The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  Because the South saw fit?

  If o’er that Freedom glorious

  For which our fathers died,

  Slavery must be victorious,

  “Then let the Union slide!”

  For ’tis not worth the keeping,

  If o’er our Father’s graves

  Man!—Shackeled man!—is weeping

  That half his race are slaves!”

  “Let it slide” then—this great Union—

  Pronounce the compact dead—

  With the South no more communion

  If slavery still must spread!

  There’s land thank God, for Freedom

  North of Potomac’s tide—

  Let the South keep slaves & breed ’em—

  But “let the Union slide”

  French had come a long way from his doughface dodging of days gone by. With the slavery crisis coming to a head, he was singing a song of disunion, though like Banks, he assumed that the North would cross that final fateful line only if pushed by the South; if the South persisted, then let the Union slide. When French published his poem in the abolitionist Liberator five years later—omitting its conciliatory first stanza—he removed “then” from the title. What had once seemed only possible had become probable by 1860; disunion was at hand.160

  Banks’s rallying cry shows the force and feeling behind the rise of the Republican Party. Antislavery in principle and Northern in orientation, its fuel and fire were born of righteous anger at Southern aggression. In 1855, that aggression was most flagrant in two places: Kansas and Congress. It should thus come as no surprise that the arrival of Republicans in Congress caused a spike in congressional violence. Pledged to fight the Slave Power, Republican congressmen stayed true to that pledge. Face-to-face with slaveholders, they propounded their cause with strong words, bold actions, and—when pushed to extremes—the force of their fists, knives, and guns, and were applauded by Northerners for doing so. Like French, they were prepared to fight for Northern rights if necessary—even to the point of disunion.

  7

  REPUBLICANS MEET THE SLAVE POWER

  CHARLES SUMNER AND BEYOND (1855–61)

  French was a Republican, but a moderate one. As he put it in 1860, he was “an ultra Union man.”1 Even as he championed Northern rights, he desperately wanted to save the Union—at least, the Union as he now understood it, with the North no longer in thrall to the South. As sincerely as he supported the Republican cause, if the party went too far, French wouldn’t go with it. “When Republicanism becomes in the least treasonable,” he wrote in 1859, “I am no longer a Republican. My Republicanism teaches me to stand by my Country & her Constitution.”2

  French’s Republicanism was grounded on a moral balancing act between rights and order. He saw events in Kansas as ample proof of an entrenched Slave Power plot to spread slavery and deny Northern rights, yet he deplored the abolitionist John Brown’s extreme actions in fighting that foe. Brown’s massacre of proslavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, in 1856, and his attempt to launch a slave revolt by seizing a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 outraged French. As much as he admired Brown’s bravery, he could “feel no admiration for the high qualities of any man who uses those qualities to overturn the Constitution and Laws of my Country!”3 Along similar lines, although French didn’t want slavery “to extend one inch into territory now free,” he believed that the Fugitive Slave Act should be enforced in the North because it was the law. Hearing of a violent attempt to free a fugitive slave in Boston in 1854, French poured abuse on the abolitionists Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips, whose speechifying had helped to rouse an angry crowd. “[O]pposed as I am to hanging people in general,” he told his brother, “I really should glory in putting the ropes around their traitor necks—pulling the caps over their traitor eyes, & launching their traitor souls into hell—the only fit place for them!! Savage, aint it?”4

  In essence, French was a member of the leave-the-South-alone school of thought. As much as he wanted to uphold Northern rights and interests and prevent the spread of slavery into free territory, he didn’t want to violate Southern rights under the Constitution by “a single hair’s breadth.”5 He was more than willing to let the slave regime solve its own slavery problems, as long as it didn’t push beyond the bounded South.6

  There were many such people in the Republican ranks. People who wanted to quash the Slave Power and champion the North, but who weren’t all that eager to stamp out slavery in the South. People who wanted to defend Northern rights without endangering the Union. People who saw the Union as dependent on a pact between North and South that had to be upheld. There were other kinds of people in the Republican Party too: racists who wanted to protect free soil for white men; radicals promoting equal rights between the races; nativists suspicious of anti-American influences; working-class and middle-class people who distrusted the “money-power.”7

  The Republican Party was born of this mix, but only gradually. Although the opening of the Thirty-fourth Congress in December 1855 saw the arrival of 108 anti-Nebraska men in the House and 15 in the Senate, there was no single party banner uniting them in a shared cause.8 Some were Know Nothings; by then, the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant movement had cohered as the American Party. Some considered themselves Free Soilers. Some called themselves Independent Democrats. Others were ex-Whigs who had broken with their party as it slipped out of existence, fractured by the slavery debate. Still others simply considered themselves an opposition to the Democratic majority. And some had already adopted the Republican label. Regardless of their party name, many of these people were antislavery and anti-administration.

  As inchoate as this new party was, the arrival of an explicitly Northern opposition had an enormous impact on Congress. Not only did the number of fights spike precipitously after 1855, but their dynamics fundamentally changed. Republicans promoted themselves as a new kind of Northerner who was willing to fight back, and they were true to their word. They fought to wrest control of Congress and the Union from the Slave Power.9

  Not surprisingly, the most radical members of this new party were the most confrontational.10 John Parker Hale, Zachariah Chandler, Benjamin Wade, Elihu Washburne, Henry Wilson, Owen Lovejoy, John Covode, James Lane, Galusha Grow, John Potter, William Fessenden, and, of course, the ever fight-ready Joshua Giddings were essentially Northern fighting men, hoping to radicalize their party and galvanize the public by displaying the emotional power of Northern aggression. They accomplished their purpose with a potent blend of extreme rhetoric and—in some cases—an apparent willingness to defend their principles with their fists. Their bold antislavery talk, the kind that had subjected Giddings to at least seven physical assaults, was virtually guaranteed to provoke a Southern backlash.

  These fights served a more complex purpose than past imbroglios sparked by men such as Giddings, Adams, and Hale to denigrate slavery by putting slaveholder savagery on display. Republicans were trying to do something concrete; their numbers were large enough to affect and possibly effect policy and the balance of power in the Union. They also were a nascent party that desperately needed widespread public support. And the core agenda of that party—mentioned in countless petitions and resolves from their constituents—was combating the Slave Power plot to dominate the federal government and spread slavery throughout the Union. Republican aggression in Congress and the Southern belligerence that it provoked served the Republican agenda; in a sense, it was campaigning. By promoting their cause in the face of raging threats, or by provoking those threats, Republicans weren’t just proving a point. They were engaging in party politics.

  Admittedly, by 1855 the threshold of fight-worthy offenses for congressional slavery supporters was low and getting lower all the time. They, too, believed that they were fighting a powerful foe: Northern aggression was threatening to strangle if not extinguish the South’s hold on the Union, and perhaps even to infiltrate the South.11 By Southern logic
, their interests and honor required forceful action, and fight Southerners did. By threatening, insulting, and even assaulting their foes, they, too, were promoting their cause and drumming up support. For both North and South, violence was politics.

  Which brings us to the most dramatic innovation in congressional violence after 1855: Northerners fought back.12 When confronted by screaming slaveholders wielding weapons, Republicans stood firm, often exchanging blow for blow, sometimes with weapons, often with numbers. More than once, when a Republican drove Southerners into a fury, brother Republicans rushed to the rescue, armed and ready to fight.

  These men stood their ground deliberately, aggressively, defiantly. They did so knowing that the simple fact of their resistance sent a powerful message. It revealed the presence of a united North willing to fight for its interests and rights. The very act of speaking in the face of howling resistance was a declaration of Northern rights, because it asserted the right of free speech on the floor, a right long violated by Southerners.

  The Republican war for free speech wasn’t purely symbolic. To promote their party, to get things done, to serve their constituents, to fully represent the North, and to fulfill the pledges that had won them office, Republican congressmen had to say their piece; they had to confront and demand and accuse. Pledged to combat the Slave Power’s hold on the federal government, they were pledged to fight bullying Southerners as best they could.

  Southerners were equally bound to resist Northern aggression, and Republicans were Northern aggression personified, as well as a fount of dangerous words; to Southern slaveholders, Republican antislavery rhetoric was personally insulting, sectionally degrading, and a threat to the security and stability of the South that had to be silenced. Most congressional clashes between 1855 and 1861 centered on this core dynamic. Republicans propounded their cause; slaveholders tried to gag them with threats and violence; and Republicans fought back. The arrival of a Northern opposition in Congress marked the start of a death struggle over free speech on the floor, which was in truth a fight for control of Congress, and thereby for the fate of the nation.

  Free speech was the most powerful weapon in the congressional arsenal.13 Any words spoken loudly enough to be heard by the press could be heard by the nation. Free speech was also a much heralded sacred right, the essence of democratic representation. A congressman without free speech couldn’t fully represent his constituents, as victims of bullying and their supporters said time and again. Cilley said so in the midst of his wrangle. Adams championed that truth as a holy cause for years. Through Adams’s persistence and the prodding of the press, the Northern public eventually awoke to this fundamental violation of their rights and rose up in outrage against such degradation to demand their due. Republicans followed in Adams’s footsteps, championing the right of free speech on the floor by exercising it often and with feeling, even fighting for it when necessary, sometimes explicitly declaring themselves defenders of that right. They did so with an approving Northern public looking on.14

  Even as they fought for their rights, Republicans appealed to that public by highlighting their bravery in Congress and its implications. During yet another contentious contest for Speaker in 1859, when Southerners threatened violence if a Republican won the post, the ever sardonic Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) said that he didn’t blame Southerners for their threats, “for they have tried it fifty times, and fifty times they have found weak and recreant tremblers in the North who have been affected by it.” When Stevens’s quip brought Martin Crawford (D-GA) to his feet uttering threats, Stevens added, “That is right. That is the way that they frightened us before.” At this, Crawford headed toward Stevens, fists waving, muttering in an undertone that had clear implications. Within seconds, Republicans and Southern Democrats were rushing down the aisles, several of them reaching for guns. But despite what the Globe characteristically called “great confusion,” nothing happened, people returned to their seats, and Stevens dismissed the matter as “a momentary breeze,” raising a laugh.15

  Republicans were announcing that they were a different kind of Northerner, and they had to be. Both sides in this battle were playing for the rafters, appealing to their publics to sustain them with support. And their pleas worked. Increasingly, Americans sent their congressmen a clear and consistent message in mass meetings, private letters, petitions, the press, and the ballot box: fight for our rights. Fight.

  Thus the fight-filled Thirty-fourth, Thirty-fifth, and Thirty-sixth Congresses, and thus their depiction in the independent press. North and South alike, newspapers emphasized the surge in violence as the ultimate proof of Kansas-fueled sectional conspiracies to dominate the Union—proof of a powerful kind, because it gave those conspiracies names and faces. Many Americans saw their worst fears brought to life on the floor of Congress as congressmen embodied the crisis of the Union, clashing in armed combat over sectional rights. In the process, Americans lost faith in the institution of Congress.

  They also lost faith in one another. The full impact of this perfect storm of conspiracy theories, policy conflicts, physical violence, and press coverage was growing distrust between North and South. Not only did the public become ever more distrustful of their sectional foe, but congressmen did too. The fact that large numbers of congressmen armed themselves in this period speaks volumes. These men were prepared for sectional warfare in the halls of Congress. They believed that the driving impact of aggression on aggression could spark a firestorm that would bring the Union down, and if things went that far, they considered it their duty to fight with and for their people. To reverse a much quoted aphorism: politics was becoming war by other means.16 When congressmen themselves lost faith in the institution of Congress and in one another—when they no longer believed that the institution was powerful enough to prevent sectional bloodshed within the Capitol—a line had been crossed. Resolution would have to come from elsewhere, if not from mediation, then in open war.

  In the midst of this sectional strife, French remained moderate, though at a time of violent extremes, the nature of moderation changed. As always, he politicked and paraded on behalf of his cause, organizing mass mailings of Republican pamphlets and campaigning for presidents. As always, he worried about the fate of the nation. As late as 1860, he declared himself “for concession & conciliation.”17 As Grand Master of the Knights Templar of the United States, he even tried to yoke Masonic brotherhood to the cause of Union.

  But French was also publishing antislavery poems and protests. He socialized primarily with Republicans, some of them abolitionists. Joshua Giddings remained a favorite; French sometimes stood near Giddings’s seat on the floor to hear him speak. Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the abolitionist National Era, was also a good friend, as was the New Hampshire antislavery advocate Amos Tuck, one of the founders of the Republican Party, whose daughter Ellen married French’s son Frank in 1861. Tuck introduced French to the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier; after talking about politics and poetry for a while, the two men wandered out to measure an enormous tree stump.18 And of course, French spent hours with New England Republicans; at times, his social calendar reads like a roster of the New Hampshire delegation, now devoid of Democrats.19

  Perhaps most striking of all during these years, French began to consider the possibility of disunion. As much as he hoped to avoid that final outcome, he felt that a Union dominated by the Slave Power was no Union at all. If disunion was to come “merely because the South cannot have all the old cow’s teats to suck,” he wrote in 1860, then he could only say, “in John Quincy Adams’s words ‘Let it come!’” This was the period when French published his ode to Banks without its conditional “Then” in the title.

  Like countless others, French now saw the firm assertion of Northern rights against the Slave Power’s encroaching grasp as fundamental to the Union. Many people were far more radical than French in demanding those rights. French was more anti–Slave Power than he was antislavery, as were many Northerners.2
0 These people experienced these years of crisis as a sectional power struggle more than a battle against an immoral wrong, although a sense of moral rectitude powered their resistance. But however individual Northerners interpreted the crisis, when it came to the balance of power in the Union, for most of them there was no turning back.

  Until the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861—and even beyond—French hoped that the Union would survive this trial as it had survived many trials before. But even as he prayed for peace, he was preparing for war. Events in 1860 pushed even this man of moderation to extremes, compelling him to arm himself to defend the Republican cause.

  THE MOST VIOLENT CONGRESS IN OUR HISTORY

  In the months before the opening of the Thirty-fourth Congress in December 1855, Americans North, South, and West predicted tough times ahead. The reasons were many. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had divided the nation into two warring factions. Union-rending conspiracies seemed to be afoot. Events in Kansas offered bloody evidence of those plots in action, flooding a watchful national audience with graphic images of slave-state and free-state settlers in open combat. Politicos in Washington were prepared to go to the wall on Kansas’s slavery status. A Northern opposition was rising in Congress. And as if this wasn’t enough, a presidential election would take place the following fall. After discussing Kansas with “knowing ones” in the summer of 1855, French felt sure that the Union would soon “receive such a shock as it never received before.” If so, he was ready “to stand by the North in resisting the unjustifiable attempts now making by the South to add more slave states to this Union.”21

  People throughout the nation echoed French’s thoughts. In Massachusetts, Henry Wilson, a Know Nothing on his way to becoming a Republican, had dire predictions for the coming session of Congress. Wilson, a shoemaker, schoolteacher, and newspaper editor who had found his way into politics in the 1840s, had spent a week in June at the national convention of the nascent nativistic American Party, bound and determined to “blow the whole thing to hell and damnation” unless they adopted an anti–Slave Power plank in their platform.22 When the party refused, Wilson led antislavery Northerners out of the convention, though not without resistance; during one of his speeches, he was threatened by a gun-waving Virginian. “At Philadelphia, for eight days, I met the armed, drunken bullies of the Black Power, without shrinking,” he wrote to the abolitionist Theodore Parker in July, “and I hope to do so at the next session of Congress, if it shall be necessary.” The South had to understand that threats of disunion, civil war, or personal violence wouldn’t carry. “The next Congress will be the most violent one in our history,” Wilson predicted. “[I]f violence and bloodshed come, let us not falter, but do our duty, even if we fall upon the floors of Congress.”23 By 1855, this once shocking image of bloody combat in the halls of Congress had become commonplace.