The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  New Englanders got the message. John Fairfield (D-ME) proudly declared Pierce just the man to stand and fight.127 Even Whig newspapers offered grudging respect. The Connecticut Courant noted Pierce’s “gallantry, show of fight, and real spunk,” concluding, “Pretty well for New Hampshire.”128 The Democratic New Hampshire Patriot went one step further: not only was Pierce brave, but the “nullifying bravadoes” had “quailed” in response. These “southern nullies” were “the greatest cowards in the world,” the writer scoffed. Though they “bluster and talk big, yet they quail and cower when they are before a yankee that faces them in their own manner.”129 By the Patriot’s logic, Pierce had saved his reputation and asserted his manhood by acting like a Southerner.

  FIGHTING MEN AND NON-COMBATANTS

  The Patriot was voicing a popular notion that seemed readily apparent in the mix of men in Congress: many a Southerner or Southern-born Westerner was what French called “a hard customer.”130 They talked big and blustered. (“[B]ombastical heroics,” French called it.)131 They strutted and swaggered. They met challengers with fist-clenched or pistol-gripping or knife-wielding defiance; armed and ready, they flaunted their willingness to fight.132

  Take for example the frequent weapon wielder John Dawson (D-LA). It’s hard to tell what Dawson was like in the Louisiana legislature. Maybe he had more self-control. Maybe not; this was a violent age of aggressive manhood, and Louisiana in the 1840s had some rough edges, as did Dawson, a self-described man of “malignant hatred” who had a penchant for fighting duels with the aptly named cut-and-thrust sword.133 Given his relative obscurity on the national stage, it’s also hard to tell how others judged him, though there are clues. John Quincy Adams summed him up as a “drunken bully,” and thanks to his 1842 threat to cut a colleague’s throat “from ear to ear,” he became something of a byword for bullying on the floor. Threats were sometimes met with a mocking “Are you going to cut my throat from ear to ear?”134 All in all, it’s entirely possible that Dawson was a blade-wielding charmer wherever he happened to be; when he died in 1845, even his congressional eulogists couldn’t avoid mentioning unnamed “grave faults.”135

  But what’s most telling about the congressional Dawson are his literal and figurative trigger points. In one way or another, it was opposition to slavery that galled him enough to wave a weapon. His throat-cutting victim, a Whig Southerner, had been defending John Quincy Adams’s right to speak during a ruckus over antislavery petitions. The outspoken Joshua Giddings was honored by Dawsonian ire more than once. In the midst of an antislavery speech by Giddings in 1843, Dawson shoved him and threatened him with a knife. (“I take it, Mr. Speaker, that it was not an attempt to cut his throat from ear to ear,” Adams joked darkly.)136 Two years later, during another Giddings antislavery speech, in what may rank as the all-time greatest display of firepower on the floor, Dawson, clearly agitated, vowed that he would kill Giddings and cocked his pistol, bringing four armed Southern Democrats to his side, which prompted four Whigs to position themselves around Giddings, several of them armed as well. After a few minutes, most of the pistoleers sat down.137 Dawson may or may not have been a troublemaker in the Louisiana legislature, but he was one in Congress for one central reason: face-to-face attacks on slavery.

  This portrait of the knife-bearing, pistol-wearing frequent fighter John Dawson of Louisiana hints at his inner demons. (Gen. the Hon. John Bennett Dawson of Wyoming Plantation, West Feliciana Parish, ca. 1844–1845, by C. R. Parker. Courtesy of Neal Auction Company)

  A bowie knife of the sort worn by congressmen in the 1830s (Photograph by Hugh Talman and Jaclyn Nash. Courtesy of National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution)

  In the South, most Southerners didn’t confront open opposition to slavery in their everyday lives. Even in print it was beyond the pale; a flood of abolitionist tracts mailed south in 1835 prompted panic, mass protest rallies, vigilante violence, and bonfire burnings of sacks of mail.138 It’s not surprising then that confrontational antislavery talk in Congress was a challenge that some Southerners handled better than others; many took it as a personal affront that they felt bound to avenge. As John C. Calhoun said in 1836, there were only two ways to respond to the insults proffered in antislavery petitions: submit to them or “as a man of honor, knock the calumniator down.”139 Many slaveholders chose the path of most resistance, even on the House and Senate floors.

  In part, this was a matter of custom. Such man-to-man encounters were semi-sanctioned in the South; authorities rarely intervened.140 Southerners were accustomed to mastery in more ways than one. Indeed, their lives depended on it. By definition, a slave regime was violent and imperiled; the chance of a slave revolt inspired a wary defensiveness on the part of slaveholders, making them prone to flaunt their power and quick to take violent action.141 When it came to leadership, violent men—sometimes very violent men—had a popular advantage. Robert Potter (J-NC) was elected to his state legislature after his release from jail for castrating two men he suspected of committing adultery with his wife; when he committed the crime, he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. William Lowndes Yancey (D-AL) was elected to the Alabama House and then the U.S. House of Representatives after killing an unarmed man by shooting him in the chest, pistol-whipping his head, and stabbing him with a sword cane.142

  Appearances mattered in such a world; authority and power were contained in a man’s person as well as his property. Thus the public-minded nature of Southern violence and its notorious brutality. It was meant to impress.143 Honor culture was of a piece with this world. A man was only as honorable as others thought him to be.144 Duels were more about parading manhood and showing coolness under fire than they were about killing. Cower before a duel challenge and you were no man at all.145

  Northern violence was different. This isn’t to say that Northerners couldn’t be savagely violent or that they were immune to the power of honor culture. The “Yankee code of honor,” as French called it, had its own logic and power.146 Less grounded in gunplay, it was no less centered on manhood.147 Canings were common in the North, as were ritualistic “postings”—printed insult-filled public attacks on offenders who refused to defend or take back their offensive words. After a particularly heated congressional election, two of French’s Maine friends in Congress posted each other.148 Mainers were New England’s frequent fighters, partly a product of the young state’s frontier spirit; it had achieved statehood as recently as 1820.

  Yet as belligerent as Northerners could be, many were slower to fight than Southerners and quicker to call in the law. In the North, when assaults went too far or rioting erupted, authorities often imposed order. Most casualties in Northern riots were killed by authorities trying to rein people in; in contrast, Southern rioters tended to kill one another.149 Thus the Northern response to violent displays in Congress; more often than not, Northerners turned to the Speaker or chair to enforce the rules. John Quincy Adams dubbed their pleas “lamentation speeches.”150

  These sectional styles of fighting bumped up against each other in Congress.151 In congressional lingo, most Northerners were “non-combatants” and many Southerners were “fighting men,” which gave them a literal fighting advantage.152 In essence, some men were willing—even eager—to back up their words with weapons, and some men weren’t, which compelled them to back away from confrontations and risk looking cowardly in the process. The British visitor Harriet Martineau thought that Northern servility was palpable in Washington. With their “too deferential air” and habitually “deprecatory walk,” New Englanders seemed to “bear in mind perpetually” that they “can not fight a duel, while other people can.”153 Southerners, in contrast, used violence as a “device of terrorism” to force compliance to their demands—and they did so with pride.154 Southerners and Westerners “would do these things now and then, and man could enact no laws that would prevent them,” declared William Wick (D-IN) in 1848 after two congressmen flipped a desk and started
slugging each other. If the House formally reprimanded the combatants, “the country would laugh it to scorn—at least, all that country west of the mountains.”155 The matter ended in something of a compromise: a formal resolution that the House accept a public apology, and no further action. The final vote was 77 to 69; no New Englander supported the resolution, regardless of party. Even in the realm of settling disputes, Southern mores often prevailed.

  Different men from different regions had different ideas about manhood, violence, lawfulness, and their larger implications—enough so that they sometimes required translators. Border-state congressmen often filled this gap.156 Hailing from Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and northern Virginia, many of them were slaveholders but their home states had mixed views about slavery, and their border location ensured ongoing interaction with the free-labor north.157 Border states had prosperous cities—Baltimore, St. Louis, Louisville—that followed a Northern model, with diverse populations and many free blacks. And perhaps most important of all for the purposes of congressional conciliation, border-state political passions often centered more on nativism than on slavery; even abolitionists were sometimes tolerated.158

  Culturally bilingual, less defensive about antislavery rhetoric than their deeper south peers, and likely to be law-and-order Whigs, border-state congressmen were perfectly positioned to negotiate fights.159 It’s no accident that the period’s most renowned legislative compromisers were virtually all from border states, nor is it any more accidental that these same men were fight mediators of the first order.160

  Fighting men, non-combatants, and compromisers: when congressmen studied pathways of power to chart a legislative course, they knew which men were in which categories and planned accordingly. The personal dynamics of the antebellum Congress were shaped by sectional patterns of violence. In ways that went beyond policies—even beyond the simmering issue of slavery—sectionalism mattered, shaping the balance of power on the floor.

  French factored these patterns into his congressional calculations on an ongoing basis. When an argument moved from animated debate into head-to-head nastiness, he did what most of the congressional community did. He sized up the fighters and their grievances, decided what course of action would redeem reputations, watched closely to see what happened, and assessed the outcome. Men who behaved “manfully” earned kudos and clout; men who didn’t were scorned as cowards and their power on the floor fell accordingly. It was the calculus of congressional reputations, and fighting was a major variable.

  Such calculations could be complex. French usually flipped through a mental fight checklist. Who was arguing? Were they Southern, Northern, or Western? Were they “honorable & fearless?”161 Had they dueled in the past? Was either man a proven coward, a non-combatant, a clergyman, or elderly? For Southerners, Southern-born Westerners, and fighting men generally, the fighting bar was set high and failing to meet it meant a lot. How serious was the offense? Was it words or a blow? Who witnessed it? Had either man used a hot-button insult? Puppy, rascal, scoundrel, coward, and liar were virtual invitations to duel. In certain circles, so was abolitionist. Were there any special circumstances? Was there a long-standing feud at play? Did the two men simply hate each other? Was one of them drunk? Were both of them drunk?

  Almost every serious spat set French to calculating. In 1834, when Senator George Poindexter (AJ-MS) and Senator John Forsyth (J-GA) had a “gladiatorial set too” over Poindexter’s slurs against the Jackson administration, and Forsyth threw the lie (accused Poindexter of lying), French predicted a duel but the Senate settled it in “some way in secret session.”162 In 1838, when Henry Wise (W-VA) and Samuel Gholson (D-MS) exchanged harsh words (Gholson called Wise a “cowardly scoundrel”—a double whammy), French expected a fistfight given the two men’s track records, but Gholson’s arm was in a sling so “he could not make much of a fight.”163 Identifying each season’s best fighters, figuring the odds of a clash, sizing up likely winners and losers, watching for playoffs on the field of honor: in a sense, congressional fighting was a spectator sport.

  And Congress was the major league. Although legislatures all over the Union had flash fights and bullying, clashes in Congress had added weight. Precedent-setting national policy was under debate. A national audience was judging the state of the nation by watching proceedings on the House and Senate floor. The Union-busting problem of slavery was never far from sight. And sectional habits gave some men a fighting advantage. It could have spelled disaster, and it ultimately did. But during the 1830s and 1840s, party bonds provided a vital counterbalance.164 Each party had its share of fighting men and non-combatants, and for the most part, parties cared for their own; attack a non-combatant and you risked a comeuppance from his combatant allies. In a very real way, there was safety in numbers.

  But sometimes the demands of pride, section, and party pushed even non-combatants into combat. French discovered this for himself in 1838. When a New England Democrat was challenged to a duel, French had a surge of Yankee pride for a countryman and ally who was holding his own. But when things went horribly wrong and the unthinkable happened, French crossed a line. He plotted an assault on a congressman.

  3

  THE PULL AND POWER OF VIOLENCE

  THE CILLEY-GRAVES DUEL (1838)

  Staring out at the House for fourteen years, French saw a lot of fighting. He saw screaming matches, finger-pointing, and desk-pounding. He saw Southerners rise en masse in a chorus of fist-clenched outrage, bellowing for all they were worth. He saw men so red-faced and angry that they could barely speak. (John Quincy Adams’s bald head was a barometer of anger; the redder it got, the madder he was.)1 He saw stamping and shoving, fistfights and flipped tables. He saw a few all-out melees—“interesting and intellectual exhibitions,” he called them—with dozens of congressmen pounding one another or standing on chairs to get a good look. He saw bowie knives brandished and pistols drawn, and even saw one gun fired on the floor. Most of it didn’t faze French, not even the stray bullet that wounded his hunting buddy, Capitol police officer John Wirt. He was “in very great pain,” French reported to his brother, but because he was “a Democrat, with of course a clear conscience, he will no doubt soon get over it.”2

  Amid all this mayhem, for French one fight stood out: the 1838 duel between Representative Jonathan Cilley (D-ME) and Representative William J. Graves (W-KY), the only fatal congressional clash in Washington.3 A fellow New England Democrat—a New Hampshire–born family man, no less—had engaged in deadly combat with a fellow congressman. It shook French to his core; he couldn’t get over it. He discussed it in letters. He ranted about it in newspaper columns. He debated its ins and outs in his diary for days, even visiting the dueling ground and sketching the details for himself.4 Twenty-six years later, when he published a memoir in magazine installments, he devoted two entries to the duel and its aftermath, the only event that received so much coverage.5

  Routine “rough play” had led to a death.6 This wasn’t how congressional violence was supposed to work. Although threats, weapons, and fistfights were common, once the initial flashpoint of conflict had passed, friends and allies usually smoothed things over and avoided extremes, testimony to the congressional community’s powers of self-preservation and the degree to which fighting—but not killing—was a congressional norm. Most congressional bullying wasn’t about bloodlust, although some blood was shed. It was grounded on the gut-wrenching power of public humiliation before colleagues, constituents, and the nation-at-large. Fighting men used that power, joined with the threat of physical harm, to intimidate rivals and get their way.

  The Cilley-Graves duel shows that power in action. It wasn’t caused by anger or a thirst for revenge; the two men had no ill will between them. Rather, Cilley and Graves were pulled into fighting. Like most congressmen, both men assumed that their honor was bound up with the honor of all that they represented: their party, their constituents, even their section of the Union. When insulted, both
men took dishonor seriously. And when the congressional community failed to negotiate a settlement, both men felt compelled to fight.

  As suggested by French’s prolonged gasp of a response, few things so effectively prompt earnest and ample testimony to the rules of the game than the game gone awry. In the wake of the duel, people inside and outside Washington weighed in on what had been wrong—and right—about it, highlighting the norms of congressional violence in the process. Indeed, virtually everyone even remotely involved in the duel registered his opinion during the formal congressional investigation that followed, resulting in a remarkable 175-page committee report full of sworn testimony to the pull and power of violence in Congress.7

  Feelings were an important part of that power; fighting men put fear, shame, and anger to political use. And the Cilley-Graves duel certainly provoked strong feelings. French wasn’t alone in his fascination. Sermons condemned it. Town meetings raged about it. Petitions denounced it. Newspaper headlines literally screamed bloody murder. Congressmen filled their letters and diaries with it. And the surviving participants justified their actions in letters, newspapers, and even on the House floor. Perhaps the best documented duel in American history, the Cilley-Graves duel presents a perfect opportunity to pierce the veil of congressional violence, revealing its internal logic and what it meant to congressmen, to Congress, and to a watchful public, horrified, fascinated, and admiring all in one.

  “THE FIRST FATAL CONGRESSIONAL DUEL”

  French immediately grasped the duel’s historic significance: it was “the first fatal Congressional duel that has ever occurred.”8 Yet it was hardly his only brush with history. He had an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time. In 1835, when a deranged man tried to assassinate President Andrew Jackson, French was there.9 He dined with Charles Dickens during the writer’s 1842 tobacco-spit tour.10 Not long after John Quincy Adams’s fatal stroke in the House in 1848, French was by his side, his eyes filled with tears.11 And he was at President Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed in 1865, comforting his wife, Mary.12 In a sense, French was a professional history-stalker. But the Cilley-Graves duel was different.