Spurred by the expansion of slavery, the rise of antislavery sentiment, and the onslaught of petitions, and encouraged by the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, a few congressmen broached the issue of slavery in earnest, most aggressively and consistently in the House, aided and abetted by a cluster of antislavery lobbyists eager to promote their cause on the national stage.8 Between 1836 and 1844, outraged slave-state representatives and concerned free-state colleagues responded by promoting a series of gag rules to keep antislavery petitions off the floor. French wholeheartedly supported this strategy. “If fanatics will persist in petitioning,” he thought, “the less debate there is, the better.”9
To French, the alternative was terrifying. An 1837 outburst sparked by the abolitionist William Slade (W-VT) showed how a worst-case scenario might play out. Sixteen days into the second session of the Twenty-fifth Congress, he presented some antislavery petitions and moved their consideration by a select committee to consider the abolition of slavery; his request for a committee entitled him to discuss the issue, and on December 20 he did just that, ranging far and wide over the history of slavery and its inhumanity, persisting even as Southerners roared out objections. “Nothing could stop him,” John Fairfield (D-ME) marveled. The impact of Slade’s stand was dramatic: three Southern-state delegations stormed out of the hall. That night, a larger group of Southerners devised a new gag rule that they presented and carried the next day. It was a good thing too, thought Fairfield, though he would have preferred a slightly different rule. “We were obliged to take that or let the whole subject remain open for a long violent, angry & dangerous discussion. I say dangerous because I believe the permanency of the Union would be endangered if not destroyed by it.”10 French wasn’t alone in his fears.
It was a strikingly simple solution to a menacing problem: stop the words. Its underlying logic was straightforward, if flawed. If we can stifle antislavery talk in Congress, we can keep its Union-threatening dissonance to a low hum. We can preserve national party bonds. We can deny a national forum to troublemaking “fanatics,” the favored word for abolitionists, who seemed maniacally hell-bent on destroying the Union. No less important, we can keep that national forum calm and functional (at least, by congressional standards).11 Slaveholders had the added impetus of staunching slave resistance; in the South, dangerous words could set off mass rebellion. For people on both sides of the aisle, including some Northern Whigs and most Northern Democrats, when it came to antislavery petitions, gag rules made sense.12
John Quincy Adams was of another mind. Elected to Congress in 1830 after losing the presidency to Andrew Jackson two years earlier, Adams had entered the House with the Union on his mind, intending no dramatic action on the issue of slavery, but the gag rule debate changed his thinking. Opposed to slavery and enraged at this blatant violation of the constitutional right of petition, he launched a campaign of resistance. Fearless and equipped with a keen intellect, a penchant for sarcasm, a lifetime of political training, and a profound knowledge of rules of order, Adams circumvented gags time and again, sometimes with creative parliamentary maneuvering, sometimes by forcing his way onto the floor. French couldn’t understand it. Why stir up trouble? Was it ego? Was Adams senile? By 1842, after years of watching Adams’s efforts, French was ready to expel “the old gentleman, for really, I do not believe him sane on the subject of petitions.” Adams seemed to be deliberately driving slaveholders—and the Union—to the breaking point.
And he was. Raising a ruckus served Adams’s purpose. What mattered most to him was forcing the issues: forcing the issue of slavery onto the floor, forcing the right of petition into play, and forcing slaveholders to display their brutality for all the world to see. As Adams well knew, imposing a gag revealed a harsh reality in stark relief: to a certain degree, in Congress, slaveholders ruled, much as they did in the federal government as a whole. As he explained in a speech to his constituents in 1842, slaveholding congressmen “marching in solid phalanx” had a preponderance of power. Gag rules were born of this regime; by drawing a line in the sand about slavery, slaveholders set the terms of debate.
Henry Wise—an “ultra anti abolitionist” according to French—did his best to defend that regime. When it came to opposing Adams’s gag rule campaign, Wise was bully-in-chief. But in this war, he couldn’t use his full arsenal of weapons, because Adams was above assault.13 Elderly (sixty-three years old when he entered the House), a former president of the United States, and the son of a president who was also one of the nation’s foremost founders, Adams suffered more than his fair share of insults, threats, and parliamentary blows during his gag rule campaign. But he was never physically attacked by a congressman. In the gag rule debate, this gave him a special power that he used to full advantage.
To counter Adams, Wise and his allies would have to fight with rules of order alone, even as Adams gleefully taunted them, almost daring them to take a swing. Wise could barely restrain himself. After one slashing exchange with Adams, he admitted it. “If the Member from Massachusetts had not been an old man, protected by the imbecility of age,” Wise warned, “he would not have enjoyed, as long as he has, the mercy of my mere words.”14 Adams got the message. That night in his diary, he wrote: “Wise then replied to me in his own way, closing with a threat of murdering me in my seat.”15
The abolitionist Joshua Giddings (W-OH) was also threatened for his antislavery views, but he most decidedly was not above assault; during his lengthy congressional career, he was attacked at least seven times, and like Adams, he seized such moments to put Slave Power brutality on display. Giddings was ideally suited to this strategy of attack because of his imposing size, strength, and spirit; over six feet tall and brawny—grown strong from years of homesteading—he was daring enough to taunt slaveholders and confident that he could hold his own. John Dawson’s knife didn’t scare him. “[H]ad I struck him,” Giddings told his wife after Dawson attacked him, his “bowie knife would have been of little avail.”16 In essence, Giddings was an antislavery toreador, waving the red flag of abolitionism in front of roaring slaveholders, confident that they would reveal their bloodlust in response before a national audience. Other antislavery toreadors had different strategies, and they needed them; standing down the Slave Power was dangerous without a plan.
Performed properly, abolitionist stands on the floor of Congress sent a strong message, because attempts to gag such men—whether with gag rules, other rules of order, or the rule of force—did slaveholders damage, galvanizing not only abolitionists, but also Northerners whose right of petition was being compromised.17 According to the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, Congress could make no law abridging the “right of the people … to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Curtailing that right was a serious step indeed (though French got past it by declaring that slavery wasn’t a Northern grievance, so Northerners had no right to petition against it.)18
Northern rights of representation and free speech also became entangled in the gag rule debate, to the point that even Southerners occasionally had qualms, as did William Graves (W-KY), of duel fame, who defended Adams’s right to express his opinion in 1837 and was roundly reprimanded by Southerners for doing so.19 Endangered rights gripped Northern onlookers with a guttural power that abolitionists used to full advantage. As one congressman noted in later years, violating “great principles of constitutional right” drove people to take action as nothing else could.20
Thus the stalwart efforts of men such as Adams, Giddings, and their lobbyist allies to advertise that threat by stirring up slaveholders in the halls of Congress. They well knew that in the battle against slavery, gags were gifts and words were weapons.
THE RULE WARRIORS AND THEIR WAR
Antislavery petitions were bringing Congress to a literal shrieking halt. But how to stop them? Should they be tabled and removed from discussion? Should they be referred to a committee, and if so, what next? Should the House simply refuse
to accept them? Was that even possible? Could petitions—the almighty voice of the public—be pushed aside? Would a simple resolution to reject them be enough, or was a permanent rule of order required? Could the latter be carried and sustained? One seething Southerner even suggested a petition bonfire.21
This wasn’t a problem for the House alone, though things unfolded differently in the Senate for several reasons: with its staggered six-year terms, the Senate was a continuing body that didn’t adopt rules at the start of every session; it received fewer petitions than the House; and, for a time at least, there were fewer firebrand senators pressing the issue, though the same qualms about stifling the right of petition were ever present.22 In 1836, John C. Calhoun raised those qualms when he proposed that the Senate reject antislavery petitions outright. After extended wrangling, they devised a roundabout solution: when an antislavery petition was presented, a senator would question whether it should be received, and another senator would table the question of its reception. By tabling that question rather than the actual petition, the Senate effectively sidestepped First Amendment complications by neither accepting nor rejecting the petitions themselves.23 This somewhat indirect mode of stifling antislavery petitions continued until 1850, when John Parker Hale (FS-NH) exposed its crass reality, noting that the Senate routinely accepted Southern petitions and rejected Northern ones.24
The House sometimes practiced the same sleight of hand, but because each Congress had to adopt rules of order, they followed a different path, passing one session-long gag resolution after another until they built up enough steam to pass a standing rule: House Rule 21. Their first resolution, passed in May 1836 after months of wrangling, provided that “all petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers relating in any way or to any extent whatever to the subject of slavery shall, without being printed or referred, be laid upon the table and that no further action whatever be taken thereon.”
Yet this hardly settled the matter. Such restrictions did nothing to stop Adams’s petition campaign or the rage that it provoked. “The House of Representatives are doing more now towards dissolving this glorious Union than has been done … since the adoption of our Constitution,” French fretted.25 Rules of order were causing disorder.
A draft of the House’s second gag rule of December 21, 1837, declaring “that all petitions, memorials, and papers touching the abolition of slavery or the buying, selling, or transferring of slaves in any state, district or Territory of the United States be laid upon the table without being debated, printed, read, or referred and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon.” (Courtesy of the National Archives)
As a House clerk from 1833 to 1845 and the House Clerk from 1845 to 1847, French’s life revolved around those rules. He recorded or engrossed House documents as prescribed by the standing rules. He made sure that every member had a copy of those rules. On duty at the Clerk’s table in front of the Speaker, he focused on broken rules, transcribing objections and recording points of order for inclusion in the House Journal, which Adams used frequently during the gag rule debate as he wended his way through thickets of gags.26 It’s no wonder that French became a recognized expert on parliamentary procedures and precedents. In 1850, when the Committee on Rules wanted to write a manual, it turned to him.27 Even as he conducted business at the Clerk’s table, people tried to stump him with questions about tangled points of order, and they usually failed.28
Thus his utter frustration with Adams for routinely, deliberately, even gleefully breaking rules for almost a decade. In some ways, Adams seemed to be at war with Congress itself. And it was an extended war; of the fourteen years that French clerked for the House, nine were pocked with the outbursts born of Adams’s “petition flourishes,” as French called them.29
Adams was just the man to fight this battle. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in 1843, he was a “bruiser” who “loves the melee.”30 His talents were in full view in 1839 when Joshua Giddings (W-OH) gave his first declarative antislavery speech. With roaring slaveholders jumping to their feet in outrage, the stunned Giddings noticed Adams at his desk laughing heartily.31 Another time, during a routine roll-call vote, Adams challenged the constitutionality of gag rules, again bringing howling slaveholders to their feet, Adams continuing to speak all the while. When the agitated Speaker pleaded for order, Adams “suddenly dropped into his chair and the uproar instantly ceased,” leaving Adams convulsed with laughter.32
But challenging gag rules wasn’t usually a laughing matter. Slaveholders viewed antislavery petitions as “assaults” and treated Adams accordingly.33 Many a slavery supporter stalked over to him during his petition rants and glowered. During one staring match in 1838, Ratliff Boon (D-IN)—“the thickest skull in the House,” according to Adams—seemed ready to land a punch. A colleague’s joking offer to fight alongside Adams to even out the odds wasn’t far off the mark; later that day, one of Boon’s messmates warned Adams that Boon had threatened to assault him, though in the end even Boon knew better than to cross that line.34
Seventy-six-year-old Representative John Quincy Adams in 1843. He was the first U.S. president to be photographed. (By Albert S. Southworth and Josiah J. Hawes. Gift of I. N. Phelps Stokes, Edward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, and Marion Augusta Hawes, 1937. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Public onlookers were no less hostile. Even as abolitionists flooded Adams with petitions, slaveholders sent death threats; by 1839 he was getting roughly a dozen per month.35 One letter told him to prepare to be “unexpectedly … hurried into eternity.” Another featured a drawing of him with the mark of a rifle ball on his head and the biblical phrase Mene mene tekel upharsin (Your days are numbered).36 Adams dismissed them all as “the natural offspring of slave-breeders and slave-traders.”37
Every controversy served Adams’s purposes. Correcting a reporter’s notes of one of his speeches in 1839, Adams was most concerned that they include the “desperate struggle” to take the floor from him. Press coverage of that attempt would be “much more valuable than that of my speech,” he reflected in his diary that night.38 Ironically, the campaign to gag Adams was spreading his message by offering the world an image of screaming, stomping, threatening slaveholders imposing their will. On the floor of Congress there was a Slave Power: a violent, domineering slavery defense team that did whatever it took to stay in power.39
Thomas Marshall (W-KY) and Henry Wise were part of that Slave Power, as they demonstrated in 1842 when they led an attempt to censure Adams. (Forty-one years earlier—almost to the day—Adams’s father had made Marshall’s uncle John the fourth chief justice of the United States.) Adams had invited the attack by presenting a petition from forty-six of his constituents calling for the dissolution of the Union because Northern resources were being drained to sustain the South. The entirely predictable stir that followed gave Adams a chance to attack slavery and defend the right of petition.40 Indeed, when a motion to censure him was first mentioned, Adams’s immediate response was: “Good!”41
On the morning of Tuesday, January 25, the galleries were packed with people eager to see this battle. As expected, Marshall and Wise held forth with lengthy anti-Adams, proslavery diatribes. (The “insolence of these Southern boys is intolerable,” fumed William Fessenden [W-ME].)42 And then—also as expected—Adams let loose, savaging both men and demolishing their arguments. French had never seen such biting fury, and given Isaac Hill’s way with an insult, that was saying something.43 Scoffing at Marshall’s “puny mind,” jeering at his supposed adherence to a temperance pledge, and noting that he most assuredly had not gotten his law from his uncle John, Adams suggested that Marshall go back to law school to learn what he missed the first time around, and then proceeded not just to refute but to correct Marshall’s speech.44 Marshall made a great show of rising to his feet and staring Adams down during the tirade. But to a friend on the floor he admitted, “I wish I were dead.”45 He was still shuddering years later when he recalled fo
r a reporter how Adams had pressed his hands on the arms of his chair and slowly risen to his feet, unleashing “such a torrent of eloquence” that Marshall had wanted the floor to open so he could drop out of sight.46
Wise received even harsher treatment. Adams insisted on his right to a fair hearing by recalling a time four years past when Wise had demanded the same: after the Cilley-Graves duel. Wise had entered the House “with his hands and face dripping with the blood of murder, the blotches of which were yet hanging upon him,” Adams charged, yet although Democrats had proposed trying him for murder, he had received no punishment because the House wasn’t a fit tribunal for such a crime. Stunned by Adams’s bloody accusation, Wise blasted back that it was “as base and black a lie as the traitor was black and base who uttered it.” But despite the bravado, Adams’s words ate at Wise, who refuted them almost literally until the day he died.47 Robert Barnwell Rhett (D-SC) spoke for many when he stated—after a brief contretemps with Adams—that “everyone who has had any experience in this Hall … understood the adroitness, in matters of controversy of this kind, which the gentleman possessed.”48 French’s friend “Long John” Wentworth (D-IL) had good reason to praise Adams’s “sledge-hammer” eloquence.49
Adams used rules to force his way onto the floor. Wise used rules as muzzles. Throughout his eleven-year congressional career, he hounded opponents with calls to order and stymied their efforts with meandering speeches that tested the bounds of the relevant. (In 1836, he wearily sighed that “he should remember that word relevant to the day of his death.”)50 His tirades routinely drove men to distraction; once, he worked himself into such a lather that he fainted.51 Speaker of the House James K. Polk (D-TN) was hard put to stop him; Wise alternately mocked, ignored, insulted, and challenged him in his ongoing campaign to advance his cause and destroy his foes, including Polk himself. Wise was a master of the legislative roadblock, a champion rule warrior.
The Field of Blood Page 14
