The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  Such coverage of a congressional sparring match was par for the course. But many anti-Nebraska newspapers went further, fitting the Breckenridge-Cutting episode into a broader Slave Power narrative. The Tribune led the charge, declaring the incident “part of a well-considered plan to pursue by intimidation and violence every independent northern Democrat who dares to defy the mandates of the Slaveocracy.” The lesson to be learned was clear: “support the Nebraska bill or submit to be bullied or shot.”113 Other newspapers blamed President Pierce, damning him as a bullying truckler to the Slave Power, which had ordered Breckenridge to attack Cutting.114

  If Pierce was the villain of this story, Cutting was the hero. Southerners had a “dastardly habit” of forcing Northern congressmen to “fight or, be disgraced,” wrote the Albany Evening Journal. Those “fiery braggarts … accustomed to swagger in the House” had met their match. Cutting was not “in the habit of submitting to the lash of a master.”115 Most glorious of all was Cutting’s willingness to duel. Cutting “is the best shot in our pistol galleries,” crowed the Portland Weekly Advertiser. “He will make Mr. Breckenridge rue this quarrel, whether he prefers pistols, rifles, small swords, closed digits, brickbats at twenty paces, or raw hides at two.”116 The Northern press was doing some swaggering of its own, depicting Cutting as a rare and special thing: a Northern “fighting man.”117 Senate freshman William Pitt Fessenden (W-ME) received similar treatment at roughly the same time. As the Tribune told it, during his “manly” maiden speech on March 3, he dared Southerners to leave the Union, even as the red-faced Andrew Butler (D-SC) threatened him with clenched fists.118 The truth was less dramatic. “Poor old Mr. Butler cut very foolish flourishes,” Fessenden told his wife, “yet he had no more idea of assaulting or even insulting me than he had of flying.” Regardless of the truth, Fessenden became an anti-Nebraska hero.119

  Fessenden, Cutting, and Campbell hadn’t engaged in any fisticuffs, but they were far more confrontational than most of their Northern colleagues had been four years past, and they were roundly applauded for it, particularly given that their resistance was played up in the press. The National Aegis thanked Northern fighters, each and every one: “We do hugely like to see the stiffening taken out of the ‘chivalry,’” it gloated.120 As depicted in the press, these stalwart Northerners weren’t only fighting the Slave Power; they were defending the fate and spirit of the North with manly bravado. Southerners weren’t the only men who knew how to fight.121

  Not surprisingly, this trend didn’t play well in pro-Nebraska papers, which assailed fighting Northerners as violent incendiaries with no respect for the law.122 Northerners, not Southerners, weren’t fighting fair, both in Congress and the North, where they routinely violated the Fugitive Slave Act. By flouting the rule of law they surrendered all claim to its protection, declared the Union on June 8. “Outlawed enemies to society,” they were “like wild beasts of the forest, fair game to be hunted by all whose safety, property, and lives they are perpetually placing in jeopardy.”123 This declaration wasn’t on a par with Pike’s manifesto, but it came close. That same day in the House, Joshua Giddings (R-OH), referenced by name in the Union piece, proposed that its editor, the House printer, A.O.P. Nicholson, be expelled from the hall for encouraging assaults on congressmen. His resolution was tabled, but not before Senator Thomas Clingman (D-NC) declared that Giddings’s speeches were far more incendiary than the Union article.124 Northerners were the aggressors, not Southerners, who were the soul of moderation throughout the crisis—at least as depicted in the pro-Nebraska press.

  The other side was plotting illicit plots with wild abandon. The other side was forcing its way to power with underhanded assaults. The other side was putting sectional interests above the good of the whole. The other side wanted to commandeer the Union. The other side was violating fundamental rights: the right of free speech, property rights.125 Pro-and anti-Nebraska newspapers told the same story with the leading roles reversed. Promises were being broken, compromises were being betrayed, parliamentary rules were being violated: each side accused the other of not fighting fair. Sectional conspiracy theories were eroding cross-sectional trust inside and outside of Congress, destroying any hope of a middle ground.

  Senator Edward Everett’s (W-MA) fate shows how hard it was to avoid taking a stand. Sick at home during the final vote on the Nebraska bill, he was attacked as a coward by anti-Nebraska men and pilloried in the Tribune. His timid self-defense and devotion to constructing a compromise drew such abuse that he resigned his Senate seat, a moderate Whig crushed by extremes.126

  “A PERFECT HELL ON EARTH”

  Although a congressional insider, French was as distrustful as anyone. No longer clerking, he was still in Congress’s orbit, watching debates from the floor and hobnobbing with congressmen almost every day. In January 1854, he had a fine time at a small dinner with Henry Edmundson, Laurence Keitt, and Preston Brooks, the trio that would stage the caning of Senator Charles Sumner two years later.127 French couldn’t have been more up close and personal with alleged slaveholding schemers, yet even he came to believe in a nefarious Slave Power plot, a belief that ultimately destroyed his twenty-three-year friendship with Franklin Pierce.

  The trouble between the two men began in March 1854. French’s half brother Henry had spent the winter in Washington and hadn’t been shy about denouncing the Nebraska bill.128 Outraged by such dissension in the ranks, Pierce scolded French for his brother’s sins. Annoyed by the scolding and no fan of the bill, French spouted some Democratic platitudes about popular sovereignty and held his tongue. Pierce responded by asking French to write a letter of support for the bill, to be published in the New England press.

  At first, French said yes. But by the end of the day he thought better of it. Convinced that the Nebraska bill was an “unpardonable political blunder” and deeply disappointed in Pierce for supporting it, French decided not to write the letter.129 It wasn’t an easy decision. His lengthy diary entry says as much. He wanted to support Pierce and believed in the principle of popular sovereignty as a good Democrat should. But he could not lend his support to a bill that was a danger to the Union and a threat to the North. Well aware that his decision could have serious consequences, French wrote a carefully worded letter to Pierce, transcribing it in his diary under the title “The Letter.” The Kansas-Nebraska controversy had brought French to a turning point, as it had the nation.

  French’s letter shows how torn he was between his feelings for Pierce, his devotion to the Democracy, his heartfelt desire to keep slavery from spreading, and his fears for both the Union and his political career. His main reason for changing his mind was pragmatic, he explained: a published letter from one of Pierce’s close friends would persuade no one and expose Pierce’s guiding hand. Treading lightly, French next admitted his doubts about the bill but pledged his firm support; he would stand behind the “great principle of popular rights.” French was on the hither side of truth once again. He was hiding his deep dislike of the bill. Even so, he was sending a clear message, admitting his discomfort with the Democratic party line.

  French’s inability to be frank with his old friend disturbed him, as it had throughout Pierce’s presidency. As chummy as the two men were during that time (which wasn’t all that difficult for the smooth and charming president), Pierce showed no interest in hearing French’s thoughts. Time and again, French offered words of advice or warning, or aired his views, but Pierce wanted none of it. Instead, Pierce wanted his old friend to “toe the mark,” French griped. After all that French had sacrificed for Pierce’s campaign—committing himself so fully that he drove paying business away—this was a bitter pill. “I Gloried in his election,” French grumbled, “and he has treated me as if he deemed me of about as much importance as his bootblack or his coachman.”130 Wounded and disappointed, he began to refer to Pierce as his “former friend.”131

  The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in May 1854 made matters worse, highlighting
sectional tensions in national parties. While Southern Democrats and most Southern Whigs supported the bill, Northern Democrats were divided and Northern Whigs voted against it. Pierce signed it into law on May 30. With Kansas’s slavery status up for grabs, swarms of free soil and proslavery settlers (branded “border ruffians” by abolitionists and Free Soilers) rushed into the territory to sway the state their way. Within nine months, its white population had increased tenfold.132 The next year saw outbreaks of man-to-man combat and fraudulent elections, with slaveholders corrupting the electoral process and bludgeoning their way to power, much as slaveholding congressmen had long bullied their way to power in Congress. Only after an extended battle over pro- and antislavery constitutions did Kansas achieve statehood as a free state in 1861.133

  It wasn’t hard to connect the dots. For French—as for many Northerners—the violence in Kansas irrefutably exposed a brutal, underhanded Slave Power plot in progress, propounded by Southerners both in Kansas and in Congress. It was “now perfectly evident that the repeal [of the Missouri Compromise] was for the purpose of establishing more slave territory in this Union,” he wrote in 1855. He saw now what he hadn’t seen before: “a determination among the slaveocracy that the people of that Territory shall not make it free if they are ever so much disposed to do so.”134 It was a stunning realization. The South was serving only itself. And his old friend had fostered this outrage.

  Even so, for a time, French stayed the course, doing his job as commissioner of public buildings, his ultimate reward from Pierce. He even dropped by the White House for the occasional visit, admiring Pierce for his fashion sense if not his common sense. (“No man dresses more appropriately on all occasions than Gen. Pierce.”)135 However much French deplored Pierce’s politics, he couldn’t deny his fundamental fondness for the man.136

  Yet French’s Democratic loyalties were wavering. And in June 1855, he was forced to make a choice. Annoyed by rumors that French had joined the Know Nothings, a nativist organization and nascent political party that met in secret (thus their name: asked about their meetings, members said that they knew nothing), Pierce demanded an explanation. Was French two-timing the Democrats? French in fact had dabbled in the Know Nothing movement, attracted by its fraternal rituals, its utter devotion to all things American, and—at least in the North—its antislavery drift, though its nativism ultimately drove him away.137 Like many Northerners, he approached the Know Nothings as a way station to the nascent Republican Party.138 As Joshua Giddings put it, the Know Nothings acted as “a screen—a dark wall—behind which members of old political organizations could escape unseen from party shackles, and take a position according to the dictates of judgment and conscience.”139 French had taken a step behind that screen, but before he could explain himself, Pierce began to rant about Know Nothing traitors, vowing to remove them all from office. Not until the next day did the two men discuss French’s politics in an unusually frank conversation, their longest since Pierce had become president, after which both men declared themselves satisfied. French left their meeting reminded of the good old Frank Pierce of old.140

  But the following day brought more Democratic accusations about French’s politics. True to form, French denied them in the press, declaring himself a member of the “anti Know Nothing party.”141 But in doing so, he angered the Know Nothings, who triumphantly exposed his former loyalties in their press organ, the appropriately named Daily American Organ. Their proof was three Know Nothing articles written by French in support of a relative’s bid for office; the Organ had the originals in his hand. His scribbling impulse had done him in, and now the press was hunting him down, with French unable to take the middle ground because there was no middle ground to take. With a “howling pack of human dogs” on his trail in the press, and “Know Nothings and Democrats, Catholics & Protestants, great men & little men, & many very small would-be-great men” out to get him, French declared his public life “a perfect hell on earth.”142

  Given Pierce’s purge of Know Nothings with government jobs, French’s fate was clear. On June 4, he resigned his commissionership, grumbling about unfaithful editors and an unreasonable press. The press responded in kind with a parting blow, harping on French’s “decapitation” as a way to mock Pierce’s ironfisted intolerance of any and all dissent.143 (Knowing full well French’s tendency to pounce into print, his half brother Henry begged him to stay silent.) Ironically, given French’s history with the telegraph, wire transmissions mangled the story, nonsensically discussing the “French Commissioner of the Public Buildings.”144

  French’s career was crashing down around him. The political ground was shifting beneath his feet. His loyalty to the Democracy had been tried and found wanting; his faith in the Democracy was irreparably shaken. Even so, he was good-natured to the end, titling his account of his ordeal “The diary of a hunted politician!,” even managing to express “the kindest feelings of regard” for Pierce in his resignation letter.145 Yet he bemoaned the tragic impact of Pierce’s presidency on his party and the nation. Pierce had done “in two years, what all the enemies of democracy have striven in vain for 50 years to do,” French fumed. He had “broken down the Democratic Party!” And the Union was at risk as never before.146

  The time had come for French to make a choice, and he made it. As he explained to Pierce in his letter, in resigning his post, he was withdrawing from the Democratic Party. He was now “a free man, untrammelled by party or personal obligations—ready to do what may seem best for my Country.”147 Thus did French—the man who had made himself “conspicuous and ridiculous” with his “fulsome letters puffing the [Pierce] administration,” according to The New York Herald—leave the Democracy and break with Pierce.148 His wrenching transition shows how many a Northern Democrat made that journey.149

  French was now a man without a party. After a lifetime of electioneering, it was a strange place to be. He knew what he wasn’t. He certainly was “no city of Washington, present administration Democrat.” And he was done with doughface dodging. He wanted “[n]o more time-serving, no more equivocation.” Nor could he accept the party’s routine sacrifice of Northern interests and honor; no amount of power was worth that sacrifice. Even the word Democrat had ceased to have meaning for him.150

  French’s diary bears witness to what came next; he wasn’t untrammeled for long. His ever more frequent references to the “slavocracy’s … war on Freedom” reveal a man taking sides.151 By August 1855, he was swearing to stand by the North at any cost.152 In January 1856 he pledged allegiance to the principles of the nascent Republican Party; impressed by a speech by Joshua Giddings (R-OH) outlining the Republican credo, French declared it his personal “platform.”153 Already busying himself as a Republican activist, he was a nominee for president of the District’s Republican Association one month later. That May, he was named a delegate to the Republican National Convention.154 Not long after, his wife, Bess, was jokingly quoting attacks on “black republicans” in her letters to French “for the fun of the thing.”155 Within a year of his break with Pierce, French had become a Republican.156

  He was one of many Northerners making that transition, a product of the seeming spread of slavery and the Slave Power through the Fugitive Slave Act and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and a growing disenchantment with political parties as they were.157 For many such people, their choice wasn’t born of cold calculation. It was a change of mind and heart, a turning away from the South that required a new understanding of the Union and its parts. No longer were these people pinning hopes on pacts and compromises. Southern aggression had to be resisted. Northern rights had to be protected. And the Republican Party was their weapon of choice, the one and only hope for the Union as they felt it should be. Many Southerners faced a similar crisis, turning their backs on Northern allies because the times demanded it but grieving at the parting.158

  In December 1855, French commemorated his change of heart with a poem, his impulse whenever he felt strong sentime
nts—and French was a sentimental man living in challenging times. In a speech earlier that year at an antislavery rally, Massachusetts representative Nathaniel Banks, a Know Nothing soon to be a Republican, had made a stunning declaration: If the South persisted in advancing the spread of slavery, then the North should “let the Union slide.” (Watching in the audience, the teenaged Thomas B. Reed, later “Czar” Reed of congressional fame, was struck by the burst of applause that greeted Banks’s words.)159 Although Banks later insisted that he was speaking of a worst-case scenario, his words caused a sensation. Southerners had been threatening disunion for decades. Here was a Northerner taking that stand. Always stirred by Northerners who took on the Slave Power, French took Banks’s words to heart. Indeed, he may have intended his poem for Banks, who was running for Speaker; French was never too proud for self-promotion. His poem, titled “Then Let the Union Slide,” was both a boast and a dare:

  Bold words are these, and fearful—

  “Then let the Union slide”—

  E’en the thought is sad & tearful,

  Howe’er it be applied!

  There’s not a patriot living

  Who would not grieve most sore,

  At the dread-dark outgiving

  “This Union is no more.”

  Is the North to be down-trodden

  Beneath the Southern heel

  As if their flesh were sodden

  And their hearts had ceased to feel?

  To all the high toned fancies

  Of these lords must they submit,

  And receive with slavery Kansas