Whatever the reason, Benton restrained himself, defending his reputation by resorting to time-honored congressional traditions that kept fighting fair. For example, on one occasion, when Foote’s insults became too much for him, Benton magisterially gathered up his cloak and left the Senate chamber. Attacking a man in his absence was unfair and thus frowned upon; it was “not in accordance with what a gentleman should do,” one victim argued.110 By leaving the room, Benton was trying to cut Foote off.111 But Foote continued his “personalities” long after Benton had gone.112
On other occasions, Benton defended himself with a “personal explanation.” According to custom, an embattled congressman had the right to demand a few minutes to “defend himself as a man of honor” before colleagues, the press, and the nation.113 Unless there was an objection—which almost never happened—people who requested personal explanations were immediately given the floor, overriding all formal rules of order, and they couldn’t be interrupted.114 These explanations weren’t without their difficulties; as one Speaker complained, when the rules were suspended, it was near impossible to determine “what language is strictly in order,” and indeed, Benton’s explanations were sometimes filled with threats and personalities.115 But given their national audience, congressmen wanted a fair chance to defend their name.
Most explanations were sparked by newspaper accounts of congressional debates. Newspapers assailed congressmen beyond their reach; personal explanations were safe havens for fighting back. And fight back Benton did. The day after Foote taunted him on March 26, he declared the National Intelligencer’s version of Foote’s remarks “a lying account from the beginning to the end.” According to the Intelligencer, Foote had accused Benton of talking big because he couldn’t be attacked: he was “shielded by his age, his open disavowal of the obligatory force of the laws of honor, and his senatorial privileges.” Foote was calling him a coward. Foote had said no such thing, Benton roared—plus, it was a lie. He wasn’t too old to fight; insult him off the floor and you would know his age “without consulting the calendar.” He decided honor disputes on a case-by-case basis. And he never hid behind his privileges. If the Senate allowed these kinds of insults to continue, he concluded, “I mean from this time forth to protect myself—cost what it may.”
That statement would come back to haunt him. Hearing it, many onlookers—including Foote—thought that Benton was giving Foote fair warning of a pending street fight. It followed the conventional format exactly and was a favorite ploy of non-duelists who wanted to defend their name. In place of a duel, they typically declared that they would defend themselves “wherever assailed.”116 Once fair warning had been given, both parties would arm themselves with weapons and friends, and watch for a chance encounter on the street, which usually involved “pushing, scuffling, pointing of pistols, calling of names, and great disturbance of peaceable bystanders.”117
These “irregular” or “informal meetings” were substitute duels. Understood to be “the usual last resort of the non-duellist,” they became increasingly common in the 1850s with the rise of Northern resistance to Southern threats.118 Onlookers expected one after the Meade (D-VA) versus Duer (W-NY) outburst that started the session, given the involvement of a feisty Northerner.119 Street fights were a sectional compromise that enabled non-duelists to defend their name on equal terms. They made fighting fair.
Thus Foote’s assumptions about Benton’s declared willingness to defend himself, come what may. Foote “expected to be attacked on his way going to or returning from the Senate, and about the capitol buildings,” he told one friend.120 Benton was “a man of courage,” warned another. “[H]e would do whatever he said he would, and … Mr. Foote ought to be prepared to defend himself.”121 A fellow senator later chided Foote and Benton for not fighting on the street. “There is plenty of room out of the Senate,” he scolded. “[T]he streets are large, the grounds are spacious; and it is said there are good battlegrounds, if gentlemen choose to occupy them.”122
So Foote donned a pistol, watched, and waited. Several times, he asked friends if he should challenge Benton to a duel. Did public opinion seem to demand it? Foote, for one, preferred it. Given that “this matter was destined to terminate in a difficulty,” he preferred to settle it honorably in a duel than to grapple on the street, where Foote was bound to lose, though given Foote’s track record, a duel wasn’t likely to go better.123 But Benton never attacked. Even when the two brushed past each other on Pennsylvania Avenue, nothing happened. Foote could only conclude that Benton was “a recreant coward.”124
It was Foote’s renewed and reinforced charge of cowardice that pushed things too far on April 17, the day Benton snapped. A few days after passing Benton in the street, Foote threw the charge at Benton, but had gotten only halfway through the insult when Benton sprang to his feet, kicking aside his chair so violently that he toppled a glass from his desk. (Reporters in the galleries described the “breaking of glass, a movement among the desks, a rising among the crowd in the galleries,” and “a sort of crashing in the neighborhood of Benton’s seat.”)125 On seeing Benton head his way “with an expression of countenance which indicated a resolve for no good purpose,” Foote retreated backward down the aisle toward the vice president’s chair, pistol in hand. In a moment “almost every Senator was on his feet, and calls to ‘order’; demands for the Sergeant-at-Arms; requests that Senators would take their seats, from the Chair and from individual Senators, were repeatedly made.”126
Henry Dodge (D-WI) tried to restrain Benton, who dramatically bared his breast and yelled, “‘I have no pistols!’ ‘Let him fire!’ ‘I disdain to carry arms!’ ‘Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!’”127 Witnesses saw him open his jacket and bare his breast as he bellowed. At this point, a senator grabbed Foote’s pistol and locked it in his desk, and for the moment the fireworks were over.
But the controversy wasn’t. Foote and Benton immediately began to argue about motives and intentions. Foote insisted that he had acted in self-defense. Benton insisted that Foote was an assassin inventing excuses—a serious charge because it suggested that Foote had taken “unmanly” advantage; by pointing a pistol at an unarmed man, he wasn’t fighting fair.128 Benton had opened his jacket to prove that he had no gun for just this reason.129 Foote’s howling objections to the charge suggest its seriousness.
An 1850 cartoon depicting the Benton-Foote scuffle. Benton is throwing open his coat and bellowing, “Let the assassin fire!” as people in the galleries flee in panic. (Scene in Uncle Sam’s Senate, 17th April 1850, by Edward W. Clay, 1850. Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
To prevent such unfair matches, when two men seemed likely to fight, brother congressmen usually did an instinctive weapon check, eyeing jackets and vest coat pockets for the bulge of a gun or a flash of metal. If one man was unarmed, people typically intervened. When no one was armed, the fighters often were left to their own devices; it seemed only fair. In 1858, this scenario played out in the House when Augustus Wright (D-GA) noticed a fist-clenched stranger standing in front of Francis Burton Craige (D-NC); convinced that Craige was the stronger man, Wright went back to work—which speaks volumes about the level of violence that seemed normal on the floor. But when Wright spotted a weapon under the stranger’s coat, he leaped to his feet to prevent an “assassination.” Even then, he held back as the two men wrestled, ready to intervene if the stranger reached for his weapon. (And he had two: a knife and a revolver.)130
The confrontation between Foote and Benton was similarly unbalanced, but it fell to an investigative committee to determine the details and pass judgment. In the meantime, the Senate got back to business. And much as people had flocked to Washington in March to see a whole-House rumble, they filled the galleries the day after the Foote-Benton fracas to see what came next. As the Boston Courier reported, the galleries were jammed full of people expecting something “in the shape of a grand finale.” When business got under way and Foote rose to compl
ete the speech that Benton had “so unceremoniously cut short,” the room hushed and the audience leaned forward. Benton sat nearby, nervously twirling a piece of paper. Would there be “another rush, another melée, another scamper, and another pistol drawn?” The entire chamber was “in an agony of suspense.” But Foote merely surrendered the floor and sat down, at which Benton took an audibly deep breath. Later that day, he sarcastically noted how “harmonious” the Senate seemed.131 With disharmony relegated to an investigative committee, the Senate was moving on.
“PUBLIC EXPLANATION IS NECESSARY”
As dramatic as the events of April 17 had been, in the end not much happened. The investigative committee did little more than condemn “personalities” and the wearing of arms in the halls of Congress, advising the Senate to take no action, which is precisely what the Senate did.132 Given this nonresponse, it’s tempting to dismiss the episode as political theater. But in his testimony, Foote noted that he had planned a path of retreat from Benton that put fewer senators in the path of his gun if he fired it. And many people assumed that Benton would have mauled Foote had he gotten hold of him.133 To the fighters and their audiences alike, the chance of bloodshed was very real.134
And the nation was watching. With the rise of the telegraph, the American public was witnessing congressional scuffles with ever-increasing speed and efficiency. “Washington is as near to us now as our up-town wards,” gushed the New York Express in 1846. “We can almost hear through the Telegraph, members of Congress as they speak.”135 Beginning with a small-scale experiment in Washington in 1844, the telegraph was spreading throughout the country, drastically reducing the news lag around the nation, and congressmen had to grapple with the impact.136 Not only did they have less time and power to tame their words, but it was difficult if not impossible to speak to different audiences with different voices. When the abolitionists Benjamin Wade (W-OH) and Charles Sumner (FS-MA) denounced the Slave Power while in their home states, Clement Clay (D-AL) took offense in Washington: How could these men “who profess to abhor and contemn us” up north “make the acquaintance of slaveholders, salute them as equals,” and “cordially grasp their hands as friends” in Washington?137 By networking the nation during a rising sectional crisis, the telegraph complicated national politics.
Ever and always at the crossroads of history, French played a role in this dramatic transformation; from 1847 to 1850 he was president of the Magnetic Telegraph Company, an enterprise that he discovered through his friend F.O.J. Smith (his son Frank’s namesake), one of three men that Samuel Morse chose to promote telegraphy at the dawning of the enterprise.138 The company had incorporated to create a telegraph line from Washington to New York, accomplishing the task in June 1846. The job not only sent French traveling about on telegraph business, occasionally putting him out in the field stringing wires, but it also made him something of an innovator in the use of telegraphy in politics. The presidential election of 1848 was the first election in which all states voted on the same day, and thus the first election in which the telegraph gathered returns. In preparation for it, French kept the telegraph offices in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Jersey City open all night from November 7 through November 10, paying workers overtime and urging them to “avoid any partiality … during the excitement” so that biased reporting wouldn’t sway the results—a new fear for a new age.139 Six months earlier, he had paid for the telegraphic transmission of the Democratic Convention out of his own pocket.140 (French also may have been a telegraph pioneer outside of politics; according to one source, the first poem to be telegraphed was written by B. B. French.)141
After reading his first telegraph transmission in 1843, French had immediately grasped its political impact: whatever happened in “the heart here in Washington, will be instantly known to all the extremities of this widespread Union!”142 In the aftermath of the Foote-Benton clash, this realization caused a shock of recognition. Minutes after people settled back into their seats, Henry Clay—ever the great compromiser—followed the lead of Jefferson’s Parliamentary Manual and asked both men to “pledge themselves, in their places, to the Senate, that they will not proceed further in this matter,” meaning they would promise not to duel. Both men refused, Benton declaring that he would rather “rot in jail” than pledge to anything that implied his guilt, and Foote insisting that he had done nothing wrong and would take “no further remedy,” though as a “man of honor” he would do whatever he was “invited” to do, meaning that if Benton challenged him to a duel, he would accept. Sensing a stalemate and hoping for better luck out of the public eye, Willie Mangum (W-NC) suggested closing the Senate doors.
“I trust not,” Foote blurted, as senators echoed, “oh, no.” “I hope my friend will not insist upon it, when public explanation is necessary on my part.” Hale agreed, noting that due to the telegraph’s “lightning speed,” by sundown in St. Louis, it would be rumored “that there has been a fight on the floor of the American Senate, and several Senators have been shot and are weltering in their gore.” The image brought a laugh, but Hale had a point. A formal investigation was essential, not just for “vindicating the character of the Senate, but to set history right, and inform the public as to what did take place.” If the Senate didn’t take immediate action, public opinion would run wild. (The challenges of viral news coverage have long roots.)
Indeed, even with immediate action, news of the encounter spread with lightning speed. The next day, headlines were screaming in Boston and New York, and within forty-eight hours the Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette announced: “By Telegraph. A ROW IN THE SENATE! COLLISION BETWEEN FOOTE AND BENTON! PISTOL DRAWN!” Just as Hale predicted, the facts got scrambled. Even before April 17, news had spread nationwide that Foote was going to challenge Benton to a duel; one newspaper even reported Benton’s death at Foote’s hand (though the report came from an April Fools’ Day telegraph transmission). Here was the answer to the question asked by countless congressmen. Why bother with the tedium of an investigation if no action was ever taken? Because it would set the record straight and suggest to the public that Congress had taken matters in hand. It would preserve the image—and ideally, the reality—of Congress as the headquarters of national compromise.
The public was watching. Indeed, the dispute was partly caused by the public eye. It was the publicity of Foote’s insults that most riled Benton. From the start of the session, Foote’s ongoing onslaught had received ample press coverage, and Benton was up for reelection. During the investigation, he questioned committee witnesses on this very point: Had they heard Foote say anything about drumming him out of the Democratic Party? Did Foote have correspondents in Missouri? Was he involved in a recent attack on Benton in the Missouri Statesman? More than fifty pages of the report center on newspaper accounts of the two men’s exchanges. Benton and Foote were fighting for public opinion.
The two men were equally obsessed with the written coverage of Foote’s insults. Foote had tampered with the press coverage of their confrontations to make himself look good, Benton told the committee, and it was bad form to privately edit the record of a personal insult after the fact. Far fairer to correct newspaper accounts of fights and insults in person in the Senate before the people who had heard them spoken and could distinguish right from wrong. To Benton, this was “the only way that honor can ever do.… A public correction of public personalities is the only thing that can be endured in a land of civilization.”143
Seconds later, Foote admitted that he had indeed tampered with the press coverage of his insults, but for good reason: he spoke quickly and was hard to hear. But he had made his edits “hurriedly” in his seat and hadn’t changed his meaning. If anything, he had softened his insults, he claimed. On the floor, he had attacked Benton for his cowardice in his 1848 honor dispute with Andrew Butler, now amicably settled. But because a senator sitting nearby murmured to Foote that mentioning a settled honor dispute was an “indiscretion,” Foote removed all mention o
f it from a reporter’s notes—though he’d be happy to restore it, he sneered.144
The tables were turned when Foote read the National Intelligencer’s account of the scuffle. In a statement published in the paper and reprinted around the country, he protested that he hadn’t “retreated” from Benton, as the Intelligencer reported. He had “glided” into a “defensive attitude.”145 This wasn’t mere silliness on Foote’s part, as silly as it was. Two senators had told him that he shouldn’t have run from Benton: Andrew Butler had blurted it out as Foote dashed past, and Willard Hall (D-MO) thought that Foote’s “enemies might say that he was actuated by fear.”146 Foote didn’t want to look like a coward in the public eye.
Both men were grappling with the challenges of national press coverage in the age of the telegraph. Reporters saw things differently and reported different things for different reasons, news spread with its own speed and logic, facts got scrambled with no time for correction, the public drew its own conclusions, and congressmen didn’t control this process, try as they might. Both Foote and Benton tried to shape their spin, but neither emerged from the episode unscathed.147
Many newspapers berated one or the other combatant with regional flair. Southern writers focused on the code of honor. Benton hadn’t fought fair, one paper argued. “This swearing one’s life against a man … so feeble in health as Gen. Foote” was not “entirely comme il faut.”148 As the “assailed party” (an arguable point), Foote had done right, claimed another. Under the code of honor, Foote had the choice of weapons, and a pistol was the most “Patrician” choice.149 Northern newspapers focused on parliamentary rules, denouncing Southern violence and insisting that someone should have called Foote to order. Reporting for the New-York Tribune, the antislavery advocate Jane Swisshelm—the first woman admitted to the reporters gallery (on the very day of the scuffle)—approved of Benton’s politics but regretted that he had “meditated any personal chastisement,” the product, she assumed, of a Southern education.150 The Foote-friendly Richmond Enquirer countered by playing the gender card, denouncing Swisshelm as “a disgrace to her sex” who was ill equipped to judge “a champion of the South.”151
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