The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  Eventually, even the rule’s staunchest supporters saw its failings. Instead of stifling dangerous talk, gag rules inspired it, causing dissension on the floor, drastically increasing the number of antislavery petitions, and rousing the Northern public to demand their rights of representation, petition, and free speech, and to elect congressmen who shared their convictions.148 French saw the irony, noting that gag rules caused more talk than “the confusion of tongues” at Babel, and as he well knew, more talk meant more violence to stifle it.149 Indeed, two of the five most violent Congresses between 1827 and 1861 met during the gag rule debate. (The other three met during the five years before the Civil War.)150

  For both Wise and Adams, such vitriol had costs. Somewhat chastened in later years, Wise confessed that his congressional sparring had almost destroyed him. “It shattered my health almost to atoms, nearly lost me my voice, and was so fraught with actual personal danger and bro[ugh]t me so shockingly & often into violent collisions with both party and personal malignity as to acquire for me a character in the country which I never coveted & now deeply regret. I was earnestly actuated by a zeal for the public good which made me really forget myself.”151 Adams likewise was caught up in the moment, heaping abuse on “the gentleman from Accomac” to the point of exhaustion. After one particularly scathing attack, he confessed in his diary, “my feelings are wound up to a pitch that my reason can scarcely endure. I trust in God to control me.”152

  Wise admitted failure on December 21, 1843, beckoning reporters to listen closely, then dramatically declaring “that now, henceforth, and forever, he ceased to contend in the war which was being carried on in that House by certain men against the South.” Defending Southern rights was too grave a matter to defend with points of order, he explained, never stating, but surely knowing, the power of gag rules to rouse Northern fury over violated rights. Not all of his slaveholding colleagues agreed. Isaac Holmes (D-SC) immediately urged them to take up Wise’s mantle. When the notoriously fight-prone Wise asked to respond, Holmes’s hasty backpedaling produced roars of laughter.153 Wise must have gotten some Southern flak, because soon he was back at his post as the gag rule’s chief defender. But like the rule, he was on his way out. In February 1844 he resigned his seat; in poor health and seeking the refuge of a diplomatic post, he had been appointed minister to Brazil in January. Roughly ten months later, on December 3, the day after the Twenty-ninth Congress opened, Adams proposed and carried the repeal of House Rule 21, due largely to an influx of freshman Northern Democrats who opposed the rule.154 “Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of God!” he wrote in his diary that night.155

  Thus ended the nine-year gag rule struggle. The rule’s opponents had won a battle—but not a war, as the Kentuckian Thomas Marshall made clear in an address to his constituents. The slave interest had accomplished something important, he charged. By tormenting Adams, they had advertised the price of opposing slavery.156 The gag of violence was still in place. And words were still weapons, provoking words, dangerous words, Union-splitting words that needed to be stopped, if not by formal rules, then by the rule of force.

  5

  FIGHTING FOR THE UNION

  THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 AND THE BENTON-FOOTE SCUFFLE (1850)

  As luck would have it, French reached his peak moment of congressional power as the nation’s next sectional crisis was taking form. At the time, his private life was going swimmingly. In 1837, he and Bess had had their first son, Frank. Five years later, he had built his family a large, comfortable house at 37 East Capitol Street, replete with an arbor-graced garden that boasted a three-tiered fountain with goldfish—the only goldfish in Washington aside from the fishpond on the Capitol grounds. His Washington insider status was apparent in his home decor; his lush red, gold-fringed parlor curtains were from the Supreme Court, bought by French when the Court was redecorated. His comfy, much-used study was on the top floor.1

  French gained the House clerkship in December 1845 (and gained his second son, Ben, in February). That same year, the United States annexed Texas. Texans had declared independence from Mexico in 1836 with the aid of Southern militias and the Southern press, after which Southern settlers had flocked into the territory, exponentially increasing its slave population in the process. Their aim was Texas as a slave state.2

  The vote over annexing Texas had been close. Just as Southerners hoped, adding it to the Union was an unequivocal boost to the spread of slavery and the Southern balance of power in the Union. Thus the flood of anti-annexation antislavery petitions to Congress throughout this period. And thus Adams’s continued insistence that the acquisition of Texas was a nefarious Southern ploy to expand slavery’s reach.3

  Adams also insisted that the annexation of Texas was immoral. Mexico hadn’t conceded Texan independence, so annexing it was as good as declaring war. Sure enough, less than six months after Texas joined the Union, Mexican-American relations unraveled. When the newly elected president James K. Polk, an ardent expansionist, ordered troops into Texas to protect American claims, President Mariano Paredes of Mexico countered with troops of his own. By May 1846, a series of skirmishes had launched the Mexican War.

  The Wilmot Proviso of 1846 was a direct result of that conflict. Proposed by Representative David Wilmot (D-PA) at the start of hostilities and unsuccessfully proposed twice more, each time failing in the South-friendly Senate, it banned slavery in land gained from Mexico. Although voted down, the proviso became a litmus test of loyalties: if you supported it, you were no friend of the South.

  Whigs used this logic to tar French in his race for reelection in 1847. Given the House’s small Whig majority and the fact that some Northern Whigs had promised French their votes, the contest was close. Some Whig newspapers thought that French’s skills and popularity might preserve him his job.4 To prevent this outcome, Whigs put the proviso to use, telling their Southern wing that French supported the slavery-banning proposition and their Northern wing that he opposed it.5

  It’s hard to say if that scheme cost French the clerkship, but whatever the reason, the former House member Thomas Campbell (W-TN) won by four votes. All but one of the Whig votes promised to French went to Campbell. For the most part, French took it in stride, happy to surrender the immense workload and “wear and tear of lungs.”6 But he was surprised that his friends and talents hadn’t kept him in office. He could only assume that he had lost his job for no sin other than being a Democrat.7 Convinced that he had taken a hit for the Democracy, French concluded that it owed him and looked forward to regaining the clerkship in the next Congress.

  The lone Whig who stayed true to his word was John Quincy Adams—ever the contrarian—who told French that although the press said that no Whig would vote for him, “I profess to be a whig, and I shall vote for Mr. French.”8 After the election, the grateful French thanked him in person, little knowing that these would be his last words to Adams, who suffered a stroke in his House seat two months later, on February 21, 1848. Carried into the Speaker’s chamber, he lingered for two days; French made a tearful visit to the comatose Adams before he died.9 Appropriately enough, Adams’s last word on the floor was “No.” Near the end, he murmured thanks to the officers of the House.10 It was a fitting end for a man who had dedicated most of a decade and all of his energies to bedeviling Speakers and challenging clerks with his war against gag rules.

  When the next Congress opened in 1849 with a Democratic majority, French felt sure that he’d regain the clerkship, but America’s victory in the Mexican War in 1848 complicated matters. The United States gained new lands whose slavery status had to be reckoned with, as did the national government’s right to restrict slavery in these territories, and a tangle of related issues: the boundaries of Texas, slavery in the District of Columbia, and the problem of fugitive slaves. By forcing the issue of slavery on Congress, national expansion raised fundamental questions about the sectional balance of power, the nature of the Union, and what kind of nation the United States w
ould be.

  Primed for the fateful decisions at hand, Northern and Southern congressmen arrived in Washington eager to seize every advantage, launching three weeks of savage, foot-stamping, name-calling arguments about selecting a Speaker. The stakes seemed too high for good faith or compromise. Accusations abounded as congressmen tried to determine the precise loyalties of each and every candidate. Did they favor the Wilmot Proviso? Did they advocate disunion over any and every compromise on slavery? Even nature seemed eager to tear the Capitol in two. Afraid that lightning would strike the building’s ninety-two-foot-tall mast “and kill Congress at a lick,” French joked darkly, Congress had taken down the mast.11

  Ten days in, the House reached a breaking point.12 While discussing the speakership, William Duer (W-NY) called Richard Kidder Meade (D-VA) a disunionist. When Meade denied it, Duer called him a liar, Meade lunged at him, and the chamber went wild. The sergeant at arms from the previous Congress ran to Duer’s side to fend off raging slaveholders, but became so alarmed that he ran back for the mace—which did absolutely nothing to stem the tide of fury. Had “a bomb exploded in the hall, there could not have been greater excitement,” he later reported. (According to a more poetically inclined Globe reporter, “The House was like a heaving billow.”)13 Alarmed congressmen hustled to the galleries to protect their families; with no officers elected and no way to impose order, people feared a full-fledged riot and almost got one. They also almost got a duel, though Meade and Duer ultimately settled their differences.

  It took some time to return the House to order. But minutes later, there was talk of disunion yet again. Enraged at the idea of Northerners branding Southerners disunionists, Robert Toombs (W-GA) swore his loyalty to the Union, but declared that if the House planned “to fix a national degradation upon half the states of this Confederacy, I am for disunion.” Other Southerners vowed that if the South was treated unfairly, they would keep the House disordered forever.14 Writing to his wife amid the “indescribable confusion,” David Outlaw could only moan, “I most sincerely wish I was at home.”15

  Northerners responded to Southern threats as Northerners were wont to do: they demanded orderly debate. But some of them did so with defiance, dismissing threats as bluster and asserting their rights on the floor. Edward Baker (W-IL) met Toombs’s ultimatum by refusing to be “intimidated by threats of violence.… We are here as freemen, to speak for freemen; and we will speak and act as becomes us, in the face of the world.”16 Chauncey Cleveland (D-CT) took the same stand. Did the South expect the North to “forget that we are freemen—the representatives of freemen?” Did they think that the North “should yield our opinions, our principles to their dictation?”17 Both men were refusing to be gagged by threats of violence. It was an echo of six years past, but magnified by a mandate; Northerners wanted their congressmen to defend their rights. To make matters worse, by dismissing Southern bullying as bluster, Northerners threw the lie at Southerners and scoffed at their manhood, raising tempers even higher.

  With Congress at a standstill, Meade pleaded for a compromise. Would no Northerner offer an olive branch? It would never happen, replied Joseph Root (FS-OH). After more than a week of Southern threats and grandstanding, no Northerner would dare appease a Southerner. His constituents would scorn his cowardice. (Or as Root more colorfully put it, any such Northerner should tell his children to “get their Sunday clothes on, for they would want to see their daddy for the last time.”)18 Several Northerners privately said the same thing to speakership candidate Howell Cobb (D-GA). Although they wanted to support him, “the threats and menaces of southern men … would destroy their position at home” by suggesting that they had voted “under the influence of these belligerent taunts.”19

  After a three-week wrangle, Cobb was elected Speaker and attention turned to the election of the Clerk. Assuming that the Democracy owed him their support given his lost election, French was stunned to find several Democrats running against him. “My notions of honor do not exactly square with the idea of placing myself in the way of any democrat who has been immolated on the political altar,” he fumed in his diary. Even so, he thought that he could win. But Democrats chose the Philadelphia Pennsylvanian editor John Forney, “a peculiarly faithful ally of the south,” as their nominee.20 To French, it was a staggering display of party faithlessness. (In true French form, he dubbed this sin “Forneycation.”)21

  Disappointed as he was, French resolved to hold back; his party had made its choice and he would let things play out. But when he heard that some Southern Democrats absolutely refused to vote for him, his “Yankee blood was up at once” and he declared himself a candidate.22 He later regretted it; his Yankee foot-stamping peeled away Democratic votes for Forney, as Forney later grumbled in the press.23 But French didn’t decide the election, although he tangled it; in a close contest with convoluted twists and turns that lasted for a week and twenty ballots, he received only a smattering of votes.24 The tide was turned by eight Southern Democrats who reelected the Tennessee Whig Thomas Campbell, putting section above party to give the clerkship to a Southerner.25 In 1847, French had lost the clerkship for being a Democrat. Now he had lost it for being a Northerner.

  For French, a loyal doughface and longtime clerk with supportive friends on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line and both sides of the aisle, it was a stunning betrayal. For two decades, he had worked to preserve party ties between North, South, and West, singing a song of Union and Jackson, playing down talk of slavery and playing up talk of states’ rights. He had done this and more for the Democracy and the Union, pouring his heart, soul, and energies into an organization that he felt sure had the nation’s—and his—best interests at heart. Yet in French’s hour of need, his party had abandoned him. The Democracy had done what it did so often and so well: Southerners had served themselves and Northerners had knuckled under, and together they had cast him aside.26

  This stark imbalance of power was nothing new. But in 1849, it had a sharp personal edge that forced French to reckon with some ugly truths; the corrupt bargain at the heart of the Democracy had been exposed. “One thing I have learned, and I intend to make a note of it,” he told his brother not long after his loss: “if a northern man will not bow, & knuckle, & prostrate himself in the dust before their high mightiness of the South, he must hope for nothing.”27 Doughface congressmen, “moulded into any shape their Southern taskmasters choose,” were little more than “whipped puppies,” he fumed, never saying—but surely knowing—that he himself had long fit that mold. French himself was through with such cowering: “I will see the South all d—nd to everlasting perdition before I will ever crook my thumb & forefinger, or open my lips in their defence.” Let Southerners turn to their “own servile race” for support.28 Northerners should defend their rights and interests and stop enslaving themselves. Though still loyal to the Democracy, French no longer trusted Southern Democrats.

  His feelings mirrored the mood in Congress. The weeks of ultimatums set the tone for the session. Sectional passions were reaching new heights. Northerners were more confrontational than ever before. And a watchful, wary public was a palpable presence. Slaveholders and free-state men were throwing down.

  Remarkably, this strife-ridden Congress produced one of the most famous compromises in American history: the so-called Compromise of 1850.29 A patchwork cluster of bills that occupied the entire ten-month session—the longest session since the founding of the government—it soothed but didn’t solve the slavery crisis. Men who were literally at each other’s throats ultimately came together for the sake of the Union; indeed, the raging sectional fury made the need for a national compromise that much more urgent. This volatile blend of intense sectionalism and intense nationalism would characterize congressional politics for years to come.

  At the heart of this standoff were sectional rights: Southerners demanded equal rights in the territories, Northerners demanded equal rights on the floor. The alternative was unthinkable—degradation,
a key word throughout the Compromise debate.30 Sectional honor was at stake in 1850, but not as a tool of debate as in “Cilley scenes” of times past. During the crisis of 1850, with the balance of power in the Union in question, sectional honor was the debate. Thus the newfound Northern belligerence.

  And thus a shift in Southern bullying as well. Southerners had long held sway with man-to-man threats. Now, with the expansion and survival of slavery at stake, they began to threaten the institution of Congress and the Union with a new power, depicting the nation’s end times with alarming precision. The halls of Congress bloodied, disunion, civil war: Southerners paraded an array of horrors in this politics of ultimatums.31 Southern bullying had expanded exponentially, embracing the entire Union in its reach.

  But even now, apart from a few stellar outbursts, Congress didn’t dissolve into a den of furies. Violence continued apace, but so did some degree of self-restraint. Even as they shoved, slugged, and threatened one another in the cross-fire of a crisis—indeed because of that crisis—congressmen abided by informal rules of combat that kept fighting fair, though like the terms of Union as a whole, these customs skewed Southern, compelling non-combatants to fight or risk dishonor.32 In essence, congressional combat was grounded on a South-centric spirit of compromise. And like the bonds of Union, without some degree of cooperation and mutual trust, Congress’s institutional bonds wouldn’t survive.