conscience.”26