The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  For years, Wise and Adams engaged in an intricate game of point-counterpoint, sometimes fighting a war of rules, sometimes a war of words. Almost by signal, when Adams spoke, Wise jumped up in protest. Adams returned the favor, objecting so frequently during one debate that a Globe reporter described him as “jumping up and down like the key of a piano.” (“Mr. A. to all appearance, did not listen … with much patience,” he added with marked understatement.)52 The two were a matched set: the brash young Virginian, twenty-seven years old when he took his seat in 1834, and the acerbic senior statesman, fearless in a fight. They were the “ruling spirits of disorganization and confusion in this House,” complained a colleague, “such a complete match … that if they were put in a bag together, and well shaken, he did not know which would fall out first.”53

  Thirty-four-year-old Henry Wise in 1840 (By Charles Fenderich. Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  RULES AS WEAPONS

  The destructive power of rule warfare wasn’t lost on French. Years later, when he devised rules of order for the Masons, he did his best to counter it.54 Unlike congressmen, Brother Masons shouldn’t be able to silence one another with charges of irrelevance, French insisted. Petitions were to be accepted or rejected with no debate, though debate was allowed once they were accepted. The presiding Master had “supreme command,” so there could be no appeal from his rulings. And unlike House rules, Masonic rules would be permanent. In French’s world of Masonic brotherhood, there would be no squabbles over rules or petitions, no gags imposed by calls to order, and an all-powerful presiding officer to keep things calm.55 The gag rule debate taught French some hard lessons.

  A “known system of rules” was supposed to impose order. So stated Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 Manual of Parliamentary Practice, a guidebook based on his time presiding over the Senate as vice president.56 Decorum was key, Jefferson insisted. Personal attacks and insults were strictly out of bounds. No one should address fellow members by name or speak to them directly; comments should be directed to the chair. There would be no hissing or coughing to drown someone out, no insulting or “nipping” words. Nor was anyone to speak “tediously”—surely wishful thinking on Jefferson’s part. Attacking someone’s motives was a “personality” and thus forbidden. “Disorderly words” would be documented by the Clerk and discussed. And in case of “warm words, or an assault,” members had to “declare in their places not to prosecute any quarrel”—meaning, there would be no duel.57

  A system of rules also was supposed to keep things fair. More than anything else, parliamentary rules are grounded on a sense of fair play. Particularly in America’s democratic system of governance, for people to be invested in it, they need to believe that their representatives have a fair chance of advancing their goals. They need to believe that all representatives—all states, all regions, all parties—fight as equals on even ground; equal membership is the heart of American federalism and its human embodiment in Congress. As Wise put it, to represent his constituents properly, he required “an open field and a fair fight.”58 By setting limits, structuring debate, and equipping everyone with the same weapons, rules of order encouraged a fair fight.

  Wise was speaking as a member of the House’s Whig minority, so his words had added meaning. As Jefferson acknowledged in his Manual, faced with a powerful majority, a minority had one weapon of defense: “the forms and rules of proceeding.”59 To protect their rights and stick a foot in the door of legislation, minority members could enforce close adherence to shared rules. In this sense, a system of rules maintained a balance of power.60 But as fair-minded as this sounds in theory, applied to real debates between warring teams, be they sectional factions or political parties, rules were more than minority ballast. They were malleable tools of legislative obstruction, and by the 1830s congressmen had perfected the fine art of using them to bring things to a standstill. Rules became weapons that were used to full effect during the gag rule debate.61

  This form of warfare was more genteel in the smaller and more manageable Senate. According to Senate rules and customs, any senator who sought the floor had the right to be recognized, there were no regulations imposing relevance during debate, and it was difficult to force an immediate vote.62 Senators bent on obstruction could talk on any topic as long as their lungs could carry them. In essence, senators enjoyed broad freedom of debate with few limits.63

  They also thought twice about calling colleagues to order because in the intimacy of the Senate, it seemed insulting. As Vice President Millard Fillmore (W-NY) explained in 1850, “The reason why Senators so seldom interfere by calling each other to order is, doubtless, because they fear that their motives may be misunderstood.”64 Senator Lewis Linn (D-MO) would be “among the last to call either a personal enemy or a political opponent to order; he would not do it,” he declared in 1842. “When any one transgressed the bounds of propriety in relation to Mr. L. he knew how to seek redress, and to obtain it in his own way.”65 Better to launch duel proceedings than to hide behind rules of order.

  The House played a rougher game in the realm of rule warfare, as Adams and Wise knew all too well. Take, for example, the knife-wielding John Dawson’s (D-LA) reaction when Thomas Arnold (W-TN) called a Democrat to order to allow Adams to speak. Stalking over to Arnold’s seat, Dawson sneered, “I understand you are a great hand at keeping order, sir.”66 When Arnold didn’t take the bait, Dawson called him “‘a d—d coward’ and ‘a d—d blackguard,’” and threatened to cut his throat. A few days later, Arnold mentioned the incident when discussing disorder in the House. Joking that “if the Democracy employed persons to bully members here, he hoped that if any of them came to cut his throat he would make a mistake and cut his own which would be a great deal better,” he got a laugh. But when called to order for irrelevance, he bridled: “[H]e was speaking of the disorders of this House, and if there could be a case more directly relevant to that subject on the face of God Almighty’s globe, he should be glad to hear it.”67 Dawson had picked a poor target; Arnold wasn’t easily cowed. Ten years earlier on the steps of the Capitol he had subdued an armed assassin intent on murdering him for insulting Sam Houston and President Jackson by association.68

  Even apart from men like Dawson, in the unwieldy House, rule warfare could be savage because it was grounded on obstruction. Minorities delayed voting by interrupting one another with calls to order, calling for the previous question (demanding an immediate vote on the question under debate), refusing to vote (known as “disappearing quorums”), and making motions for adjournment.69 Representatives had to compete for the floor and defend it once gained; House proceedings were based on competition for a scarce resource. The House was called a “bear garden” for good reason.70 And not surprisingly, talk of slavery made matters worse. By 1842, Adams was using a one-word shorthand in his diary for petition flare-ups: “Explosion.”71 Recalling years later an insult-laden, fist-waving, foot-stamping debate about a “bomb shell … in the form of a petition,” French dubbed it the customary “manner of debate in our House.”72

  A caricature of the different modes of fighting in the somewhat genteel Senate and the “bear garden” House (By John L. Magee, ca. 1852. Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  In this setting, Henry Wise was a self-proclaimed champion. As he explained in 1843 during the gag rule debate, his habitual “mode of warfare” consisted of contesting motions, “calling upon the Speaker to decide points of order;… [and] asking that the rules of the House may be enforced.”73 All three techniques immediately halted debate. Contested motions and points of order took precedence over the topic at hand, and demands for enforcement shifted attention to the rules and the chair’s ability and willingness to enforce them. It was a devastatingly effective way to stymie debate.

  For example, on January 21, 1841, a day dedicated to petitions, Adams presented “a preamble and resolution of the anti-slavery society of Pennsylvania” to the House. Wise immediately called him to order and continue
d to do so—loudly—as Adams continued to read. The Speaker favored Wise. Wise next protested that Adams’s “paper” was a series of resolutions and not a petition, so it had no place on the floor that day. Adams denied it. The Speaker favored Adams. Wise next moved that the question of receiving the petition be tabled—the conventional way of taking antislavery petitions off the floor. The House passed the motion. Adams then moved that the paper be printed. Wise objected that the House hadn’t received it so it had no business printing it. Adams objected, but when others joined with Wise, Adams folded, only to immediately present another antislavery petition that Wise attacked in like manner. It’s no wonder that Adams sometimes couldn’t contain himself, as in this Globe account of him gaining the floor: “Mr. Adams [much excited and raising his voice] Yes, sir, provided there is no point of order raised—no fifty or one hundred questions of order raised to gag me.”74

  On this occasion as always, Adams gave as good as he got, insisting on his right to read aloud a letter from Wise to his constituents to prove a point, which Adams did “exultingly” according to the Globe, though Wise didn’t protest. “He was so used to the gentleman pouring out the vials of his wrath on his head,” Wise explained, “that he really now did not regard it.”75

  Adams’s wording is worth noting. Points of order were being raised “to gag me,” which indeed they were. There were countless ways to use parliamentary procedures as gags. Peppering people with objections was one way. Taunting them and denying them the chance to respond was another. It was “the usual practice of the Whigs,” complained gag victim Jesse Bynum (D-NC), “after having two or three bullies to attack a gentleman and do him injustice, to refuse to let him reply to such attacks.” Calling for the previous question—demanding an immediate vote—was yet another “gag system,” as Charles Brown (D-PA) phrased it: “A member moved the previous question; another member of the same political sentiments asked him to withdraw it; he consented, provided that member would renew it; that member renewed the motion, and then withdrew it at the request of another of his political friends.”76 This was tag-team obstruction at its finest, but unfortunately for the minority, because demanding the previous question was a way to force an immediate vote, it tended to work best for the legislation-wielding majority.77

  As Adams showed time and again, such gags could be resisted. But it took a certain kind of man with a certain kind of nerve to stand down angry men bellowing calls to order. Called to order for irrelevance in 1840, Wise declared himself one of these men: “Let me tell gentlemen, that if they ever attempt to apply the screws to me for this irrelevancy in debate, I will throw them into a scene of disorder which it will not be so easy to get out of. This would be easy for a man of nerve to do when he was determined to maintain his rights.”78 On June 14, 1841, he asserted that nerve during a six-hour diatribe defending a gag rule, probably leading many to want him gagged.79

  In 1842, the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld saw what such men of nerve faced when they attacked slavery. When Adams told him that he planned to put slaveholders “in a blaze” the next day, Weld went to watch. “Such a scene I never witnessed,” he told his wife, Angelina, and sister-in-law Sarah Grimke, themselves leading abolitionists. Scores of slaveholders shouted points of order, “every now and then screaming at the top of their voices: ‘That is false.’ ‘I demand Mr. Speaker that you put him down.’ ‘What are we to sit here and endure such insults.’” Hoping to silence Adams, a pack of glowering Southerners gathered around his seat, but their threats and interruptions only earned them scorn from Adams, who shot back barbed comments, such as “I see where the shoe pinches, Mr. Speaker, it will pinch more yet.”80 The din was so deafening that reporters couldn’t hear a word.81 There was a “glorious row in the House,” French reported to his brother, “& in the midst thereof the House adjourned, & to day I expect we shall have an elegant time.”82

  And where was the Speaker in the midst of such mayhem? Couldn’t he keep order? Often, the answer was no. In part, this was a matter of logistics. Presiding over a testy band of roughly 240 men crowded into a room and competing for attention was no easy task, and things could turn ugly in a flash. An alert Speaker could make all the difference. Once, in the middle of a personal insult (halfway through the word malignant), Wise saw Speaker John Bell shaking his head, and stopped, adding, “Sir, I leave the blank to be filled by the House.”83

  The Speaker’s ultimate tool of order was supposedly the House mace, a ceremonial staff that sits on a pedestal to the right of the Speaker when the House is in session.84 Carried by the sergeant at arms into the midst of tumults at the Speaker’s request, it was supposed to shame men to their senses. More common was the response to an 1841 eruption. When Wise and Edward Stanly (W-NC) launched a fistfight, most of the House rushed over, some to intervene, some to cheer on their favorite, others to join in. Sitting at the Clerk’s desk, French saw it all: the pandemonium on the floor, the Speaker screaming for order; the crowd yelling “Damn him … Knock him down”; Thomas Arnold’s (W-TN) lucky escape from having his head bashed in by George Houston’s (D-AL) cane. Although the House Clerk rushed into the uproar with the mace, yelling, “Gentlemen, respect the symbol of authority, respect yourselves,” it did nothing. According to French, order was restored by the enormous Dixon Lewis (D-AL), who positioned himself between Wise and Stanly “like an elephant among a parcel [of] dogs, keeping them all at bay.”85

  It was hard to preserve order in the House, but most Speakers were somewhat arbitrary in their efforts because they were blatantly partisan, sometimes according to party, sometimes according to region.86 Biased Speakers shaped the House in their own image. They stacked committees with like-minded men, buried their opponents in hopeless minorities, and shut some men out; abolitionists sometimes served on no committees at all. They favored allies during debate: friends were recognized first, got the floor more easily, could rain down abuse on their enemies, and were upheld more often. As Alexander Duncan (D-OH) complained when called to order for insulting Whig president-elect William Henry Harrison, why weren’t Whigs “called to order when they called Van Buren a jackass?”87 There were limits to such favoritism; Congress’s credibility and utility rest on credible debate and compromise. But all in all, Speakers skewed the balance of power. Thus the elections for Speaker that provoked fistfights and dragged on for weeks.88 And thus the despair of the losing side. When the speakership went to a Southerner in 1849 (as it had in every Congress between 1827 and 1845), abolitionists despaired. “Now we shall have all proslavery committees,” lamented Horace Mann (W-MA). Sure enough, within two weeks, Mann reported that abolitionists were “so buried” in committees full of Southern Democrats that “they cannot get their heads high enough up to breathe.”89

  By not imposing routine order, presiding officers had a tremendous impact, making gag campaigns with points of order that much more offensive. They were like “throwing firebrands into the House,” thought Charles Brown. They were virtually guaranteed to “kindle the flame of discord” and have “injurious consequences.”90 Whereas Jefferson’s Manual stated that calls to order and demands for the previous question could halt discussions “of a delicate nature,” it didn’t consider that it could cause them.91

  Adams courted such chaos in his fight against the gag rule. He was a master at orchestrating the House’s sounds and silences, driving the chamber into a frenzy and then dropping into his seat to cut it off, only to immediately rise to his feet and start again. Two years into the gag rule controversy, French couldn’t see a way out. If rules of order couldn’t silence Adams, what could? “[T]he end must come,” he predicted, but “God only knows what that end will be.”92

  THE LAW OF FORCE AND ITS ENFORCERS: CONGRESSIONAL BULLIES

  Wise knew full well what could silence most antislavery advocates when rules failed to do the job. Like many, when it came to fending off attacks on slavery, he believed in the almighty power of the “law of force.”93 Adams was exempted f
rom this reign of violence, but most men weren’t, and Wise was a prime practitioner. As much as he objected to the term, Wise was a “bully.” (He preferred the phrase “troublesome fellow.”)94 Bullies were fighting men with a legislative agenda; as “political champions,” they routinely and strategically used threats, insults, and physical force to intimidate opponents out of their objections and potentially their votes. Adams sometimes called them “destructives.”95 So regular was congressional bullying that it was frequently condemned as a “system” of intimidation, beginning as early as the 1820s and continuing through the 1850s. Rejecting a duel challenge in 1824, David Barton (NR-MO) hurled defiance at the congressional “system of bullying and pistoleering,” a system that would frame the gag rule debate.96

  No one liked being called a bully, particularly given its implications of cowardice: bullies targeted the weak.97 Wise said as much in 1836 after a screaming match with Jesse Bynum of North Carolina, the alleged “champion” of the Democrats and a bully himself; within four years, he fought a duel with a colleague, almost provoked at least two more, and sparked two fistfights on the floor, one time wielding a knife.98 Bynum had called Wise a bully; Wise had scoffed that he “would as soon think of bullying a fly”; and then all hell had broken loose as the two sprang at each other crying, “Scoundrel!,” “rascal,” and “contemptible puppy,” duel-worthy insults all. (According to French, Wise pulled a gun.) After frantic negotiating on the floor to avoid a duel, Wise explained that “an epithet had been applied to him, which he despised, and which no one should make to him without receiving the proper response.” Apparently, the proper response to a charge of bullying was … bullying.99