For the most part, French’s conscience remained clear; a wavering but enthusiastic temperance supporter, he wasn’t much of a drinker. But some people let loose in Washington in ways that they didn’t dare back home. The whirl of diversity, the city’s notorious “floating population” of residents who came and went with Congress, the many men who left their wives and families back home: the “bachelor-life” of Washington “was not conducive to moral restraint,” noted an observer with marked understatement. Even staid Northerners sometimes went to extremes.27 “Many of our best men are … giving a loose rein to their ambition & their appetites,” worried Robert McClelland (D-MI) in a letter filled with misbehaving Northerners.28 Amasa Dana’s (D-NY) friends despaired when he befriended Felix Grundy McConnell (D-AL), a hard-drinking, “all-round, all-night man about town.” McConnell liked to swagger into saloons and invite everyone “‘to come up and licker.’” (French liked him fine when he was sober, but refused to commit McConnell’s witty “vulgarisms” to paper.)29 Once, at a party, thoroughly soused and with a woman on each arm, McConnell teetered up to President James K. Polk and toasted him, insisting that Polk drain his glass in a gulp, calling out, “No heel taps, Jimmy.” With McConnell by his side, Dana transformed from “a sober, steady, modest & sedate man … into a perfect rake.”30 Franklin Pierce didn’t fare much better. He hit an alcoholic low in 1836 when he and two drinking buddies, Edward Hannegan (D-IN) and Henry Wise (W-VA)—the three of them a case study in national diversity—got drunk and caused a ruckus at a theater when Hannegan got into a fistfight and pulled a gun; the rumble nearly sparked a duel.31
Drunken congressmen were the stuff of legend; newly arrived members looked for each session’s hard drinkers. “Gov. [John] Gayle [W-AL] and a man by the name of [John] Jameson [D-MO] … are the only members I have seen drunk,” David Outlaw (W-NC) reported in 1848 within his first months in office, the word only revealing his expectations.32 Diaries and letters describe men too drunk to speak clearly, too drunk to leave their lodgings, even too drunk to stand; they matter-of-factly note that one or another congressman is out on a drinking bout, called a “breeze” or a “spree.”33 In 1841, French saw a remarkable before-and-after performance by Thomas Marshall (W-KY), nephew of the renowned Chief Justice John Marshall and a self-described member of the “spreeing gentry.”34 On August 23, Marshall—“for a rarity, sober,” French noted—gave an eloquent speech that “enraptured” everyone, including the not easily impressed John Quincy Adams (W-MA), who praised its “beautiful flights of fancy.” Two days later, Marshall gave a ranting, raving speech while “three sheets in the wind,” forcing his way onto the floor, ignoring calls to order, and draping himself all over his desk, at one point leaning so far back that he was virtually lying on it. French considered it “a most disgusting exhibition.”35 (The Globe said only that Marshall “further continued” the debate.)36
Some men were surprisingly functional when boozy, even chairing the House, as did George Dromgoole (D-VA) in 1840. (“Drunk in the chair,” Adams observed matter-of-factly.)37 Others became master orators under the influence. Some of Senator Louis Wigfall’s (D-TX) most stingingly bitter and effective speeches were supposedly a product of the Hole in the Wall.38 Even the overindulgent Thomas Marshall had his moments when sloshed; Adams summed up his “peculiar style of eloquence” as “alcohol evaporating in elegant language.”39
But other men were overcome. James McDougall (D-CA) became a staggering drunk in Washington, falling off his horse on Pennsylvania Avenue, even lying in the gutter. “The temptations of the Capital were too strong for him,” a friend noted.40 Pierce’s drinking buddy Edward Hannegan suffered the same fate for much the same reason.41 A few men paid the ultimate price for their sins. In 1834, James Blair (J-SC) committed suicide due to drink, shooting himself in a state of sodden despair. Blair was a man “of sterling good sense, and of brilliant parts,” noted Adams, but “the single vice of intemperance … bloated his body to a mountain, prostrated his intellect, and vitiated his temper to madness.” Blair once drunkenly fired a pistol at an actress on a Washington stage; he carried a loaded gun to the House every day. Adams thought the “chances … quite equal that he should have shot almost any other man than himself.”42 Most shocking of all was the death of Felix McConnell, who butchered himself with a pocketknife in 1846. According to Polk, a shaky and pale McConnell, probably “just recovered from a fit of intoxication,” came to the White House, borrowed one hundred dollars, dallied at a bar, loaned some money to the barkeep, retired to his room, and killed himself.43 If a congressman was “at all inclined to dissipation,” observed one writer, “an easy and pleasant road is opened to him; and not a few yield to the temptation.”44
Formal congressional privileges sometimes made matters worse. According to Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution, congressmen were protected from arrest while attending Congress. The fine art of flaunting this privilege has a storied history and it started early.45 According to French, in 1838, when police stopped the “Honorable” John Brodhead (D-NY) from picking flowers on the Capitol grounds, Brodhead replied, “I am a member of Congress, & I’ll let you know I shall do just what I please,” proving his point by grabbing clumps of flowers and “strewing them about.”46
This isn’t to say that all congressmen were boozed up rowdies or that all socializing was a back-slapping, booze-drinking bonanza. There were genteel receptions, parties, dinners, “hops,” and fancy balls galore.47 French and Bess attended and hosted many, though even tame events could have a risqué undertow; one congressman noted a string of colleagues cheating on their wives.48 Nor were the city’s freedoms restricted to partying. The New York writer Anne Lynch loved the “intellectual superiority” born of the city’s “delightful freedom,” particularly for women. Washington wasn’t “hedged round by so many conventionalities,” she thought.49
All in all, Washington’s diversity was a mixed bag, forging cross-regional friendships even as it fostered the city’s turbulent spirit. On both counts, it influenced not only the Washington community but also the community of Congress.50 One reporter said so outright: “The disagreeable, shocking scenes which are so often witnessed in both Houses of Congress, would perhaps not occur, if there were an independent and sufficiently consequential society in Washington, capable of punishing offenders against the proprieties of life.”51 An unfettered Washington meant an unfettered Congress. Washington’s gloriously freeing diversity set the stage for congressional violence.
LIVING IN SLAVE-LAND
French did some moderate dissipating. During his first spring in Washington, he went to the city’s wildly popular horse races and loved it. The excitement, the fighting, the gambling, the drinking: French had never seen anything like it. “[V]ery many honorable members of Congress were—not exactly sober,” he reported to his half sister Harriette, swearing that he “drank nothing, not even a glass of water.”52 Within a year or two, he had learned to play billiards (or as he put it in his diary, “have learned to play billiards!”).53 But the appeal of cockfighting was beyond him: “pah. It almost made me sick.”54
Horse racing, gambling, and cockfighting: some of Washington’s most popular pastimes had a distinctly Southern flavor. In fact, national city that it was, Washington was Southern at its core. As one Ohio congressman attested, the city’s “fixed population” was “intensely southern.”55 In 1830, roughly 60 percent of its permanent white residents were from Southern states or had strong Southern ties, and about a third of the city’s residents were black; the fact that more than half of these black residents were free made Washington a true border-state town.56 Even the city’s town houses, with their back-lot outbuildings for housework, mirrored the layout of plantations.57 In more ways than one, the South reigned supreme in Washington.
Of course, the most obviously Southern aspect of Washington was the ubiquitous presence of slavery. The auction blocks and slave pens, one of them clearly visible from the Capitol’s window
s; the cuffed slave gangs; the brutality that infused a slave regime: although Washington wasn’t a central hub of the slave trade, slavery’s grim realities struck Northerners in the face when they first arrived.58 (“Here I am in slave-land again,” reported the Massachusetts Free-Soiler Horace Mann upon arriving in Washington in 1852.)59 Not long after his arrival, Joshua Giddings (W-OH) was stunned to see a slave gang of sixty-five shackled men, women, and children being marched down the street.60
French was stunned to be living with slaves; New Hampshire was overwhelmingly white in 1830, with 602 free black citizens and 5 enslaved people out of a total population of 269,328.61 I have “a servant to wait on me whenever I call,” he wrote wonderingly to Bess during his first days in his boardinghouse. “There are about a dozen or fifteen servants about the house, all negro slaves.”62
Not all of New England was as free of slavery as New Hampshire, where it had never really taken hold; for a time, the nation’s “free states” weren’t entirely free. Slavery was scattered throughout New England in small numbers, and it shaped the region dramatically, enabling it to shift from subsistence farming to a market economy.63 It was also entrenched. Emancipation in most Northern states didn’t come easily; it was a complex process that took decades and introduced new complications; for some Northern whites, disapproving of slavery was one thing and living among free blacks was quite another.64 Slavery and race were very real problems in New England, and New Englanders like French arrived in Washington with their home-born prejudices intact.
Detail from an American Anti-Slavery Society broadside showing chained slaves in front of the U.S. Capitol (The Home of the Oppressed by William S. Dorr, 1836. Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
But Southern plantation slavery was an entirely different thing. Many Northern congressmen had never seen a plantation or talked slavery with slaveholders. Curious Northerners sought out such encounters, sometimes at the encouragement of Southerners, who were all too eager to free their Northern allies of their “temporary … prejudices,” as one Southerner put it.65 The abolitionist Harriet Martineau experienced this Southern charm campaign firsthand; on her first day in Washington she was visited by several Southern senators and their wives, who pledged their services and invited her to their homes to see plantation slavery for herself.66
French’s friend and fellow New Hampshirite John Parker Hale (D-NH) couldn’t wait to talk slavery with slaveholders. “I have had an opportunity which I have long wanted, viz. a full unreserved & frank conversation with a Southerner, an intelligent & gentlemanly man, on the subject of Slavery,” he told his wife during his first weeks in Congress in 1844. The man was “not only willing, but I thought quite as willing to answer as I was to ask questions.” Two more conversations revealed something that would shock most Northerners, Hale thought: white Southerners were “hard-working people.” One South Carolina congressman even made his own hoe handles.67 Four years later, Hale advanced his slavery schooling by spending a weekend with four wealthy planters at a nearby plantation, discussing slavery.68
Many Northerners made similar visits.69 French did. In 1851, he and his family visited the Maryland plantation of his fellow Mason Michael Carroll, and French was pleasantly surprised.70 Carroll’s slaves seemed well-off; the house slaves were “dressed better than N.[ew] H.[ampshire] Farmers’ wives & daughters.” And Carroll seemed to care about them, almost sobbing over a beloved slave’s recent death. French’s diary account virtually oozes relief, suggesting that as dedicated a Democrat as he was, he’d had his doubts about plantation slavery. His visit eased his conscience and made him roaring mad at abolitionists who were threatening the Union. God sanctioned slavery, he insisted in his diary a few days later: “the old Testament abounds with evidence.” And abolitionists were fanatical Union-busting blasphemers with baseless claims; to prove his point, he attached a newspaper clipping about recent New Hampshire antislavery resolutions that seemed to violate “in spirit, the Holy Word of God.”71 When Carroll died a month later, French’s obituary sang his praises as a “good, generous, and noble-hearted master” and condemned Northern “fanaticism.”72 His plantation visit had had an impact.
But so did other visits. Witness French’s tangled trajectory: As a Northern Democrat, he had come to Washington as a self-described “ultra” on the issue of slavery, so firmly convinced that only slaveholding states had the right to act on it that he didn’t think that people in free states had even the right to petition against it.73 A conversation with the Ohio abolitionist Joshua Giddings in 1849—a mere two years before his plantation visit—changed his mind. After hearing Giddings argue in the House that slaves weren’t property, French had been so intrigued that he went to Giddings’s boardinghouse to chat about it. He came home vowing to help abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.74 Two years later, French would be declaring slavery God-sanctioned after visiting Carroll’s plantation. The following year he devoted himself to promoting Franklin Pierce’s South- and slavery-friendly presidential bid. Yet not quite a month after Pierce’s nomination, French wrote a poem honoring Giddings for a speech condemning Pierce’s proslavery views.75 French wavered on slavery, and he wasn’t alone; for many Northerners, living in Washington put their politics to the test.
“A NEW HAMPSHIRE BOY”
For a time, the bonds of party overcame such sectional fluctuations—or at least, they outweighed them, particularly in Washington, where many people experienced their party as a national organization for the first time. Fragile though they were, political parties of the 1830s forged vital national ties. A far cry from today’s top-down enterprises, they were essentially national leagues of local organizations. Cities and towns had party clubs and committees; county, district, and state organizations fostered and corralled those local efforts; and politicians in Washington helped as best they could, coaching and guiding more than anything else.76 Well into the 1840s there was no central party management and no clear chain of command; party organization stemmed from local organizers like Isaac Hill. Even national party conventions, which had their start in the 1830s, were initially centered on creating party unity, gathering together a far-flung group of allies to hash things out.77 National party politicking was much like the Union: decentralized, localized, and bound by ties of sentiment more than structure.
Thus the novelty of politicking in Washington. Local politicos like French suddenly found themselves banging the party drum with allies from near and far, particularly in Congress, the national center of partisan “slang-whanging.”78 French was a noteworthy cog in the congressional slang-whanging machine. He was a congressional correspondent for Democratic newspapers in New Hampshire, Washington, and Chicago. (Isaac Hill’s brother Horatio co-owned the Chicago Democrat.)79 As an active member of the city’s Jackson Democratic Association and ultimately its president, French corresponded with sister clubs around the country, collecting information and spreading the party line. He helped stage massive celebrations and lavish banquets with guest lists of hundreds of prominent Democrats from around the country and national press coverage that preached the glories of their visibly national party to a widespread audience. In Washington, French forged national party ties.
For much of the 1830s, Whig and Democratic party ties alike centered on the iconic figure of Andrew Jackson. The early Whig Party was a conglomerate of interests bound together by their hatred of “King Andrew’s” polarizing politics.80 The “wiggies” were an “unholy league” of “ites” (“Bank-ites,” “Tariff-ites”) formed “of the odds & ends of disappointed factions,” French thought. They were a blend of “Abolition, Antimasonry, old Federalism & humbug, mingled with drunkenness and dissipation,” and little else.81
For the Democrats, of course, love of Jackson knew no bounds. French virtually genuflected at the mention of his name. Even in his diary, he gushed.82 The magic at the heart of the Democracy was the rhetorical link between Jackson and the Union; in the Democratic cosmos, they were lastingly entw
ined. At the events that French organized, these polestars of the party almost always led the way. Promoting Jackson would promote the Union; worshiping Jackson was worshiping the Union; national party unity would breed national unity: Jacksonian Democrats north, south, and west joined in singing one song. And French was a choirmaster, a fount of Democratic songs and poems.83
An 1852 Battle of New Orleans dinner was typical of many. The Washington Jackson Democratic Association sent invitations to Jackson’s “friends” throughout all thirty-one states, inviting them to a banquet that would bolster party bonds and Old Hickory’s beloved Union, and promote Franklin Pierce’s presidential bid in the process. The lavish gathering, attended by five hundred people, featured three hours of speechifying, a B. B. French song (“The Altar of Liberty”), and at least sixty toasts, with French—a man with a “pair of lungs admirably calculated to keep order,” according to the Baltimore Sun—repeating the toasts so that everyone could hear. (“I almost split my lungs,” he later groused.)84
So routine were such pro-Jackson fanfares that they became a standing joke. An 1828 newspaper parody caught the parade of excess perfectly. Predicting how that night’s Battle of New Orleans celebration would go (because “it can be predicted with as much certainty as the weather in an almanac”), it described an elaborate banquet featuring half an alligator, and if necessary, eaten words; a series of ridiculous toasts; and a grand triumphal song, heralded with trumpets, bagpipes, gongs, and a “Grand Shout,” followed by the song’s opening lines, “Strike the Tunjo! Blow the Hugag!”—a B. B. French song on steroids. This “famous ‘hugag and tunjo’ article” so perfectly captured the pomp and nonsense of the period’s politicking that satirists mined it for decades.85 But silly or not, such grandstanding worked: it fueled passions powerful enough to bridge sectional divides.
The Field of Blood Page 7
