For French and countless Northerners, the “fight for freedom,” as French called it, was thus fundamentally bound up with the right of free speech.107 The Northern press celebrated it. Indignation meetings rallied behind it. It was heralded as the pride of Northern democracy, the heart of democratic governance, and the soul of the Union. More than anything else, this was the Northern lesson learned from Sumner’s caning. Northern rights, Northern honor, and democratic governance required free speech, and the Slave Power was brutally suppressing it to advance its regime, a violation that called for extreme measures of resistance.
Thus the concern over dangerous words at the national center, where they had the power to tear Congress and the nation in two. The anonymous letter to Nathaniel Banks made this threat clear. The only way to fend off disaster in Congress was to avoid throwing “missiles” of inflammatory words. “Let gentlemen who may choose to take part in this debate, scrupulously avoid the utterance of unnecessarily harsh language.”108 Israel Washburn (R-ME) said the same thing when debating Brooks’s expulsion: “Let us not irritate each other. Let us avoid disagreeable language to each other.”109 Franklin Pierce echoed that request a few years later from retirement in New Hampshire, pleading for “temperate words” in Congress.110 During this same period, Thomas Hart Benton was removing dangerous words from the congressional record in the hope of soothing tempers and saving the “brotherly Union.” He spent his last years writing an abridgement of congressional debates from 1789 through 1856 with the threats and insults removed, including his infamous 1850 clash with Henry Foote. Sick with cancer and working in intense pain, he died the day after he completed it.111 As Benton well knew, for Congress and the Union to survive this crisis—for cross-sectional conversation to be even possible—people had to watch their words. The alternative was Union-rending violence.
Free speech and violence were thus dangerously intertwined.112 For the South, they always had been; to suppress dangerous words was to suppress slave insurrection. In Congress, another kind of insurrection was at hand. Northern congressmen were rising up and their chief weapons were the right of free speech and their willingness to fight for that right. Massachusetts Republican Chauncey Knapp’s constituents said as much in June 1856 when they saw him off as he headed back to Washington. Just before Knapp boarded the train, a small assembly of people gave him a parting gift for use in Congress: a revolver inscribed with the words “Free Speech.”113
“A HELL OF LEGISLATION”
Knapp had been given his marching orders: fight—literally fight—for our rights. Such was the legacy of 1856: a heightening of sectional tensions and a spike in congressional violence, as well as an ever more intense emotional investment in the fate of Kansas. Knapp wasn’t the only person being presented with weapons by enraged Northerners; this was the period when Northerners began shipping cartons of rifles to free-state settlers in Kansas.114 Noting the crowded House and Senate galleries in 1858, French thought that the “intense feeling … from this political centre has radiated the fever heat to all quarters of the Union.” French was doing his part to spread that heat. At the end of January 1857 he became president of the National Republican Association of Washington. Founded in 1855 as a club of roughly twenty-nine members (including the exceedingly clubbable French), within a few years its membership had climbed to several hundred.115 Its main purpose was to disseminate Republican political tracts and speeches throughout the nation, aided by the inner workings of Congress, congressional clout and mailing lists, and free postage courtesy of the congressional frank. By all accounts, the association did its job admirably; during the 1856 presidential campaign, it claimed to have circulated four million documents.116
As president, French set out in earnest to gain Republican seats in the midterm elections of 1858. A newspaper announcement in May showed the association’s strategy. First, it needed Republicans around the country to send good Republican cash—“the freest offering of a free people in the Free States.” Then, it would produce and disseminate mass mailings. A newspaper announcement a few months later revealed the fruits of its labor: an extensive list of speeches and tracts for sale, ranging in price from 75 cents to $1.75 per hundred copies. With a handful of exceptions, every publication was about Kansas.117
By spreading around his name in the press as president, French spread news of his new party loyalties. In June, the Albany Evening Journal took notice. “Major B. B. French, an old line democratic politician of New Hampshire, for many years an office-holder at Washington, has become president of the National Republican Association in the capital, which is not agreeable to his old friends.”118 Battle lines were being drawn.
In Congress, that was no mere metaphor. Thinking back to this period after the Civil War, veterans of the Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Congresses remembered the years between 1857 and 1861 as a time of fierce sectional violence on the floor. These were the years that drove Senators Benjamin Wade (R-OH), Simon Cameron (R-PA), and Zachariah Chandler (R-MI) to create their pact to “fight to the coffin” regardless of the consequences. The “gross personal abuse” inflicted by their slave-state colleagues was insulting their manhood and depriving their constituents of their representative rights. Yet, because of Northern anti-dueling sentiment, Northern congressmen held back and were treated like cowards. “I feel it frequently,” Wade admitted.119
The abuse that produced their pact probably took place during a Senate debate over Kansas’s constitution. In 1855, free-state advocates had produced an antislavery constitution in Topeka; two years later, slaveowners drafted a competing proslavery constitution in Lecompton, the state’s capital. After a messy and corrupted vote on the two constitutions, Kansans had sent both documents to Washington for congressional approval. During an all-night session on March 15, 1858, hostilities peaked. Eager to push through the Lecompton constitution, Robert Toombs (D-GA) threatened to “crush” the Republican Party, provoking an outburst of Republican outrage.120
As a result, Republican nerves were already on edge when later that evening Cameron accused James Green (D-MO) of dictating terms to the Republicans; in the course of the argument that followed, each man threw the lie at the other, Cameron took responsibility for his words, and Green hinted at a duel challenge.121 Cameron’s subsequent consultation with Wade and Chandler led to their decision to put an end to such taunts by challenging future offenders to duels. There seemed to be no other way to counter the “deep humiliation” of the “people of the Free States,” and to some degree, their ploy worked. Their willingness to fight checked some abuse. As they later concluded, risking their reputations, their careers, and perhaps even their lives was the price of fighting slavery in Congress.122
For Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA), these years marked the start of armed sectional combat in the House. Discussing the imminent return of Southerners to Congress after the Civil War a decade later, he urged colleagues not to be hasty. The new congressmen seated around him had no memory of Congress as a “camp of armed men.” They hadn’t seen Robert Toombs and his “gang” render the halls of Congress “a hell of legislation” by rushing with knives and guns “as one yelling body” at Northerners who dared to denounce slavery. Bring the Southerners back, but “first rearm yourself,” Stevens counseled, and “wait until I am gone.”123
Stevens was speaking for effect, but he was very specific about the first instance of full-fledged sectional combat on the floor: the February 6, 1858, House melee caused by a clash between the radical Galusha Grow (R-PA) and the equally radical Lawrence Keitt (D-SC), the first time that a group of Northerners confronted a group of Southerners “force against force.”124 The “battle-royal in the House … was the first sectional fight ever had on the floor,” wrote former congressman and future vice president of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens, noting that although no blood was shed, there were bad feelings in abundance.125 The press agreed. “This is the most important and significant of all the fights that ever occurred in Congress,” d
eclared the Charleston Mercury. It was “a sectional and not a personal quarrel. It was North and South—not Grow and Keitt.” Unlike previous fights, “members fought in battalions. They did not go into a corner or a lobby to fight, or entangle themselves as heretofore, between chairs and desks. They took an ample area—the open space before the Speaker’s chair.”126
The reasons for this change were many. Sectional passions were already flaring because of the Supreme Court’s landmark Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled that enslaved people and their descendants could not be American citizens, and that the federal government could not ban slavery in western territories. Endorsing the spread of slavery and suggesting that the Court was a tool of the Slave Power, it was deeply felt by Northerners.127
Lawrence M. Keitt, 1859 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Galusha A. Grow, 1859 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
It didn’t help matters that the fight took place in the middle of an overnight session, virtually a guarantee of violence. The topic of debate—Kansas’s proslavery Lecompton constitution—was also sure to enflame tempers and push people to extremes. Democrats made matters worse by delaying a vote because some Southerners were missing in action and every vote counted. Liquor also played a role, as it almost inevitably did during evening sessions; many of those missing Southerners, boozing at bars, were so dead drunk when dragged into the House that they were kept out of the chamber until it was their turn to vote.128
The two men at the heart of the fight were also lightning rods of conflict, though for different reasons; the combative Grow was a leading House Republican with a cut-and-thrust style of debate and strong antislavery views, and Keitt was an almost comically hot-tempered fire-eater who was ever and always defending Southern honor.129 Their confrontation was the spark that set the congressional tinderbox aflame.
Not surprisingly, Keitt set things off. At about two o’clock in the morning, Grow was conferring with a Pennsylvania Democrat on the Democratic side of the House. As Grow headed back to his seat, someone asked to submit a motion out of order, and Grow objected. Keitt, who by some accounts was dozing and by many accounts was tipsy, was alert enough to yell that Grow should object on his own side of the House. Grow replied that it was a free hall and he could stand where he pleased, at which Keitt (supposedly muttering, “We’ll see about that”) stalked up to him and demanded to know what Grow meant, perhaps assuming that talk of a “free hall” was a backhanded slap at Southerners, or perhaps—knowing Keitt—assuming nothing at all; it didn’t take much to set him off. When Grow repeated his words, Keitt grabbed Grow’s throat, vowing to teach the “black republican puppy” a lesson. Knocking Keitt’s arm away, Grow declared that he refused to be bullied by a slave driver cracking his whip. Keitt responded by grabbing Grow’s throat again, at which Grow slugged him hard enough to knock him flat. And here the trouble began.
A group of Southerners immediately rushed over, some to aid Keitt, some to attack Grow, and some to calm things down, though the latter group ultimately got swept up in the scrimmage. Seeing a pack of Southerners descend on Grow, Republicans rallied to his aid, streaming across the chamber from their side of the hall, jumping on desks and chairs in their haste to save a brother Republican, bringing a rush of Southerners in their wake. The end result was a free fight in the open space in front of the Speaker’s platform featuring roughly thirty sweaty, disheveled, mostly middle-aged congressmen in a no-holds-barred brawl, North against South.
A comical view of the Keitt-Grow rumble (Barksdale’s toupee is on the ground) (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)
Press accounts of the fight vary, but they generally agree that John “Bowie Knife” Potter (R-WI) and the fighting Washburn brothers—Cadwallader (R-WI), Israel (R-ME), and Elihu (R-IL)—stood out in the rumble, with the barrel-chested Potter jogging straight into the scrum, throwing punches as he tried to reach Grow.130 At one point, he slugged William Barksdale (D-MS), who mistakenly reeled around and socked Elihu Washburne in return. (Elihu liked his Washburn with an e.) Potter responded by grabbing Barksdale by the hair to punch him in the face, but to his utter astonishment, Barksdale’s hair came off; he wore a toupee. Meanwhile, John Covode (R-PA) had raised a spittoon above his head and was looking for a target, while the ashen-faced Speaker pounded his gavel for all it was worth and ordered the sergeant at arms to grab the mace and do something. Within a few minutes, people had settled back in their seats—thanks, in part, to the hilarity of Barksdale’s flipped wig—and the House went back to arguing until its adjournment at 6:30 a.m. With the exception of a few black eyes and some cuts and scrapes, most of the combatants were none the worse for wear; a few men had reached for weapons, but none used them. (The Globe summed up the episode as a “violent personal altercation” between Keitt and Grow in which “several members seemed to participate.”)131
The most notable aspect of the fight was the mass rescue by Republicans, who had rushed over to Grow with fists flying because they thought that Southerners were staging a group assault. This was Slave Power thinking; it was knee-jerk distrust of Southerners as brutal, domineering, determined to cow Northerners, and on the attack. This distrust was no back-of-the-mind matter of speculation. It was immediate; Republicans jumped into action in seconds. They also felt that at long last, they had taught Southerners a lesson. As Grow put it, Southerners had long been “under the delusion that Northern men would not fight.” By running “from one side of the Chamber to the other … with fists clenched and arms flying,” Republicans had taught Southerners that “Northern men will fight in a just cause.”132 In essence, Republicans were a different kind of Northerner. French’s friend Daniel Clark (R-NH), boarding with French during this Congress, declared this to Robert Toombs when Toombs threatened to crush the Republican Party. He wouldn’t have an easy time of it, Clark warned. “A different class of men now came from the North … They are sent not to bow down, but to stand up.”133
The Republican press echoed Grow, glorying in the show of strength and savoring the vicarious pleasure of slugging Southern blowhards. The Boston Traveler listed a string of “comforting reflections” about Northern “pluck.” Several newspapers gleefully noted that Reuben Davis (D-MS), who had recently given a rabid speech about conquering the North, got a black eye from Potter. (Davis claimed to have tripped over a chair.)134 Best of all was the knockdown of the swaggering Keitt. “The great State of South Carolina (in the person of her valorous (!) representative, Mr. Keitt,) lies kicking in the dust,” gloated Frederick Douglass’ Paper, particularly relishing the fact that Grow, a representative of David Wilmot’s district, had floored a man who helped Brooks cane Sumner.135 In this rematch of the caning, the North had won. Many papers thought that after years of bullying Northerners, Southerners had finally learned a lesson. They had been “beaten with their own weapons, in their own way, and on their own ground.”136 “The South is cowed,” claimed a New York Times letter-writer. “I know what I say—COWED.”137 (Hard-pressed for a comeback, the Democratic New York Day Book said that Keitt made a manly apology.)138
Judging from the Southern press, the South wasn’t cowed. It was angry and defensive. Southern newspapers aimed most of their venom at the “Black Republican” press, so brutal in its accusations that it “cannot fail to be imitated in Congress.”139 The Northern press was full of lies, charged Southern papers. Grow, not Keitt, had started the fight. Grow, not Keitt, was insolent. Grow, not Keitt, had violated rules of order by not objecting from his seat. Nor was this fight anything special; such tussles happened all the time.140 Equally grating, Northern papers were full of “vulgar boasting.”141 Northerners were entirely too focused on “the mere powers of the pugilism” and Grow’s “chance-blow,” charged the Virginia Sentinel. They didn’t understand that honor wasn’t a matter of muscle.
In truth, the Sentinel cared quite a bit about that blow, as did the many Southern newspapers that went out of their way to prove that Grow mo
st assuredly had not punched Keitt, who had tripped over a desk. Or stubbed his toe. Or been thrown off his feet when pulled away from Grow, who stood by, paralyzed with fear.142 The Charleston Mercury went so far as to admit that Grow might have tried to hit Keitt, but he certainly never touched him. A felling blow from a “Black Republican” was not easily swallowed in the South.
This desperate need to prove that Keitt hadn’t been punched spawned a cottage industry in jokes, puns, and poetry at Keitt’s expense, none of it from the South, which wasn’t laughing. Nor was Keitt, who tried to save face, first by claiming that he didn’t know if he’d been struck, then by denying it.143 The British were particularly amused at both the fuss and the rough-and-tumble of American politics. One humorist published a poem titled “How Mr. Keitt of South Carolina Stubbed His Toe.”144 Punch magazine outdid itself with an epic poem in the style of Homer’s Iliad.145
Sing, O goddess, the wrath, the untamable dander of KEITT—
KEITT of South Carolina, the clear grit, the tall, the undaunted—
Him that hath wopped his own niggers till Northerners all unto KEITT
Seem but as niggers to wop, and hills of the smallest potatoes.
The description of Keitt’s fall to glory is classic:
Prone like a log sank KEITT, his dollars rattled about him.
Forth sprang his friends o’er the body; first, BARKSDALE, waving-wig-wearer,
CRAIGE and MACQUEEN and DAVIS, the ra’al hoss of wild Mississippi;
Fiercely they gathered round GROW, catawampously up as to chaw him.
The Field of Blood Page 28
