The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  Every Congress had its bullies, and like Wise, many of them threatened to pound their accusers, with no apparent sense of irony.100 Most such men were Southerners or Southern-born Westerners, though not all bullying was slavery-centric, and not all fighting men were bullies. (Adams described one debate as pitting “bullies” against “Yankees.”)101 Whigs and Democrats were almost equally represented; even law-and-order Whigs were pushed to extremes in the congressional combat zone.102 Bullying was gentler in the Senate but it was there, tending toward threats of duel challenges or street fights that funneled violence off the floor.

  Wise was a bully of the first order. His talents were in full view in 1841 when he tried to make the entire Georgia delegation support a tariff bill by bullying its most mild-mannered member, Eugenius Nisbet (W-GA)—“gentle, inoffensive, and no duellist,” John Quincy Adams noted pointedly.103 Speaker James K. Polk was a constant target; Wise bullied him for years as a way of smacking at President Jackson, Polk’s close friend.104 At first, Wise tried open contempt during debate, refuting Polk’s rulings loudly, frequently, and with flair. A typical Speaker faced a sprinkling of challenges; Polk suffered seventy-eight such objections, largely from Wise.105 When that didn’t faze Polk, Wise insulted him to his face, ambushing him by the House door and spouting a string of insults, adding for good measure: “I mean it personal … damn you. Pocket it.”106 A deliberate personal insult virtually demanded a duel challenge, but Polk resisted the temptation and the Whig press shamed him accordingly.107 Democrats, on the other hand, sang his praises in an electioneering song for his presidential run in 1844, praising his resistance to “a ruffian named Henry A. Wise … Who sought to repulse him with insults and lies.”108

  Clearly, bullying could backfire. Not only did it enhance Polk’s image among his supporters, but it inspired him to bury Wise in committees packed with Jackson supporters. And Wise’s bullying invited more in return; in 1837, President Andrew Jackson announced that the Virginian and his fellow Polk-provocateur Balie Peyton (W-TN) “should be … chastised in the public streets,” a virtual invitation to a Jacksonian champion to pummel them. Jackson was so taken with the idea that he coined a word for it, saying that Wise and Peyton should be “Houstonized,” a reference to Sam Houston’s vicious caning of William Stanbery (AJ-OH) five years past. Both men took Jackson’s threat seriously enough to remain armed at all times, showing how quickly threats could spiral into violence.109

  Attacks on Northerners—“Cilley scenes,” as Adams phrased it—displayed the power of bullying in all its glory.110 Given the gaping holes in the parliamentary safety net, many Northerners silenced themselves rather than face violent or humiliating repercussions. As ever, Adams stripped this logic bare. “Languid, compromising, non-resistants of the North” allowed gag rules to prevail because they feared “the attitude of defiance, flung in their faces by the bullying threat of readiness to meet them ‘here or elsewhere’”—the customary invitation to fight a duel.111 Fearful of the price of resistance, Northerners were victims of the gag of violence.

  Joshua Giddings (W-OH) noticed this sectional imbalance during his first weeks in Congress in 1838, and it struck him to the core. Irritated when the Democratic delegate George W. Jones—unseated because of his involvement in the Cilley-Graves duel—claimed travel fees and a per diem that he didn’t deserve, Giddings discovered that his Northern colleagues refused to protest “on account of Mr. Jones’s duelling character.” Stunned by such cowering, Giddings took action. “I have myself come to the honest conclusion that our Northern friends are in fact afraid of these Southern bullies,” he wrote in his diary.

  I have bestowed much thought upon the subject. I have made inquiry, and think we have no Northern man who dares boldly and fearlessly declare his abhorrence of slavery and the slave-trade. This kind of fear I never experienced, nor shall I submit to it now. When I came here I had no thought of participating in debate at all, but particularly this winter. But since I have seen our Northern friends so backward and delicate, I have determined to express my own views and declare my own sentiments, and risk the effects.… I would rather lose my election at home than suffer the insolence of these Southerners.112

  Risking life, limb, and potentially his reelection, Giddings took slaveholders on.

  “Antislavery toreador” Joshua Giddings, ca. 1855–65 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Swaggering bravura was part of Giddings’s method; in a sense, he fought Southerners with their own weapons. For example, in 1845, when he criticized Georgia slaveholders for claiming government compensation for unborn children of fugitive slaves, Edward Black (D-GA) fired off a volley of abuse and then approached Giddings’s seat, threatening to knock him down (after glancing up at the galleries to be sure that no ladies were watching.)113 Giddings responded:

  The gentleman talked about knocking him down. Did he [Black] think the people he [Giddings] represents would send a coward here? One gentleman had once drawn a bowie knife on him, and others had used menacing and insulting language towards him. Did gentlemen think to brave the freemen of the North because we are modest and unassuming, and disapprove of fighting duels?

  When Black persisted, Giddings replied that he had “never seen an internal coward that did not talk loud”—strong words, for according to the code of honor, “coward” was a grievous insult that virtually demanded a duel challenge or a beating. Black opted for the latter. The Globe describes what happened next: “[Mr. Black was here observed rushing into the bar towards Mr. G., with a cane upraised, but was seized and withheld from entering the bar by Mr. Hammett (D-MS) and other southern gentlemen.]”114

  Black’s attack had little impact; Giddings continued to speak as the “dancing raving and prancing” Georgian was restrained by friends.115 Nor did John Dawson’s armed posse silence Giddings that same year.116 Not even the likelihood of a street fight stopped him; one friend was so sure that Giddings would be assaulted that he offered him his knife, which the Ohioan declined.117

  Giddings was standing down the Slave Power, which responded with gusto, attacking him in ways that they didn’t dare with Adams. Since Adams was “too old a man to be the object of personality,” explained one congressman to his wife, Southern abuse was “principally levelled at Mr. Giddings of Ohio.”118 Shunned, insulted, threatened, shoved, and attacked with guns, knives, and canes, Giddings persisted, partly to advance the antislavery cause, partly to expose Southern barbarism, partly to show that the North could—and would—stand up to Southern bullying, and partly because Giddings “enjoyed the sport … first-rate.”119 Giddings was indeed an antislavery toreador, performing death-defying feats in the congressional arena before cheering and booing crowds in the Capitol and beyond.

  “SOUTHERN DOULOCRACY AND NORTHERN SERVILITY”

  In later years, French would be part of that cheering crowd. But for the present, when it came to slavery, he preferred gag rules and a reign of silence. Although Giddings routinely shattered that silence, French vented most of his spleen at Adams, whose interruptions and tossed-off barbs were a constant irritant on the floor. They were also disappointing; French expected more from a “great man.”120 In truth, apart from the gag rule debate and a few wild and woolly Whig moments, French deeply respected and liked the elder statesman, taking careful note of what Adams thought about his colleagues (not much), about the Capitol’s artwork (not bad), and about Andrew Jackson (not good). On Jackson, French recorded a story that Adams told about a woman who called her husband a “crack-louse” so often that he dunked her head underwater, at which she raised her hands and gestured “crack-louse” with her fingers. That was Jackson on the Bank of the United States, said Adams: on a sickbed, on his way out of office, thrusting his hands above the waves to signal “crack-louse” one last time.121 For French, the best way to redeem Adams and save Congress was for his constituents to keep him home in Braintree, where he could happily write poetry with his dignity intact.122

  It’s ha
rd to imagine a more un-Adams-like image: a passive poet surveying the national scene from afar. Adams was a congressional warrior in every sense of the word and he had nothing but scorn for “Northern political sopranos” who silently stood by.123 Yet even Adams was sometimes cowed by bullying. In 1842, listening to a Southerner rant about “liberty and the natural inalienable rights of man” while decrying debtor laws—“as if there was not a slave in his State or in this District,” griped Adams—he feared that if he “said one word about slavery I should have had the whole pack of Southern doulocracy and Northern servility upon me, produced merely a brawl, and been branded as a firebrand in my own land of the Pilgrims.” So in utter disgust, he stayed silent, “leaving six thousand slaves to drag their lengthened chains for life.”124 He did the same in 1844 after a pro-gag rule onslaught of “overbearing insolence and bullying” by the “slavers.” Although he longed to lash out, he dreaded the consequences: “To leave it all without reply would be tame submission. To reply in the same tone might breed a brawl; for which I should be held responsible by the public. To say just what will be proper, and nothing more, requires counsel from above. May it not be withheld!”125 As much as he relished baiting slaveholders, deliberately launching a full-fledged brawl was beyond the pale. In this case, although Adams was safe from physical attack, public opinion silenced him. Even he could be silenced by the gag of violence.

  Thus his strong support of the 1839 anti-dueling law to loosen that gag. “There is not a point in the affairs of this nation more important than this very practice of dueling,” Adams argued. Why? Because it allowed “members from that section of the Union whose principles are against duelling … to be insulted upon every topic of discussion, because it is supposed that the insult will not be resented, and that ‘there will be no fight.’” Adams refused

  to sit any longer here and see other members from my own section of country, or those who may be my successors here, made subject to any such law as the law of the duellist.… It goes to the independence of this House; it goes to the independence of every individual member of this House; it goes to the right of speech and the freedom of debate in this House.126

  Adams was testifying to the impact of bullying. Northerners were insulted and shouted down because they were too scared to fight back and face the repercussions back home. Adams’s anti-dueling rant was an attack on the gag of violence.

  Congressmen alone didn’t impose that gag. The American public held it in place. Adams restrained himself for fear of disapproval back home, as did Northerners who dodged duel challenges. Those who didn’t dodge challenges—like Cilley—worried about constituent disapproval even more.127 Giddings thought that his tough-guy theatrics might lose him his seat.128 All of these men assumed that a Northern audience would condemn their aggression.

  Southern audiences were different, Southern congressmen insisted. In Georgia, Giddings would be lynched for his words and actions, argued Edward Black (D-GA). Should Black “sit silently and take what his people would not take?” Moments later he was running at Giddings, brandishing his cane.129 Adams echoed this idea in his 1842 speech to his constituents. Most Southern congressmen weren’t bad people, he said. Their bullying was “dictated far more by the passions and prejudices of their constituents than by their own.”130 Adams’s point was startling but true. Some bullying was performed for the folks back home, though it was no less real or damaging because of it.131

  Wise’s career was a case in point. His exploits earned him the praise and votes of his constituents, who hailed him as their “peculiar champion” in the House and reelected him six times in an age of one-term wonders.132 Indeed, for a Southerner, avoiding a fight could be a serious liability, as Edward Stanly discovered in 1842. When Stanly’s horse jostled Wise at a racetrack, Wise struck Stanly with his cane. A physical blow was a serious offense, but Stanly negotiated an apology rather than issue a duel challenge, leaving himself open to charges of cowardice that opponents in North Carolina used to full advantage. One election broadside joked that his campaign motto of “On, Stanly, on!”—had been “Wise-ly changed to ‘Run, Stanly, run!’” According to some, Stanly’s duel dodge cost him the election.133

  By discouraging Northern violence and encouraging Southern violence, the American people fostered the imbalance of power in Congress. The gag rule debate began to shift this balance. The imposition of gag rules galvanized the North by attacking their fundamental rights of petition, representation, and free speech, and highlighting the degree to which a tyrannical Slave Power held the reins of power in Washington. Northerners responded by demanding that their congressmen fight for their rights, though with words and votes rather than fists and weapons.

  John Parker Hale felt the impact of that message. French’s friend from New Hampshire Assembly days and Pierce’s classmate at Bowdoin, “Jack” Hale (as French called him) was like French in many ways: a stocky, good-natured Granite State man whose life was transformed by the Democratic Party. When Hale first took his House seat in 1843, he was “as good a Democrat … as there was in the world,” he later recalled. But the gag rule debate brought his scruples about slavery and the right of petition to the fore.134 So on the opening day of the Twenty-eighth Congress—Hale’s first day in the House—when Adams proposed adopting the rules of the previous Congress without House Rule 21, its standing gag rule, Hale was the only New Hampshire delegate who supported him.

  Hale’s vote earned him fan mail praising his manly resistance to “Southern dictation” and urging him on.135 The antislavery advocate Amos Tuck praised Hale for “daring to be a man, a whole man.” Another writer fumed that Northern rights and character had “been trampled upon long enough by such … Southern Bullies.” Yet another worried about how those bullies would respond to Hale’s vote. “Should any of the southerners be rash and mean enough, to challenge a New Hampshire Representative to fight,” he counseled, “I trust New Hampshire men have sufficient courage to refuse a challenge.”136 As much as Hale’s constituents wanted him to fight the gag rule, their disapproval of dueling remained a powerful counterforce.

  Hale’s constituents continued to urge him on at the session’s end, much to the dismay of Franklin Pierce, retired from Congress but a leading New Hampshire Democrat who feared a split in the party. The two men went head-to-head at a Concord town meeting in March 1844. When attendees proposed resolutions upholding the right of petition, denouncing New Hampshire congressmen who upheld the gag rule, and urging them to join Hale in “manfully” sustaining their rights, Pierce pleaded the case of the slavery-bedeviled South with the kind of all-stops-pulled speechifying that usually earned him kudos. He concluded by chiding abolitionists for disrupting the meeting and leading him into the uproar, at which someone fired back that he was “sorry that friend Pierce should consent to be led by anybody,” a slap at Pierce’s doughface willingness to be led by the South.137 Others scolded Pierce for his pro-gag-rule voting record, which haunted him for years to come; when he stood to speak during a meeting of New Hampshire Democrats in 1846, people yelled “Gag! Gag!” to drown him out.138 The mighty New Hampshire Democracy was dividing, with French’s longtime friends Frank Pierce and Jack Hale leading the way. For French, it was a bellwether of things to come.139

  Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the gag rule’s galvanizing power was the censure of Joshua Giddings in 1842. Two months earlier, an attempt to censure Adams had failed, partly because of his status, partly because of his parliamentary skill, and partly because he had invoked the right of petition. But Giddings had no shield, few defenders, and, due to some skillful parliamentary maneuvering, no chance to defend himself. So on March 21, 1842, when Giddings offered resolutions defending the rights of rebelling slaves on a slaving ship to go free, a fellow Ohioan—Democrat John B. Weller—moved to censure Giddings for promoting mutiny and murder, and then immediately moved the previous question, effectively gagging him.140 The next day, the House voted to censure him without even gi
ving him the chance to speak, arguing the question with what Adams described as two hours of “twistings, decisions by the Speaker reversed by the House,” and “motions that he should have permission to be heard in his defence, by reconsideration, by suspension of the rules, by general consent.”141 That same day, Giddings suffered his punishment; called up to the front of the House, he received a formal censure read aloud by the Speaker. Although the rule of force didn’t gag him, the rules of order did.

  From the beginning of Giddings’s congressional career, Adams had advised him to insist upon his rights and “not to be intimidated by the course taken by the Southern men.”142 The two had been comrades in arms throughout the gag rule struggle, strategizing in league with a core group of antislavery lobbyists based in Washington; Giddings dubbed the group the “Select Committee on slavery.”143 During the gag rule debate, that committee devoted itself to causing congressional chaos.144 The dangerous words that so upset French were of great service to the antislavery cause; when the Southern hysterics that resulted were transmitted to the nation through the vehicle of the press, they exposed the tyrannical force of the Slave Power for all to see. But those same words were nothing but trouble to the Whig and Democratic parties, whose survival depended on some degree of conciliation between North and South. Giddings’s censure was the result.

  The elder statesman hadn’t foreseen this outcome. “I can find no language to express my feelings at the consummation of this act,” the stunned Adams confessed.145 But Giddings had the last word. Upon suffering the humiliation of being censured, he resigned his seat and went home to his constituents, who applauded his “manly” fight against “congressional tyranny.” Town meetings throughout his district passed resolutions upholding his antislavery sentiments, denouncing the violation of their rights, and insisting that Giddings’s censure had insulted “the whole North.”146 He was reelected by a whopping 7,469 to 393 votes over a proslavery Democrat and returned to Congress stronger than before with an antislavery mandate. Wise ruefully deemed it “the greatest triumph ever achieved by a member of the House.”147