The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  In part, this was because he was smack in the middle of it. French saw the debate that set things off, tracked the circulating gossip, and even saw Cilley write the letter that invited Graves’s challenge. (When Cilley ducked into the Clerk’s office to write it, French was there.)13 On the day of the duel, French tried to intervene. Hours later, he saw a carriage with the victim’s body ride by, and days later, he attended the victim’s funeral.14

  French also knew Cilley and Graves, and he liked them. They were pleasantly conventional. Graves—tall, dark, and strapping—was a “good-natured, pleasant” man, so much so that French deemed him “the last man … of all the members of the House” who seemed likely to duel (though this may say more about the good-natured French than about Graves; one New England congressman deemed Graves an “insolent … Kentucky rowdie.”15 The thin, bespectacled Cilley was “gentlemanly” and “seldom without a smile,” though when excited, “there was a curl of the lip indicative of firmness and determination.”16 That curled lip was in evidence more than once during Cilley’s time in Congress. According to French, he had “an excitable temperament,” and it’s obvious in his letters. He was given to blustery warnings like “They shall hear from me.”17

  Jonathan Cilley, ca. 1838 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  William Graves, ca. 1840 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  In a sense, Graves and Cilley were average congressmen; they certainly fit the profile. Not quite forty (Graves was thirty-three; Cilley was thirty-five), both men were well educated; Cilley had a brief stint as a newspaper editor while studying law. Both men served in local office before coming to Congress. Both were loyal party men; like French, Cilley was a dedicated doughface Democrat. And both came from established families, particularly Cilley, who spoke often and proudly of the Cilley name: his grandfather, the Revolutionary War general Joseph Cilley, appears in one of John Trumbull’s epic paintings in the Capitol rotunda; his uncle Bradbury was in the House during the Madison administration; and his brother Joseph would be an abolitionist senator under President James K. Polk.18

  Yet in one way, Cilley wasn’t average. He was unusually aggressive for a New England congressman. In part, this was a matter of circumstance; for years, he had been fighting for his political life in Maine against a league of friends turned enemies, usually emerging victorious. (Oddly enough, his foremost opponent would unintentionally play a role in the duel.) Elected to the Maine legislature in 1831 at the age of twenty-nine—a young man on the fast track to political power, much like his college friend Franklin Pierce in New Hampshire—Cilley held his own by taking strong stands. “I know that by many here, I am hated & feared,” he wrote to his wife in 1833. “I am hated because I am feared.”19 He was rewarded for his efforts by being elected Speaker in 1835; in the fall of 1836 he was elected to the U.S. House, following Pierce’s path to power. During a visit the summer before Cilley left for Washington, his college friend Nathaniel Hawthorne thought him a strange mix of sincerity and ambition, a shrewd “daring fellow”—“fierce as a tiger” if need be—who had fought his way into Congress by sheer force of will. Indeed, Hawthorne thought him a bit overconfident: “Hardly anybody, probably, thinks him better than he is, and many think him worse.” He predicted that Cilley wouldn’t be prominent in Congress.20 Sadly, it was a prediction that proved wrong for all the wrong reasons.

  Spurred by the financial panic of 1837, the Twenty-fifth Congress convened three months early for a short six-week session, and Cilley took his seat in September with a reputation as a man of mettle. French later recalled that Cilley “came to Washington with the endorsement that he would fight”; already, French’s congressional calculations were under way.21 As a fellow New England Democrat, French doubtless cheered the news. And Cilley delivered, though his wife counseled otherwise. “Why do you want me to keep still,” he asked her on September 24. “It will not do for one who is sustained by the democracy to shrink from responsibility.… I never felt stronger or more confident in my life.”22 His confidence was apparent during the following session. Six weeks in, he was on his feet making speeches. “I made quite a sensation in the house, I assume,” he told his wife in January 1838, the “I assume” suggesting that perhaps he didn’t.23 He was doing well socially, mingling with his messmates and attending parties. And then he got into an argument with Henry Wise (W-VA).

  By 1838, the thirty-two-year-old Wise had served two terms in Congress, and in some ways he was much like Cilley and Graves. Similar in age, college-educated and trained in the law, Wise came from good Virginia stock; his father had been a Federalist presidential elector in the contest of 1800 that elected Thomas Jefferson.24 But there all similarity ended, because Wise was the virtual epitome of a Virginia gentleman, almost to the point of caricature. He was a man of extremes: blustering, flamboyant, impulsive, high-strung, even violent, yet a remarkably genial jokester when he wanted to be; once, during an endless evening session, French saw him sneaking up on sleeping congressmen and tickling their noses with a slip of paper.25 People who expected a firebrand when they met him were disappointed. As Wise himself put it, he was “warm in his affections” and “generous in his disposition,” but could make a man “hate him with a bitter hate.”26 The phrenologist who examined his skull and said that he made a “bitter enemy” had it right.27 Like many a Southerner, Wise was an inveterate tobacco chewer; he could spit to the impressive distance of fifteen feet. (Someone saw him do just that on a White House portico.)28 Tall, thin, and “ghastly” pale, his clothes and long hair usually a bit askew, Wise had a long, striding gait and a short fuse.

  On the floor, Wise was a frequent, fiery, and eccentric speaker who sprinkled his invective with strange streaks of humor; once, when someone protested against a call to order by insisting that he could ask what he liked, Wise jumped to his feet and asked the Speaker “how to spell apple pie.”29 (He made his point.) Prone to dramatic displays of bravado, Wise seemed to revel in waging war, but his passions got the better of him time and again. By the time of the Twenty-fifth Congress, he already had fought a duel, started a fistfight, and nearly gunned down Reuben Whitney in a committee-room—and he was just getting started.30 Crediting Wise with “a dozen brawls,” French considered him the king of disorder, and many agreed. He was “an impudent & fancy fellow,” Cilley thought. “I do not like him at all.”31 So renowned were Wise’s congressional exploits that during Charles Dickens’s 1842 House visit, Wise was one of two men whom he wanted pointed out. (The other was the knife-wielding John B. Dawson; Dickens clearly had the inside scoop on misbehaving congressmen.) Just a few days before Dickens’s visit, Wise had denounced a visiting British abolitionist during debate, dramatically turning to face him when delivering his most biting barbs, a bit of stage business that Cilley would come to know all too well. Dickens described Wise as “wild looking … with a great ball of tobacco in his left cheek.” Wise undoubtedly contributed amply to the spit-spotted rug that so disgusted Dickens.32

  In all these ways, Wise was the epitome of a congressional “fighting man,” even staking his reputation on it. As he explained to his constituents during the furor over the outcome of the Cilley-Graves duel, to properly fulfill his duties as their representative, all he needed was the protection of his “own trusty weapon, and a trusty friend.”33 A gun and a friend to fight by his side: these were the tools of Wise’s trade. He was even more explicit a year later when his role in the duel came up during debate. “In the face of an approaching election, I say to my good constituents … ‘If you are determined I shall not defend myself when assailed, like a true knight, do not send me to Congress, for I shall just as surely fight.’”34 His constituents approved of his fighting, he declared, and indeed they did, electing him to Congress a remarkable six times. He went on to become Virginia’s governor in 1855, the man responsible for signing the abolitionist John Brown’s death warrant in 1859.

  Wise first clashed with Cilley on January 23, 1838, while deb
ating the ongoing war against the Seminole Indians in Florida. When Wise sympathized with the Indians to malign the Van Buren administration’s handling of the war, Cilley erupted in defense of the Democratic president. “[W]hat was to become of the poor Indians?” he mocked. Far more important to worry about “poor Whites.” To Cilley, sympathy for “the dark red man” seemed “to be akin to that expressed in some quarters for the man of a yet darker hue.” Cilley was taunting Wise with abolitionism, and Wise felt the blow. He “cowered under the charge more than I have ever seen him before,” observed John Quincy Adams.35

  Three weeks later, Wise returned the favor. He was in full form on February 12 when he rose to his feet with a newspaper in hand. The matter was “of the deepest importance,” he announced dramatically; two Whig newspapers had made charges of corruption against an unnamed Democratic congressman.36

  Reading aloud the charges from the New York Courier and Enquirer, Wise demanded an investigation. Cilley objected. A free press could say what it pleased, he argued. Why credit one newspaper’s dark hints? He didn’t know the Enquirer’s editor, James Watson Webb, personally, Cilley added, but if he was the same man who had attacked the Bank of the United States in his paper and then changed his tune after it granted him a loan, he didn’t deserve much credit in Congress.

  Whigs persisted. Democrats objected. The debate grew heated. The appropriately named tough guy Ratliff Boon (D-IN) growled that if anyone accused him of corruption he would settle it “by applying my fist to his spectacles,” an open threat to the author of the Enquirer piece, Matthew “Old Specs” Davis, a man who seemed to court controversy; he was an Aaron Burr supporter in times past. James W. Bouldin (D-VA) deemed the charge yet another example of Wise’s ongoing crush-the-Democrats blame game, played so artfully three years past when he had falsely accused Democrats of being drunk at the close of the session. Wise replied that they had been drunk and he could prove it. “So much for that.”37

  Now it was Cilley’s turn to face Wise’s fire. A true man of honor wouldn’t quibble over details, Wise sneered, and as a Democrat, Cilley certainly shouldn’t quibble, given that he himself might be the anonymous culprit mentioned in the Enquirer. When Cilley predictably bristled at hearing “the basest charges insinuated against himself,” Wise stopped him mid-sentence and played the honor card. Dramatically turning to face Cilley, seated behind him, he asked if Cilley had meant to accuse him of making “base charges.” This was moving into duel territory. Cilley said that Wise had been “ungenerous.” Unsatisfied, Wise asked again and Cilley repeated himself. So Wise upped the stakes. Was Cilley deliberately insulting him? An answer of “yes” would have justified a duel. No, Cilley insisted, but he knew his rights and the rights of his constituents; he had every right to speak his mind. A little more taunting and sneering by Wise and the moment had passed. (The Globe summed up this spicy exchange as “some mutual explanations.”)38

  But the impact lingered. This was harsh stuff. It impressed French. Flipping through his mental checklist, he decided that it seemed to require something more. Yet recently Wise had let someone get away with a “gross insult,” so perhaps he was too cowardly to push things further—a stellar example of the high price of letting insults pass.39 And what about Cilley? As a non-combatant Northerner, what would he do? Being a combative non-combatant could be hard to manage, and Cilley’s situation reveals why. His defense of his party had become self-defense within seconds. Soon, his life would be in the balance. In Congress, party politics could be a matter of life and death.

  KNOCKING DOWN WHIGS

  It’s hard to believe that the Cilley-Graves duel stemmed from vague charges of corruption in the Democratic Party, but so it was. Underneath all of its twistings and turnings, it was a good old-fashioned party battle at heart. It started as a Whig attack on Democratic corruption; touched on the Bank of the United States, a third-rail source of party strife; involved one of the nation’s most powerful Whig newspapers, James Watson Webb’s New York Courier and Enquirer; and pitted a team of Whigs against a team of Democrats.

  In 1838, this battle was intensifying because of the financial panic the year before. In the wake of massive economic instability, party differences clarified and a united Whig Party was born. No longer an amalgamated cluster of “ites,” as French put it, the Whigs had cohered into a party that championed the use of government programs to develop the nation’s infrastructure and promote economic growth; they favored protective tariffs and the return of the Bank of the United States. The states’ rights Democrats, in contrast, blamed the nation’s problems on corrupt banking men, sometimes summed up as a “Money Power.” Thus the power of Wise’s charge of corruption in the Democratic Party; he was turning the table on his foes. And thus the Democratic sensitivity to such charges.40

  Agenda-driven as this battle was, however, it was also profoundly personal. “The Whiggery” and “the Democracy” were enduring entities with an emotional heft that went beyond mere institutional loyalty. French’s love for his party ran deep. Its purpose, its principles, its founder, its revelry: he loved it all. The Democratic Party was more of a brotherhood than a political organization to French, and he wasn’t alone.

  Cilley’s eight-year-old son, Greenleaf, had imbibed such lessons well. Not long before his father’s duel, Greenleaf told him that he couldn’t wait to knock down Whigs, bragging that “I guess I culd knock one of them down as fast as he could get up.” Cilley laughingly told Greenleaf to bide his time. “You are not quite large enough yet to knock down Whigs,” he chided. “Better wait till your beard & whiskers grow.”41 French’s five-year-old son, Frank, was also an early adopter of party politics, though he had little sense of its meaning; in 1842, seeing a massive crowd gathered at the White House to pay a call on President John Tyler on New Year’s Day, Frank asked with great seriousness if the people were going to “head Captain Tyler”—a phrase used by irritated Whigs who wanted to force Tyler to comply with their demands.42

  Join the passions and ideals of party membership with its newly energized team-sports mentality, its political benefits, the confines of the congressional community, and the pressures of performing in the public forum of Congress, and you begin to see the many ways that party bonds inspired violence. They certainly did in the Twenty-fifth Congress. During the eight months of its first two sessions alone, in addition to the Wise-Cilley spat, there were at least nine nasty encounters—eight in the House and one in the Senate—most of them not degenerating into all-out fights but coming close.

  Most of the clashes pitted Whigs against Democrats, though a brawl between the Tennessee Whigs William Campbell and Abram Maury was particularly dramatic. During an evening session, Campbell had gone home at 3:00 a.m. and was dragged back by the sergeant at arms; when Maury complained about slackers, Campbell took it personally and slugged him, nearly crashing him through a window. (Campbell later apologized.)43 Not surprisingly, Democratic newspapers put the fight to good use, branding it a sign of “Whig Manners and Decency.”44

  Without a doubt, Henry Wise was the session’s most frequent fighter. There was a reason for this beyond his persistent floor-rage problem. He was in the midst of an extended campaign against Speaker James K. Polk (D-TN) and, through him, the Democratic Party. With the presidential election of 1840 looming and candidates gunning their engines, Wise was campaigning for a Whig president in the way he knew best: by dishonoring leading Democrats with man-to-man showdowns, with Polk at the top of his list. And he wasn’t alone. Joining him in his crusade were John Bell (W-TN) and his “trusty friend” Balie Peyton (W-TN).

  The inner logic of this Whig onslaught was the inner logic of many a fight: insult one party member and you insult them all. The reverse was true too: disgrace a party and you disgrace its members. No man was an island when it came to party politics—a reality that brought Wise and Cilley to their feet. Wise was attacking a party; Cilley was defending it. And the consequences were profoundly personal as well as politic
al. Two years later, when Edward Black (D-GA) attacked Whig policy and Waddy Thompson (W-SC) jumped to his feet as though personally insulted, Black confronted the problem outright: “Had it come to this, that a member could not get up here to question the course of a party, without being required to make personal explanations?”45 The answer, at least sometimes, was yes. Here is one explanation for congressional violence. A simple equation: my party, myself.

  The impact of such thinking could be severe, as the Cilley-Graves duel shows all too well.46 That same thinking was in play a few months later during yet another battle in Wise’s anti-Democracy campaign, though this time Wise’s buddy John Bell did the dirty work, calling Polk supporter Hopkins Turney “the tool of tools” during debate. Seated directly in front of Bell, the “strongly excited” Turney wheeled around and declared Bell a liar (or as French recorded it: “Tis false—tis false”). Bell responded by slugging Turney, setting off a full-fledged rumble.47 Calculating outcomes in a letter to Wise two weeks later, Balie Peyton wondered if there would be a duel. If so, then Bell should

  load up those rifle barrel pistols of his which will kill a Buffaloe 50 yards and meet him, shooting the first at the distance of at least 30 yards—holding it like a rifle in both hands, and aiming low, with a heavy charge. Bell can out shoot any man in that way you ever saw. He has a steadiness of nerve which I never witnessed in any other man. He would be hell in a street fight—rather too slow in a duel—but very deliberate anywhere.