To see the rising tensions between fighting and fairness, it’s hard to think of a better case study than the dramatic 1850 clash between Senator Thomas Hart Benton (D-MO), the storied champion of the nation’s “manifest destiny” to spread across the continent, and Senator Henry Foote (D-MS), Benton’s far less storied colleague.
The two men had long disliked each other, and their mutual dislike had blossomed in the summer before the opening of the session. Early in 1849, Senator John C. Calhoun (D-SC) had orchestrated what came to be known as the Southern Address, a statement signed by a small group of Southern congressmen denouncing Northern aggression against Southern rights, denying Congress’s right to forbid slavery in new territories, and threatening secession. Not long after, the Missouri State Assembly adopted similar resolutions.33 Disturbed by Southern extremism and its implications for the Union, and eager to prevent agitation of the slavery question, Benton attacked the measures in electioneering speeches throughout Missouri for months, denouncing the extreme claims and downplaying the threat of secession.34 “There has been a cry of wolf when there is no wolf,” he later quipped.35
Alarmed by Benton’s politics and outraged at his implied sneer at Southern threats, several Southerners took him on. Foote did so with verve. Egged on by his friend Henry Wise—now a bullying consultant from afar—he published a lengthy letter to Wise full of abuse of Benton, accusing the Missourian of being willing to “sacrifice southern honor and southern prosperity on the altar of his own political advancement.” He continued in that vein for twenty pages.36 His sniping continued once Congress was in session.
Foote played a leading role in this slavery showdown. His first attempt to get what he wanted reached far beyond Benton; he threatened a mass Southern assault on Congress and civil warfare if a South-friendly bundle of compromises wasn’t hammered out in private—and soon. This was Southern bullying on a massive scale, so massive that few people believed it. But some did, and that meant something. They saw sectional combat in the Capitol as not only possible, but imminent.
When Foote failed to get his way with bullying writ large, he turned to bullying writ small, focusing his sights on Benton, a loud and aggressive opponent of his plan. Hoping to defeat Benton’s influence by damaging his reputation, Foote insulted him for weeks, with Benton grasping at rules and customs to defend himself without losing control and thereby losing the fight.
Finally, on April 17, 1850, Benton snapped. Throwing back his chair, he lunged at Foote, who responded by pulling a pistol and aiming it at Benton. Predictably, this produced chaos. Congressmen stampeded through the Senate to break up the fight (or get a better look). Some of their fellows howled for order in a panic. Mass pandemonium erupted in the galleries. A few moments later, Foote’s gun was taken from him and the chamber regained some semblance of order.
A crisis had been averted. But Benton refused to let the matter drop. The ensuing debate centered not on the simple fact of Foote’s gunplay, but rather on his motives and intentions: had he been fighting fair? After what the Globe might call a “lively debate,” with Northerners pushing for a formal investigation and Southerners dismissing the episode as too trivial to merit one, Vice President Millard Fillmore (W-NY) appointed an investigative committee. The next day, the Senate got back to business, eventually making its way to the subject of … the acceptance of antislavery petitions.37
The Senate committee then went to work. Over the course of several weeks, it examined forty-three witnesses, including senators, congressional staff, newspapermen, personal friends of both combatants, and even the shop clerk who sold Foote a pistol. The resulting 135-page report—filled with people’s thoughts about a fight and its fighters—reveals the patchwork of intricate and sometimes contradictory compromises that kept fighting fair and bridged divides, much like the Compromise of 1850 itself.
French emerged from his lost clerkship battle with his own patchwork of contradictions and compromises. For income, he patched together several jobs, cashing in on his congressional know-how by opening a claims office; doing some lobbying; and serving as a director and stockholder of the Magnetic Telegraph Company, and from 1847 to 1850 as its president. But his hard work didn’t garner much reward. His finances fluctuated throughout this period; neither lobbying nor lawyering promised a stable income. “We have plenty of business,” he wrote of his claims office in December 1850, “but it is of that sort which only pays if we are successful.”38 His loss of the clerkship—the office that his wife, Bess, said he preferred “to any other in the Union”—was a mighty loss indeed.39
By 1849, French’s politics were something of a patchwork as well. The betrayal of Southern Democrats in his election for Clerk had opened his eyes; although he remained a party activist, he no longer saw the Democracy as a forge of Union. From this point on, the Constitution would be French’s political touchstone. Fidelity to the Constitution—to French, “the wellspring of wisdom and concession”—would bind the nation, section to section, state to state, and man to man.40 The fellow feelings of Americans would secure those bonds; French saw the unifying power of such feelings among the Masons, a national brotherhood that came to play an increasingly central role in his life.41 With sectional tensions on the rise, French grasped at what he perceived as the nation’s fundamental spirit of fellowship and compromise.
Yet even as French fretted for the Union, he turned his face north. Convinced that Southern domination meant national ruin, he saw Northern resistance as the only way to level the balance of power: Northerners needed to fight for their rights. French’s near idol worship of Joshua Giddings in the 1850s was of a piece with his new state of mind; he deeply admired the Ohioan’s willingness to risk life and limb battling the Slave Power. French had long admired Northerners who stood down Southern bullies. Now he wanted a league of such men, and he wanted them to fight. And he wasn’t alone. During the debate over the Compromise of 1850, fighting for the Union began to take on troubling new dimensions—for French, for Congress, and for the nation.
THE FIGHTERS AND THEIR FIGHT
When the dust had settled after the tumultuous opening of the Thirty-first Congress, French did what came naturally: he wrote a poem—a “rather patriotic piece,” his twelve-year-old son, Frank, judged after reciting it.42 Alarmed at the sectional uproar (or as French’s poem put it: “That dark and dismal cloud that seems / Our Union to enfold”), French published “Good Wishes for the Union,” a call to arms for compromisers everywhere. His message was captured in the poem’s refrain: “Our Union cannot fall— / While each to all the rest is true, / Sure God WILL prosper all.” With selfish Southerners and faithless Democrats fresh on his mind, French was preaching national brotherhood and loyalty. Yet even in this ode to nationalism, he planted seeds of sectionalism; his poem cites every Northern and Middle Atlantic state by name, even encompassing Western territories, but mentions no state south of Virginia. His wounds were fresh and deep.
French had good reason to be alarmed. Political bonds of all kinds were fraying. Not only were the Whig and Democratic parties collapsing under the strain of sectional tensions, but even sectional allies were at odds. All told, Congress was split four ways over the issue of a compromise on slavery. There was a mix of Free Soilers, Northern Whigs, and Northern Democrats who opposed compromise and thought that slavery should be excluded from the West. There were Whigs who favored compromise and felt that the federal government had power over slavery in the territories. There were Democrats (Northerners and some Southerners) who favored compromise and thought that new territories should decide the issue of slavery for themselves. And there were Southern Democrats who opposed compromise, denied the federal government’s power over slavery, and demanded slavery’s expansion west.43 Even slaveholders were divided on the best way to handle the issue of slavery, as the Benton-Foote conflict shows all too well.
In a sense, the two men were bound to create conflict because their politics clashed and their practices didn’t; b
oth men were congressional bullies of the first order. Forty-six years old, the Virginia-born Foote was slight, short, bald, and none too strong; he had a slight limp from a wound received in a duel.44 But he was a fighter; as a friend put it, Foote was “liable, somewhat, to be involved in disputes and personal difficulties.”45 That was an understatement. Foote fought legislative battles by insulting, belittling, and threatening his foes; at peak moments of oratorical wrath, he stamped his feet. (In the committee report, several observers noted that he barely had time to stamp each foot once before Benton exploded.)46 He earned his nickname—“Hangman Foote”—in 1848 when he told the aggressively antislavery John Parker Hale that if he ever set foot in Mississippi he’d be hanged, with Foote standing by to help. Foote called the nickname the most “severe humiliation” of his life, which was saying something given his congressional shenanigans.47
Not surprisingly, Foote was a frequent fighter. He fought four duels during his political career and was shot in three of them, suggesting that he was far better at shooting off his mouth than his gun.48 In addition, during his five years in the Senate he was involved in at least four brawls with senators, once exchanging blows with Jefferson Davis (D-MS) in their boardinghouse, an episode that prompted two near-duels; once exchanging blows with Simon Cameron (D-PA) on the Senate floor (as Sam Houston [D-TX] put it, the “eloquent and impassioned gentlemen got into each other’s hair”49); once slugging John C. Fremont (D-CA)—Benton’s son-in-law—just outside the Senate door, again raising talk of a duel (Fremont asked Cilley’s second, George W. Jones, to be his second); and once getting into a scratch fight with Solon Borland (D-AR) over the politics of John C. Calhoun.50 He also routinely bullied Northern non-combatants.51 So notorious was Foote’s fighting problem that a journalist set it to music, writing a mock “moral song” for children—and senators:
Grave Senators should never let
Their angry passions rise,
Their little hands were never made
To scratch each other’s eyes.52
Henry Foote, ca. 1845–60 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Despite the mayhem, Foote was an educated man with refined tastes, as were many bullies; the fine art of congressional bullying went beyond back-alley brawling. Having pursued classical studies before training in the law, Foote sprinkled his lengthy and frequent oratorical forays with learned references, accompanied—as one reporter described it—by the “eloquent gestures of a galvanized frog.”53 Watching Foote perform in the Senate, Representative David Outlaw described him as a “talking machine” who quoted “Greek, Latin, the Bible, Shakespeare, Vattel, and heaven knows what else.” Foote was his “evil genius,” Outlaw groused to his wife, “for it so happens I hardly ever go into that chamber, and remain for half an hour, without [him] either making a speech, or interrupting some person who is speaking.” All in all, Outlaw concluded, “of all the men I ever heard, he is to me the most disagreable.”54
Many found the sixty-eight-year-old Benton equally disagreeable. French thought him the vainest man he’d ever known, citing as proof a time when he had seen Benton point to his signature on a document and pronounce it (with a portentousness that “Doct. Johnson could not have surpassed”) a name of world renown. But Benton had a right to be vain, French thought, ranking him as one of the nation’s greatest statesmen.55 Personally, French liked him. During the friendly house calls that filled most New Year’s days, the French family often called on the Bentons.
Born in North Carolina, Benton practiced law in Tennessee before moving to St. Louis; a notorious street brawl with Andrew Jackson featuring pistols, knives, fists, a whip, and a sword cane probably influenced the move, since it complicated Benton’s place in Tennessee politics, to say the least. (As Benton himself put it, “I am literally in hell.”)56 But in Missouri, Benton was no less combative; in 1817, he fought a duel with the opposing lawyer in a court case and killed him.57
In Congress, Benton’s fighting reputation preceded him; even as a newcomer, French was already factoring it into his congressional calculations.58 It was for good reason that Cilley’s friends turned to Benton for fighting advice. During the Missourian’s many years in the Senate, he came close to fighting a duel three times in addition to his 1850 fight with Foote, in one case throwing the lie at Henry Clay, who threw it right back. (Clay claimed that Benton had once said that if Andrew Jackson became president, congressmen would have to be armed at all times; they settled the matter off the floor.)59 Most recently, after an argument sparked by a debate over the slavery status of the Oregon Territory in 1848, Senator Andrew Butler (D-SC) had commenced duel negotiations with Benton, with Foote acting as Butler’s second. Foote’s delivery of Butler’s opening letter had so alarmed the entire Benton family, that—partly out of disdain for Foote—Benton had refused to act on it.60 Rumor also had it that Benton, a devoted family man who was so publicly affectionate with his children that he almost charmed the formidable John Quincy Adams, had promised his wife that he would never duel again.61 During the 1850 encounter, Foote’s sneering reference to Benton’s alleged cowardice in the Butler affair made matters worse.
Thomas Hart Benton, ca. 1845–55 (Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis)
Physically, Benton was Foote’s polar opposite. A large, hulking man, muscular, powerful, roughly six feet tall, he was an imposing figure when fully fired up. His towering temper matched his size. He “was not only a man of tremendous passions,” recalled Representative George Julian (FS-IN), but he was “unrivaled as a hater.… He was pre-eminently unforgiving.”62 Watching him in one of his rages, the ever-sardonic Adams described him as “the doughty knight of the stuffed cravat” abating “his manly wrath.”63 None too challenged in the ego department, Benton veered toward pomposity. Foote stamped; Benton strutted.64
One of Missouri’s first senators, Benton served in the Senate for a remarkable thirty years, and he never forgot it; in 1850, he was the senior senator in point of service. Foote wasn’t the only man to denounce him as a self-proclaimed Senate patriarch who routinely bullied men into compliance. Like Foote, “Old Bully Bottom Benton”—to quote Henry Wise—had a sarcastic turn.65 “When he wanted to torture an opponent,” a contemporary later recalled, “he had a way of elevating his voice into a rasping squeal of sarcasm which was intolerably exasperating and sometimes utterly maddening” and he used the word sir as “a formidable missile,” as during the exchange that led Andrew Butler to challenge him to a duel.66 When Butler accused Benton of leaking a document to the press, Benton declared, “I don’t quarrel, sir. I have fought several times, sir, and have fought for a funeral; fought to the death, sir; but I never quarrel.”67 (True to form, the Globe summed up the fiery exchange by noting: “[The scene was more than usually exciting at one time.]”)68
In personality alone, the two seemed destined to clash, but their clashing politics guaranteed it. Although both men were Southern Democrats hoping to save the Union, they differed in their views of sectionalism, slavery, and compromise—and in 1850, all three were bound in a bundle of controversy. Fearful that Southern ultimatums would destroy the Union, Benton opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories, a stance that Foote couldn’t fathom. California statehood proved their breaking point. When the state requested admission to the Union as a free state, Benton supported it but Foote wanted a bundled compromise hammered out privately in committee with California as a bargaining chip—to him, the best way to protect Southern rights and interests.69 Benton objected to this proposed “lump” of legislation, unwilling to allow the threats of a Southern minority to awe the majority into concessions.
To defeat Benton’s influence, Foote turned to bullying, attacking the Missourian’s reputation. By his logic, to prevent the South’s degradation, he had to degrade Benton. But even as his anti-Benton campaign began to build momentum, Foote attempted something far more dramatic. He tried to force through his plan of compromise by threatening the institution
of Congress and the Union as a whole.
SECTIONAL DEGRADATION AND THE POLITICS OF ULTIMATUMS
Foote wasn’t alone in this politics of ultimatums. Disunion and civil war were topics of debate throughout the session. Southern congressmen had long used such threats to good effect. But in 1850, with a Union-shaping cluster of concerns on the table and sectional hostilities reaching new heights, those threats became more detailed, more violent, and more ambitious.70 Sectional bullying was coming into its own.
In the same way that the threat of a duel challenge had tipped the balance of power toward Southerners for decades, the threat of disunion held that balance in place during the crisis of 1850. In both cases, Southerners didn’t really want to follow through; few if any men wanted to fight a duel or dissolve the Union. During the speakership wrangle, Richard Kidder Meade had lunged at William Duer for suggesting as much. Threats don’t need to be fulfilled to be effective; the power of a threat is in the chance of its fulfillment, and Southerners had been flaunting their collective itchy trigger finger for decades.
The power behind these threats was the power behind all bullying: fear of humiliation and dishonor. Indeed, the entire Compromise debate was infused with talk of degradation and submission, honor and bravery, manhood and power, defiance and pride.71 Northerners, Southerners, and Westerners saw their rights under attack, and rights talk is honor talk; men who surrender their rights without resistance are cowards.72 So a discussion of sectional rights was bound to be painfully personal for congressmen and constituents alike.
This amped-up style of bullying began not long after the speakership contest was settled. While discussing California’s slavery status on January 22, 1850, Representative Thomas Clingman (W-NC) gave a speech so extreme that at least one newspaper editor thought that telegraph transmissions had mangled it. If the North intended “to degrade and utterly ruin the South, then we resist,” Clingman declared. “We do not love you, people of the North, enough to become your slaves.”73 To prevent such degradation, he proposed a Southern one-two punch. First, Southerners would fight as “Northern gentlemen” did, using calls for adjournment and calls for yeas and nays to bring the government to a dead halt. If that failed, then they would fight like Southerners—with violence. If Northerners tried to expel Southern troublemakers, there would be bloodshed. “Let them try that experiment,” he warned. Washington was slaveholding country, and “[w]e do not intend to leave it.” The end result would be a “collision” as electric as the Battle of Lexington, followed by the collapse of Congress.74 Clingman was describing the opening vista of a civil war. He was also offering fair warning.
The Field of Blood Page 18
