The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  It’s no wonder that congressmen devoted long, hard hours to their press coverage.62 Even such renowned speechifiers as Daniel Webster routinely primed the press, outlining speeches in advance for reporters, testing different wordings while delivering his speeches, then whittling away the excess during editing.63 Occasionally that excess found its way into print, as it did in the Globe in 1850: Webster begins a sentence by stating, “I demur—I hesitate—I doubt—I repel.”64

  Typical are the efforts of John Quincy Adams. On March 6, 1835, he went to the Intelligencer office to read notes of a speech he had made four days past, but they weren’t available. (While he was there, two other congressmen came to review notes of their speeches.) Three days later Adams got the notes and found them “very imperfect,” so he spent the day revising them. He submitted his revisions the next day, then reappeared at the office two days later to review the proof sheets. His speech appeared in print on March 17, two weeks after he delivered it. Adams hated the “double waste of time” so much that he vowed to give fewer speeches.65 (He failed.) No wonder congressmen often revised one reporter’s notes and then referred other papers to the corrected copy, as did Henry Foote in 1850 when he sharpened an anti-Benton screed for the Union and then referred the Intelligencer to his revised text.66

  Inserting comebacks into the record was a surefire way to spark a fight, as Foote learned all too well, and it happened all the time. It was also a surefire way to defend your name, and not just for congressmen. Washington newsmen sometimes used the record to have their say. When insulted during debate, they defended themselves in footnotes. In 1840, when William Bond (W-OH) berated a Globe reporter for accurately reporting his insults, the reporter insisted in a footnote to his report of Bond’s speech that he had softened Bond’s words.67 When Waddy Thompson (W-SC) went one step further, throwing the lie at the Globe reporters William Curran and Lund Washington, Jr., they too went one step further, denouncing Thompson in a footnote as a bullying coward who attacked men only where they couldn’t fight back.68 Thompson, a man of “alarming” physique according to a fellow reporter, responded as bullies were wont to do: he threatened to beat the reporters, a practice that was all too common and not just in Washington; the Enquirer editor Webb suffered his fair share of beatings in New York.69

  Given that tradition, Curran and Washington immediately armed themselves, one with a knife and the other with a “big stick” (probably a hickory cane), keeping a close eye on Thompson.70 But they did something more. They stopped reporting him.71 By erasing him from the record, they effectively erased him from Congress, leaving him no choice but to swallow his pride and apologize, which he did after four weeks of press silence.72 The Kentuckian William Graves, another member of the Whig anti-Globe posse, suffered the same fate and responded the same way.73 As compromised as it was, the Washington press had the literal last word on Congress, bullying congressional bullies in the process.

  Congressmen and newsmen of the independent press had a different sort of partnership. Independent newspapers were not formal party organs.74 Though many of them were partisan, they were profit-driven and survived by selling papers. And given that nothing sold papers better than spice, scandal, and exaggeration, their rise fostered a new, splashy style of journalism.75

  Although independent newsmen often worked hand-in-hand with congressmen, they were free to argue and declaim as they saw fit, and with the arrival of the telegraph in the late 1840s, their numbers in Washington grew dramatically. Increasingly, the House and Senate galleries were filled with out-of-town reporters whom congressmen often didn’t know and couldn’t control. The very things that intensified the nation’s sectional slavery crisis—new technologies and national expansion—gave the American press a more fluid and expansive national reach, sapping the power of the Washington press and loosening its grip on congressional coverage. At a peak moment of crisis, Washington’s party operatives lost control of national news coverage.76 As The New York Herald declared in 1860, “the only record of what is actually said in the House, is to be found in the independent press, over which the members can have no control.”77

  This doesn’t mean that congressmen lost full control of their spin. Many became virtual pen pals with influential New York City newsmen; the New-York Tribune’s Horace Greeley, The New York Herald’s James Gordon Bennett, and The New York Times’s Henry Raymond had enormous influence in Congress. Alternately pleading and plotting with independent editors and reporters, congressmen shaped narratives of Congress that were part fact, part fiction, and part aspiration; journalistic objectivity was in its infancy in the 1850s.78 The press in this period was in the business of projection in every sense of the word: projecting motives and intentions onto foes; projecting the future of the nation; and projecting all of this and more throughout the nation in newsprint.

  Such storytelling was in full swing during the Kansas-Nebraska debate, and congressional clashes played a key role in these narratives. To some degree, such combat had always been performative; anyone who bullied an opponent knew that the nation might be watching. Indeed, sometimes that was the point. Bullies were proving themselves champions to their constituents. Extreme rhetoric often followed the same logic. Flame-throwing, fist-waving “Buncombe speeches”—so called because of a North Carolina congressman’s claim that his heated diatribes were intended only for the folks back home in Buncombe County—were aimed at a home audience. (It’s somehow fitting that the U.S. Congress gave us the word bunkum, or bunk.) But given their public impact, such diatribes also poisoned politics on the floor and sparked many a fight. David Outlaw hated so called “Buncombe days.” They “always produce excitement, and fan the bad feeling of which heaven knows there is enough already.”79

  The independent press didn’t hesitate to leap into this fray, urging Northern congressmen to fight. The New-York Tribune reporter James Shepherd Pike jumped in with both feet. Even more radically antislavery than the Tribune editor Horace Greeley, Pike went to extremes in a letter published on May 10, 1854, eerily echoing the Southern doomsday talk of 1850. “We are in the midst of a revolution,” he declared, a struggle that required the “unbending determination” of Northern congressmen to defeat the Kansas-Nebraska bill.

  Better that confusion should ensue—better that discord should reign in the national councils—better that Congress should break up in wild disorder—nay, better that the Capitol itself should blaze by the torch of the incendiary, or fall and bury all its inmates beneath its crumbling ruins—than that this perfidy and wrong should finally be accomplished.80

  Pike’s words resounded in the pro-Nebraska press for weeks thereafter, where they were pilloried as the epitome of Northern aggression.81 When Pike republished his letter years later, he removed this passage.82

  The next day, Lewis “Lew” Campbell (KN-OH) put Pike’s preaching into practice.83 When House Democrats attempted to push the Nebraska bill through, Campbell led a campaign of resistance that lasted for a remarkable thirty-six hours, ending only when the House adjourned in exhaustion with no vote taken.

  Campbell was fully engaged in this fight, sometimes to the point of howling defiance, though admittedly, howling defiance came naturally to Campbell, an ambitious politico known for storming and sulking.84 Late at night on May 12, after more than a day of wrangling, his howling reached its peak. When a Democrat tried to force the bill through with the previous question, Campbell jumped to his feet vowing to fight to the bitter end, at which the House erupted. The Globe says only that members crowded around Campbell and stood on desks. But as short-tempered as congressmen doubtless were by that point, Campbell’s pledge alone wouldn’t have caused such an uproar. The crowding was caused by Henry Edmundson (D-VA), who accepted Campbell’s challenge and began to remove his jacket in preparation for a fight.85 As always, a rush of men surged toward the point of conflict; as always, congressmen stood on desks to watch; and as always, bullying and blustering had an impact. Although Edmundson didn’t lay
a finger on Campbell, the anti-Nebraskan minority got what they wanted: an adjournment and no bill passed.

  But Campbell wanted more. A few days later, he wrote to Pike with a request. He had stood firm before the “Nebraskaites’s” revolvers and bowie knives and defeated “Edmondson’s effort to whip me.” Yet there wasn’t much of a public response. Could Pike stir people up? Not for himself, Campbell claimed; he needed no encouragement to soldier on. But a few words in the Tribune might inspire the public to draft resolves of approbation that would shore up “weak-kneed” anti-Nebraska congressmen by persuading them that the public was on their side—and watching.86 Israel Washburn (W-ME) seconded this motion, asking Pike to write a column warning Northern congressmen that anyone who chose to “show the white feather will be exposed.”87 Here was the power of the press laid bare on paper: if public approval was a carrot, exposure as a coward was a very big stick.88

  Such letters show the boomeranging action and reaction between Congress and the public as mediated by the press; the public was a third and all-important part of this partnership. Campbell was using the Tribune to shape outcomes in the House, counting on the power of public opinion to keep congressmen in line. That same public opinion might vault the ambitious Campbell to fame and fortune, to the speakership, or even to the presidency, which no one but Campbell saw in his future.89 In 1854, it earned him fame. Greeted by a crowd of hundreds when he returned to Ohio at the end of the session, he was reelected by a large majority, winning nearly 60 percent of the vote.90 The press had created an anti-Nebraska hero.

  Campbell’s victory shows the dynamics of the partnership of the press. Performing before a national audience and hoping to promote their cause and career, congressmen thundered and bellowed with Buncombe speeches. Faced with the blatant affronts of such speeches, their fellow congressmen responded with bellowing and sometimes bruising of their own. Reading about the sectional fury as amplified by the press, and inspired by rising sectional passions, the public urged their congressmen to fight for their rights. And with public opinion behind them and sectional taunts before them, congressmen did as they were told. Congress was trapped in a vicious cycle of sectional outrage.

  TELLING TALES OF CONGRESS: THE SLAVE POWER AND NORTHERN AGGRESSION

  The New-York Tribune had done much of the work in promoting Campbell. When it came to framing narratives, the Tribune was a virtuoso. One of the nation’s leading newspapers and firmly anti-Nebraska, it pounded away at the Slave Power throughout the Kansas-Nebraska crisis, with the ardent Horace Greeley at its head and equally ardent reporters such as James Shepherd Pike beside him.91 Pike was a master of one of the period’s most powerful journalistic weapons: the “letter.” On-the-spot reports framed as letters to the editor and filled with insider information, letters revealed the gritty human reality of politics. Chatty, personal, and irreverent, they had a biting edge that gave them power.92 In letters, bad speeches looked bad. Controversies looked controversial. And violence sometimes looked violent. The Globe routinely suppressed such “gems of … brilliant parliamentary display,” sniped The New York Times.93 The “congressmen behaving badly” school of journalism, which rose to new heights in the late 1850s (as the next chapter shows), made good use of such letters.94

  Between roughly 1835 and 1838, French was a letter-writer for the Chicago Democrat, edited by the former New Hampshirite, six-foot-six-inch-tall John “Long John” Wentworth (D-IL). Writing as “A Looker On,” “One of the Multitude,” and “Nominis in Umbra” (bad Latin for “a name in shadow”), he focused his sights on Congress, offering insider hunches, calculating the rise and fall of reputations, and recounting fights, using his diary entries as fodder. His letters were chatty, good-natured, and staunchly Democratic, much like French himself. They also were “not quite spicy enough,” according to at least one reader, and indeed, they lacked a certain gossipy bite; French didn’t have a letter-writer’s killer instinct. Less than a week after that complaint, the Graves-Cilley duel solved his problem with a vengeance, filling his column with outrage for weeks.95

  A new sensationalistic style of journalism was springing to life, raising the hackles of congressmen in the process; their vitriol against letter-writers virtually oozes from the pages of the Intelligencer and the Globe.96 Fearful to the point of paranoia of being exposed, they sometimes searched for lurking letter-writers in the galleries and under desks before launching closed sessions. One such search in 1859 exposed a cubbyhole housing two black cats; after that, “black cats” became congressional shorthand for suspected leaks.97 It was for good reason that letters often were written under pseudonyms, particularly given that clerks and even congressmen sometimes wrote them.98

  As threatening as letters could be, congressmen often benefited. Although Campbell received high praise in a much-reprinted Tribune article that singled him out for his “vigilant and determined course in resisting the Nebraska outrage,” it was Pike’s subsequent letter that sealed the deal.99 There, Campbell became a heroic freedom fighter against an evil proslavery plot. Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) and his cronies had staged a bullying offensive to force the bill through in defiance of all rules, Pike reported. Why else was Douglas in the House issuing orders during the filibuster? Why else had Edmundson threatened not one anti-Nebraskan but three—including French’s friend Wentworth, whom the Virginian supposedly drove from the hall? Clearly, Edmundson had been the evening’s designated proslavery bully, with Douglas’s full approval.100

  There was truth to this telling. Douglas and other Democrats were trying to force the bill through, and bullying played a role in their campaign. But the Tribune fit that truth into a conspiratorial narrative of violent barbaric slaveholders engaged in a crafty, clandestine plot to spread slavery throughout the Union. As the Tribune told it, Edmundson, drunk and “armed to the teeth”—a virtual caricature of a Southerner—had rushed at Campbell, knife in hand. Campbell, in turn, had bared his chest and dared Edmundson to strike. This stirring bit of melodrama became the stock account of the encounter in the Northern anti-Nebraska press.101

  More anti-Nebraska lies! charged the eccentric Mike Walsh (D-NY), a rough-and-tumble bravo from the streets of New York with a flair for humorous asides that he used to full effect in mocking the Tribune’s account of Campbell’s moment of glory. Edmundson was said to have “rushed down … armed to the teeth, like Sampson slaying the Philistines,” he joked, while Campbell “had his arms thrown behind him in a position similar to that of Ajax defying the lightning. [Great laughter].”102

  Walsh’s jeering received ample press coverage; the anti-Nebraska press wasn’t alone in weaving narratives. The pro-Nebraska press told a story of Northern fanatics, Northern violence, and the unholy power of the Tribune to dictate orders to Northern congressmen, with Pike’s Capitol-razing manifesto standing front and center as “fanaticism … openly and boldly avowed.”103 The threats and violence of anti-Nebraska congressmen were “without a parallel … in the Legislative history of the country,” claimed the Richmond Whig—quite a claim for a Southern paper.104

  Such were the two framing narratives of the Kansas-Nebraska crisis in Congress.105 Newspapers throughout the country veered toward one or the other of these slavery-centric poles, and the Thirty-third Congress gave them plenty of material to work with, though truth be told, this Congress wasn’t exceptionally violent; it just seemed that way in the press—particularly in the Northern press.106 Representing the underdog in this debate, anti-Nebraska newspapers had every reason to amplify congressional violence in their effort to urge action against a domineering Slave Power. Southern “aggression” in Kansas and in Congress became a byword of this debate.107

  Given the dire threat and high stakes, Northern fighting men had a powerful appeal: as depicted in the press, they were brave champions fighting the spread of slavery in defense of Northern rights.108 Francis B. Cutting (D-NY) was one of those fighting Northerners who drew applause. His peak moment of performance took p
lace in March 1854. Although he supported the Nebraska bill, on March 27, he proposed referring it to the Committee of the Whole for a full discussion, thereby delaying its passage. Democrats in the press and in the House responded by denouncing him as a traitor.

  John C. Breckenridge (D-KY) was a loud denouncer. During their harsh exchange—which began when Cutting tried to defend himself against charges in the Union—the two men essentially called each other liars, causing a “Great sensation, and cries of ‘Order!’” That night, Cutting opened formal duel negotiations with Breckenridge. But with each man claiming to be the insulted party, little happened and an apology on the House floor on March 31 ended the matter.109

  In and of itself, a near duel between congressmen was guaranteed headline news, so the Cutting-Breckenridge fight produced headlines aplenty. Some newspapers were all sensation. “CUTTING REPORTED KILLED,” declared the Newark Daily Advertiser, adding in small print that it had no idea if this was true.110 The Connecticut Courant put the power of the telegraph to full use on April 1, printing a 1:30 p.m. report that the two men were in hiding, a 1:45 p.m. report that a bloodless duel had taken place, and an evening report denying any duel. “People have a ‘wonderful proclivity’ in this country, to the ‘spicy,’” stated the Alexandria Gazette with marked understatement.111

  Other papers took a more traditional approach, chiding congressmen for their bad behavior, though with a regional spin. Congress was a place for “gentlemen to exchange ideas,” not a place for “passionate bullies to exchange shots,” declared the Massachusetts Spy, condemning both combatants. The only cure for such barbarities was to “get rid of Slavery.” The Baton Rouge Daily Advocate blamed the Speaker. Why hadn’t he spoken up when insults began to fly? Was he afraid of being challenged to a duel? Given that the Speaker was a Southerner—the Kentucky Democrat Linn Boyd—this was no slight charge.112