Yet those divides persisted, even for a devoted national party operative like French. Given his party electioneering, his decades in Washington, and his congressional career, it’s hard to imagine someone more national in perspective or Washingtonian in spirit. It becomes harder still when his endless stream of civic responsibilities is thrown into the mix. French was president of the City Council, an alderman, a co-founder of one local charity and active in several others, a trustee of the public schools and a supporter of a school for free black girls, assistant secretary for the Smithsonian Board of Regents, and a lecturer for clubs and societies all over town. As commissioner of public buildings under Presidents Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Johnson, he repaired bridges, watered down the dusty avenues, and oversaw the Capitol’s extension and new dome, which featured French’s name inscribed on the “Goddess of Freedom” sculpture at its top.86 As Grand Master of the District of Columbia Masons, he even laid the cornerstones of three of the city’s most iconic buildings: the Smithsonian Institution, the Washington Memorial, and the Capitol extension.87
But as dedicated a national organizer and Washingtonian as French was, he viewed the world through a New Hampshire lens. He was looking through that lens when he attended a Democratic rally in Maryland in 1840. Curious to see “how they manage political meetings in this part of the Union,” he was impressed. The speeches—given by congressmen—were just the thing to “tickle the ear & stir up the feelings of the multitude.” But the flagpole! No one from the Granite State would have settled for such a puny flagpole. New Hampshire poles stood one hundred feet high; this one was so short that if the wind hadn’t been blowing, the flag “would have trailed upon the ground!”88 (Competitive pole-raising ran rampant during electoral campaigns, adding a whole new dimension to the manly art of politics.)89 Even amid a crowd of people who were virtually—if not literally—singing his song, French was a Granite State man to the core.
In fact, he was never more a Granite State man than when he was in Washington. He praised New Hampshire in poems and toasted it at dinners. (“New Hampshire!—Before my heart shall forget thee, it must become harder than thy granite.”)90 He sang its glories in songs, as in one that he wrote for the 1849 “Festival of the Sons of New Hampshire,” a celebration of native sons living “abroad” (in foreign countries like Boston and Washington):
Our granite race are every where,
Where man can find employ;
If ever man was in the moon,
’T was a New Hampshire boy.91
He was a virtuoso of the New Hampshire non sequitur. Unexpectedly called to the podium during a St. Patrick’s Day dinner in 1843 and casting about for kinship with the Irish, he came up with this: “it was said that the Emerald Isle rested upon a bed of granite, and he himself was born in the ‘Granite State.’”92 Even in death he salutes his home state; he lies beneath a granite obelisk in Washington’s Congressional Cemetery. To say that French was proud of his birthplace (as he himself couldn’t say often enough) is a colossal understatement.93
French identified just as much with his home region. His writings are filled with references to his “Yankee ears” and “Yankee blood.” He was quick to praise Yankee ingenuity and just as quick to see the Yankee in people he liked; he thought the “very amiable” Charles Dickens looked far more like a Yankee than a Brit.94 His closest friends in Washington were from Maine and New Hampshire. And he wasn’t a lone Yankee fan; he was an active member of the New England Society of the District of Columbia, a club devoted to celebrating “the land of the Pilgrims” and promoting Yankee charity.95 His New England accent was just as steadfast; more than a decade after arriving in Washington, his Yankee twang remained so sharp that even New Englanders noted it.96 An 1849 newspaper sketch put it best: French “retains a deep and ardent love for New England, of which time does not seem, in any degree, to abate the fervency.”97
This reporter was more accurate than he knew. Because not only didn’t French’s time in Washington cool his love of New England; it intensified it. Watching New Englanders mingle with Southerners and Westerners, French gained a new understanding of what set them apart. His writings are filled with lessons learned: Yankees are industrious; Yankees are brave; Yankees can hold their own in a fight. French developed a new and stronger image of New England in Washington; in the process, he learned just how different the rest of the Union could be.98 He was experiencing in person the ultimate lesson taught by life in the nation’s capital: the Union truly was the “Glorious Whole of glorious Parts.”99
The same held true for many congressmen: being in Washington revealed and reinforced regional views. This was as true for Southerners as it was for Northerners. The presence of Northern “he-women” taught Representative David Outlaw of North Carolina just how superior Southern women were. “There is a boldness, a brazenfacedness among the Northern city women, as well as a looseness of morals which I hope may never be introduced south,” he complained to his wife, who was safely and permanently ensconced in North Carolina.100
Caricatures of the stereotypical unpolished Western congressman, starchy Northerner, and swaggering Southerner (Harper’s Weekly, April 10, 1858. Courtesy of HarpWeek)
Some Southerners found Northern men no more impressive. Back home after a term in Congress in 1841, Charles Fisher (D-NC) announced his findings in a speech. “Why is it that the condition of the people of the Southern States, is not as good as that of the people of the Northern States?” he asked. Some “among us … say it is owing to the superior sagacity, & greater industry of the people of these states over our people.” This was untrue, Fisher stated, and he had proof: “We meet them in Congress—are they sup[erio]r there?”101 The reluctance of Northern congressmen to brawl or duel was just as striking; Southern scorn of Northern cowardice was a constant.102 Here was the flip side of cross-regional bonding: familiarity could breed contempt.
In this sense, being in Congress required an internal balancing act. Congressmen were in a national institution doing the nation’s work with a national sampling of colleagues tied to national parties; but doing that work highlighted what set them apart. Although party loyalties often reigned supreme, for most congressmen, as for French, sectional preferences framed their vision of the world.
DOCILE DOUGHFACES
At no time was this balancing act more apparent than when casting votes, because every vote was a statement of priorities. Thus the creative ways in which congressmen dodged vote calls. Such personal compromises were the stuff that the Union was built on, makeshift as they might be.
Northern Democrats were notorious for this kind of dodging, largely because of the problem of slavery. When it came to that seemingly irreconcilable difference, preserving party unity and preserving the Union required dodging and weaving on all sides. Some evasive measures were more successful than others. Sweeping stratagems like gag rules that prohibited discussion of slavery petitions were stereotypically Southern; uncompromising, unapologetic, aggressive, and heavy-handed, they did more to stoke antislavery fires than to slake them.
Subtler strategies were better at smoothing the waters, and when it came to subtleties, Northern Democrats like French were virtuosos. As Northerners, some of them weren’t entirely comfortable with slavery’s morality or realities; by the 1830s, many of them viewed it as both Southern and foreign.103 They also were keenly aware of the precarious balance of power between states slave and free, so the addition of new slave states couldn’t help but give them pause. Many of them had racist fears that freed slaves would head north, as well as realistic fears that attacking slavery would destroy both the Union and their party.104 Some worried that slavery would overrun Western territories and outpace yeoman farming. Yet their support of states’ rights gave them a hands-off policy concerning slavery. For Northern Democrats, there was a brutal bargain at the heart of party membership: the rewards of party power were tied to preserving slavery. In exchange for the former, they accepted the
latter. In the Democracy, as in Washington, Southerners held sway.
French’s views were typical of many Northern Democrats, a messy, shifting blend of generalization, distraction, abstraction, and denial. As he put it when pressed on the matter in 1855, he was
so much a Freesoiler as to be opposed to the addition of any more slave territory to this Union—but utterly opposed to the agitation of the question of slavery if it can be avoided, &, although abhorring slavery in the abstract, defending it to the utmost of my power so far as it is tolerated or justified by the Constitution.105
French abhorred slavery, wanted no new slave states, defended slavery, and didn’t want it discussed. His one tangled sentence exposes an internal tug-of-war felt by many Northern Democrats.
There was a word for men like French: doughface. Coined by the acerbic and eccentric Representative John Randolph of Virginia, it referred to Northerners who catered to Southern interests. As defined by Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1848), doughface was a “contemptuous nickname, applied to the northern favorers and abettors of negro slavery.”106 The term first gained popularity after the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and it had a sting, particularly in Congress. By implication, doughfaces were servile, docile, and all-around unmanly. Working side by side with slaveholders, congressional doughfaces risked being these things in person. When they responded to proslavery blustering by backing down or making nice, they seemed to prostrate themselves before their slaveholding colleagues. In Congress, the challenges of balancing section and party could be painfully personal.
It makes perfect sense that Randolph coined this notorious slap at Northerners; he was a master of Southern swaggering. Famed for his brilliant, rambling, and sometimes drunken oratory, his razor-sharp wit, his fighting temper, and his shrill, piping voice, Randolph stalked around the House booted and spurred, riding crop in hand and hunting dogs at foot, beating men down with withering insults and tossing off duel challenges, a virtual caricature of a Southern slave lord. He has the dubious distinction of being the only person to have challenged both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster to duels, though only the Clay duel advanced to a dueling ground, with no blood shed. When Thomas Hart Benton solemnly delivered Randolph’s challenge to Webster, who was relaxing on a sofa on the outskirts of the House, Webster was nonplussed, to say the least; he read it, carefully folded it, paused, unfolded it, reread it in seeming disbelief, and wiped his brow.107 Randolph ultimately retracted the challenge.
Although the term doughface has puzzled people almost from the moment that Randolph uttered it—Doe face? Dough face?—in fact, he was referring to a children’s game involving dough masks donned to frighten people. Using the term in 1809, Randolph said that passing a nonintercourse act against Great Britain was equivalent to dressing up in a dough face to frighten people “who may blow our brains out.”108 He used the term again in 1820 during the crisis over Missouri’s admission to the Union. Speaking of Northerners who had voted with the South to admit Missouri as a slave state, Randolph mocked their “conscience, and morality, and religion,” declaring:
I knew these would give way. They were scared at their own dough faces—yes, they were scared at their own dough faces! We had them and if we had wanted three more, we could have had them; yes, and if these had failed we could have had three more.109
As appreciative as he was of Northern supporters, Randolph couldn’t stomach their seeming servility. By his logic, these men had prostrated themselves before the South out of fear of fracturing their party and perhaps the Union. Thirty years later, Walt Whitman echoed the thought in a poem titled “Song for Certain Congressmen,” later retitled “Dough-face Song”:
We are all docile dough-faces,
They knead us with the fist,
They, the dashing southern lords,
We labor as they list.110
For both Randolph and Whitman, doughfaces were cowards who had betrayed their home region.
For Northern congressmen working alongside Southerners, such blows hit hard, particularly given Northern parliamentary acrobatics aimed at sidestepping slavery; in their flagrant attempts to flee the issue—sometimes literally—Northerners looked cowardly. Some of them routinely dodged problem votes; in 1850, during voting over the controversial Fugitive Slave Act mandating that runaway slaves anywhere in the country must be returned to their masters, a pack of Northerners had a sudden urgent need to visit the congressional library. William Seward’s (W-NY) son saw them aimlessly milling about and knew enough to ask what was happening in the House.111 Their absence was duly noted—and mocked; once the bill passed, Thaddeus Stevens (W-PA) wryly suggested sending a page to the library to tell the dodgers “that they may now come back into the Hall.”112
Vote changing was another doughface dodge. For example, at the opening of Congresses between 1835 and 1843, some Northern Democrats routinely voted against a rule “gagging” discussion of slavery petitions, well aware that their constituents might object to it. Later in the session when the rule was no longer in the spotlight, these doughfaces would drift back to the “pro–Gag Rule fold”—and national party unity—for the rest of the session.113
Some Northerners were equally adept at dodging problem Southerners, fleeing the chamber rather than endangering party unity by confronting aggressively proslavery allies. After just one week in Congress, William Fessenden (W-ME) had already fled the House several times. The need to adopt rules for the session had raised talk of a gag rule, sparking a slew of Southern insults about Northern fanatics oppressing the South. Afraid of being “forced into a reply & defiance,” Fessenden and a number of other Northern Whigs left the chamber to avoid “disappointing our friends, & ruining the party.” A few times, “pushed beyond all power of human patience,” he tried to get the floor, “thanking God afterwards that I did not succeed.”114 Fessenden was afraid of being defiant to brother Whigs—striking testimony to the tangled emotions behind Northern party loyalties. “Selfish” Southern Whigs didn’t struggle that way, he grumbled; they lashed out at their Northern allies thinking only of themselves. Such selfishness was the flip side of being a doughface: being disloyal to one’s party for the sake of one’s section. “The truth is that we are cursed with a set of allies who are enough to ruin any party,” he told his father.115 Sustaining the balance of section and party was no easy thing.
Dodging, fleeing, and flip-flopping: many a new congressman was stunned by such spinelessness. Within his first two weeks in Congress, the abolitionist Joshua Giddings was shocked to find “our Northern friends so backward and delicate.”116 John Parker Hale (D-NH) said virtually the same thing during his first term.117 Even Southerners who banked on doughface votes sneered at Northern servility, stirring up sectional discord in the process. To Henry Clay, the two words dough and face with which John Randolph had “rated and taunted our Northern friends … did more injury than any two words I have ever known.”118
Antislavery advocates had more reason than most to denounce doughface treachery. Giddings declared even slaveholders more honorable. “I may be led to confide in the honor of a slave-holder,” he said during debate in 1843, “but a ‘servile doughface’ is too destitute of that article to obtain credit with me.”119 Hale found the “servility of some of the Northern democrats to Southern dictation … humiliating and disgusting to the last degree.”120 Doughfaces were “white slaves,” charged one congressmen; they suffered from “slavery of the mind,” said another.121 The only way to defeat slavery was for free-state congressmen to assume “a bolder tone, and rise above the unmanly fear of slaveholding ‘chivalry.’”122
Clearly, doughface was more than a political label in Congress. It was a personal insult that put one’s manhood on the line.123 Franklin Pierce (D-NH) felt this firsthand during an 1836 debate over slavery in the District of Columbia. To prove that abolitionism was a looming threat, Senator John C. Calhoun (N-SC) claimed that Northern Democrats routinely underplayed the number of abolitionists in their
home states in the hope of soothing Southern allies. As proof, he cited a newspaper article that accused Pierce of committing that sin and branded him a doughface. Isaac Hill immediately leaped to Pierce’s defense, as did Thomas Hart Benton after a hasty consultation with Pierce, who had entered the Senate chamber as the article was being read, and blanched. Calhoun apologized to Pierce at least three times in the next few days, during debate and man-to-man. It was a good thing, too, noted John King (D-GA), for “what encouragement did such treatment afford to our friends at the North to step forth in our behalf?”124
But Calhoun’s apologies weren’t enough for Pierce. A few days later in the House, still visibly upset, he fought back. He first justified his claims about the paltry threat of New Hampshire abolitionism (by pooh-poohing the importance of antislavery petitions signed by women, among other things).125 Then he addressed the second charge. He had been called an epithet coined by “one of the ablest debaters of any age” that in the North “was understood to designate a ‘craven-spirited man.’” It was a lie to say he was a doughface, he declared, and he would physically fight anyone who dared declare it true. He didn’t want to “provoke an assault.” He had nothing against Calhoun, who had apologized. But for all other comers, Pierce hereby declared, “once for all, that if any gentleman chose to take that statement as correct, he might put Mr. P’s spirit to the test when, and where, and how he pleased.”126 By this point, Pierce was so wound up that he had to sit down. But he made his point. Accused of being a cowardly tool of slave-driving Southerners, Pierce had demonstrated his manliness by pronouncing himself willing to fight.
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