Even more alarming were the actions of Southerners off the floor. In December, Governor William Gist of South Carolina told his state’s congressional delegation that if a Republican was elected Speaker he should be ejected by force if necessary, and if it came to that, he would send armed forces to Washington. He was prepared “to wade in blood rather than submit to inequality & degradation.”176 But a governor couldn’t cross this line, Gist explained. The ultimate decision to bloody the House would have to come from congressmen.
Gist’s letter helps to explain Keitt’s actions during the speakership contest as witnessed by his wife, Susanna. In December, she wrote to her brother in a panic. Her husband, Thomas Clingman (W-NC), Roger Pryor (D-VA), and Virginian Ambrose Dudley Mann had just left her parlor—all of them armed—ranting about a Black Republican Speaker and swearing to “fight to the knife there on the floor of Congress. And either take possession of the Capitol or fall.” And they weren’t alone. “Bowie knives and revolvers are the companions of every Southern Member,” Susanna Keitt fretted, and Governor Wise was said to have 10,000 men armed and ready to march on Washington at the first sign of trouble. The tension was unbearable. “I am nervous and excited so I can hardly keep my seat,” she confessed. “Heaven help us all.”177
Republicans weren’t sitting silent during the crisis.178 They swore up and down that they had no desire to invade or harm the South; a few even withdrew their endorsement of Helper’s book. They had endorsed it only after being told that he would cut the most objectionable passages, which—clearly—he hadn’t done.179 But Southerners didn’t believe them, just as Northerners refused to believe Southern threats of disunion. By 1859, there was little faith between North and South, and for some men of extreme feelings on both sides, little liking.
Even so, in the end nothing happened, even when freshman William Pennington (R-NJ) won the speakership on February 1. A conservative Whig who had only recently become a Republican, Pennington became Speaker during his first term because he was moderate on slavery, opposing the Lecompton constitution and slavery extension but upholding the Fugitive Slave Act as the law of the land, much like French.180 The immediate crisis of the moment had passed, though the Speakership vote set the tone for the session: every Northerner in the House voted for Pennington, and every Southerner but one—Henry Winter Davis (A-MD)—voted against him. A few weeks later, when the American flag in the House chamber was accidentally hoisted upside down—or “Union down,” as French put it—he took it as an omen.181
For the next few months, Congress rumbled along, erupting into violent outbreaks every few weeks, sometimes more often. All told, there were more than a dozen fights in the Thirty-sixth Congress as well as many near misses. Prominent among these was a near duel between Roger Pryor (D-VA) and John “Bowie Knife” Potter (R-WI), the clash that earned Potter his nickname.182 Pryor was a bully of the first order, involving himself in at least five confrontations that session.183 The Maine native Potter was likewise “a most uncomfortable antagonist to run against in a conflict,” noted a friend.184 The two came head-to-head in the wake of a near melee sparked by Owen Lovejoy (R-IL), brother of the antislavery newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy, who had been murdered by proslavery forces in 1837. When Lovejoy, warming to his subject (“The Barbarism of Slavery”), strayed too close to the Democratic side of the House, waving his fists, Democrats leaped to their feet, hurling insults, and streamed toward Lovejoy, bringing a wave of Republicans in their wake. When Pryor threatened to silence Lovejoy, Potter insisted that Republicans would be heard, “let the consequences be what they may.” This was a virtual invitation to fight, and so Pryor took it, initiating formal duel negotiations.
Potter immediately consulted the fighting Republicans Cadwallader and Israel Washburn, Galusha Grow, Zachariah Chandler, and Ben Wade. Determined to show the South that they “were not to be bullied any longer,” Potter then accepted Pryor’s challenge and chose bowie knives as weapons. When Pryor refused to fight with such “vulgar” weapons, Republicans rejoiced, celebrating Potter’s fighting-man gumption. At the Republican national convention one month later, Potter was awarded a seven-foot-long “monster Bowie knife” inscribed with the words “Will Always Meet a Pryor Engagement.”185 Potter’s second, Frederick Lander, who offered to duel Pryor with pistols in Potter’s place, was likewise celebrated. When the surprised Lander asked a gathered crowd why they were honoring him, someone yelled back, “Because you’ve got pluck!”186 Democrats who claimed that Potter’s posturing was aimed at upcoming elections weren’t far from the truth; he was easily reelected that fall, with his fighting-man status front and center.187
Fighting man Galusha Grow (R-PA) was also challenged to a duel during this Congress—and reelected. During an argument in the House, Grow accused Lawrence O’Bryan Branch (D-NC) of violating the “gentlemanly courtesies” of deliberative bodies. Branch took offense and sent Grow a letter of inquiry regarding a duel. Refusing to accept a challenge, Grow made himself available for a street fight, vowing to prove to Southern men that Northern men would fight. But for once, the anti-dueling law worked. Branch was arrested, and closed the matter by publishing their correspondence in the press.188 (Vanity Fair, resorting to the tried-and-true cliché about the fighting Irish, summed up the incident as a fight between Galellshy A. Grow and O’Blarney J. Branch.)189
North and South, fighting men were in the limelight. Although the vast majority of congressmen hoped to avoid conflict, in the charged atmosphere, it didn’t take much to spark it. French experienced the temper of the times firsthand in May 1860 when the Washington Republican Association celebrated the nomination of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin for the 1860 Republican presidential ticket. As president of the association, French was the master of ceremonies. Lincoln wasn’t in Washington, but Hamlin was, so on the evening of May 19, a crowd of about two hundred Republicans marched to Hamlin’s lodgings as the Marine Band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hail to the Chief.” After an introduction by French, Hamlin thanked the party and praised Lincoln in a brief speech. By this time, the crowd had at least doubled; French thought that there were thousands of people present “of all sorts of politics.” The procession next moved to the lodgings of Senator Lyman Trumbull (R-IL). But during Trumbull’s speech, “uneasy spirits,” as French called them, began to heckle, cheering for Stephen Douglas and asking where John Brown was. Elihu Washburne (R-IL) had just begun to speak when a swarm of people (“drunken rowdies,” French thought) descended on the crowd throwing rocks, starting a general stampede with the band leading the way. Enough people stood their ground for Washburne to finish his speech, and after a rousing three cheers, everyone went home.190 But a point had been made; the Republican Party’s ratification meeting nine days later had police protection.191 Washington was a Southern city, and Republicans had to take care.
This was particularly true of the most aggressive Republicans, men such as Charles Sumner, who returned to the Senate in December 1859, a little more than three years after his caning. On June 4, 1860, he showed just how aggressive he was by delivering a savage four-hour antislavery speech. Titled “The Barbarism of Slavery”—like Owen Lovejoy’s speech—it fulfilled the promise of its title, arguing with carefully documented statistics as well as stunningly powerful rhetoric that slavery had made the South an inferior civilization: “Barbarous in origin; barbarous in its law; barbarous in all its pretensions; barbarous in the instruments it employs; barbarous in consequences; barbarous in spirit; barbarous wherever it shows itself, Slavery must breed Barbarians.”
For Sumner’s Southern colleagues, one portion of his speech hit particularly close to home: the section on “Slave-masters in Congressional history.” Beginning with Henry Wise’s and Bailie Peyton’s near-shooting of Reuben Whitney in a committee-room in 1837, Sumner marched his listeners through a congressional chamber of horrors, quoting Southern threats from the Globe, often with volume, page, and date citations. He talked of John
Dawson of throat-cutting fame; of John Quincy Adams’s years of abuse; of Joshua Giddings’s sufferings and censure; of Henry Foote’s threat to hang John Parker Hale, and Foote’s later attack on Thomas Hart Benton, complete with its dramatic denouement in the Senate. Nor did he stop there. He read some of the insults thrown at Owen Lovejoy two months past. He said nothing about his own attack, but of course, he didn’t have to. Such examples could be “multiplied indefinitely,” he concluded. Every one of them, “every appeal, whether to the Duel, the bludgeon, or the revolver—every menace of personal violence, and every outrage of language, besides disclosing a hideous Barbarism, also discloses the fevered nervousness of a cause already humbled in debate.”192 By blasting slaveholders as barbarians, Sumner put into words what antislavery toreadors had been implying for decades. When he concluded, James Chestnut (D-SC) rose to explain why Southerners had quietly submitted to such abuse: after watching Sumner whine and cringe his cowardly way through Europe, they didn’t want to send him “howling through the world” again in martyrdom. Sumner responded by promising to include Chestnut’s words in an appendix in the printed edition of his speech “as an additional illustration” of slaveholder barbarism, and he kept his word.193
Sumner’s words were explosively powerful, so powerful that French worried about how his son Frank would respond. Writing to his wife in New Hampshire, where his family was visiting, French asked her to tell Frank that the speech was a personal matter, not a matter of party. The speech was “terribly, vindictively, savagely severe,” thought French, “a mortal tongue stab at the South, for every blow Brooks gave.” The Republican Party didn’t endorse its severity, he noted, but it admitted its truth and understood its personal logic for Sumner: “Heaven avenged him first and now he has avenged himself.”194
Two days later, French met his fellow Republican Association member Lewis Clephane and some strangers on the street, clearly upset about something. One of the strangers, a visitor from Kansas, asked French if he could borrow a gun. When French asked why, Clephane took him aside and explained what had happened the night before: some Southerners had tried to assassinate Sumner, forcing their way into his room, demanding to speak to him privately, and running off when refused. Clephane had been there when it happened and had stayed by Sumner’s side until 2:00 in the morning, when Sumner finally went to bed. Because Sumner was a non-combatant on principle, he refused to wear a gun, Clephane explained. So the men who French had just encountered on the street had decided to act as bodyguards, accompanying Sumner wherever he went, sometimes staying by his side, sometimes hanging back and watching for trouble. French loaned them a revolver, hoping that if someone attacked Sumner, it would fire true.195
French’s chance encounter bothered him for hours, upsetting him, angering him, even frightening him. By the afternoon, he was so disturbed that he decided to arm himself and headed straight downtown to buy a small pistol that he could carry in his pocket every day. Explaining his decision to his wife, French said that he was arming himself in self-defense, “for if we are to be bullied for our republican principles, I think we ought to be prepared to defend ourselves.”196 French was preparing for the possibility of armed conflict with Southerners on the streets of Washington.
It was a telling decision, yet in explaining it, French didn’t act as though he’d crossed a line. In his letter, a gun was one of several purchases he made that day. He also bought two pairs of underwear. He had a pair on even as he wrote, and he declared them very comfortable. The purchase of underwear and the purchase of a gun: the routine dailiness of French’s decision is striking. Although he hadn’t worn arms for protection before, he didn’t feel like he was going to extremes. It was Southerners who had him worried. French was wearing a gun in case they crossed a line.
This was the logic of many weapon-wearing congressmen in 1860. They didn’t arm themselves every morning and head off for the Capitol hoping to gun people down. They were defending themselves against an unpredictable foe. That’s how Senator James Henry Hammond (D-SC) explained his decision to arm himself in April 1860 after the “Lovejoy explosion” had blown over. Convinced that almost every member of both houses was armed, and seeing even the oldest and most conservative senators with revolvers, Hammond “most reluctantly” got one for himself and kept it fully loaded in his Senate desk. “I can’t carry it,” he admitted to a friend. Twice in his life he had worn a pistol, and both times he’d gotten so unnerved that he’d put it aside. But now he had a loaded pistol in his desk because there was no telling what Republicans might say or do. They had the power to provoke a fight whose bloodiness would “shock the world and dissolve the government,” he thought. If that happened, as much as he hoped to avert it, he would stand by his fellow Southerners to the end. Hammond was armed “as a matter of duty to my section,” ready to fight and die with his countrymen on the Senate floor. And he wasn’t alone.197
John Haskin (R-NY) had a similar reason for wearing a gun, which became national news during the speakership debate in January 1860. During an angry exchange over John Clark’s (D-MO) anti-Helper resolution, Haskin accused his fellow New Yorker Horace Clark—an Anti-Lecompton Democrat—of both supporting and opposing slavery in Kansas, vowing to reveal to the world “in what a circus-riding aspect that colleague stands.” (This is doubtless what inspired Vanity Fair’s “Great National Circus.”) Haskin’s remark caused an uproar during which he pulled a gun on Horace Clark. In the crowding, pushing, and shoving that followed, Haskin’s gun went clattering to the floor, though not before Laurence Keitt, again playing against type, said that personal fights should be taken outside. (In its account, the Globe mentions only “confusion” and “crowding.”)
After some strategic mace-wielding by the sergeant at arms, the House went back to work—or at least, it tried to. There was some joking (Thomas Davidson [D-LA] said that “if these things are to continue in the future, I must bring a double-barreled shot-gun into the House”) and some scolding, with no one citing names or details, until Sherrard Clemens (D-VA) said that he had seen Haskin pull his gun on Clark, and felt that the New Yorker owed his constituents an explanation. (Clemens’s statement that he was shocked—shocked—to see a weapon in the House didn’t get any laughter, but it should have.) The House immediately silenced Clemens with roars of order and objections; such things were not to be mentioned on the floor, and any such discussion was bound to make matters worse.
But a few minutes later, Haskin made a personal explanation. Never in his life had he been armed before coming to Washington, he said. Now he wore a gun because he feared being attacked; in this session and the session before, a number of Northern congressmen had been assaulted, and he had to protect himself. Of course, he would never use his pistol in the House, he insisted—unless he was “unjustly assaulted and had to do it in my own self-defense.”198 Like Hammond and French, Haskin was protecting himself against a desperate and unpredictable foe: his fellow congressmen. And like Hammond, he was fully prepared to use his gun in the halls of Congress, however much he hoped he wouldn’t have to. So was “Bowie Knife” Potter. As he explained to a friend as he strapped on a pistol and a knife before heading to the House, there was no telling what would happen, particularly if Southerners in the galleries took action.199
And so did the United States Congress become an armed camp, just as Thaddeus Stevens said (though Vanity Fair urged congressmen to follow Haskin’s example and drop their weapons).200 Also, as Stevens said, at least a few dwellers in that camp were prepared to gun people down. A few days after the Lovejoy scuffle, Martin Crawford (D-GA) admitted that in the midst of the melee, he had cocked his revolver in his pocket and taken a position “in the midst of the mob,” fully prepared to fight and die.201 “We have the men of sufficient nerve to bring this matter to a bloody issue” with armed combat in the House, he assured former congressman Alexander Stephens (D-GA). The only thing holding them back was fear of public opinion back home. Launching a shootout in the
Capitol required a respected champion who could justify the bloodshed and “inaugurate the movement.” Too bad Henry Wise was no longer in Congress, Crawford thought. Without such a man, he feared “that the people would be disgusted and we should be disgraced.”202 Here was a grand irony. After years of intimidating Northerners with threats and duel challenges, knowing full well that Northern public opinion kept them from fighting back, Southerners now faced the same dilemma. Events in Congress were driving them beyond where their constituents might go.
Men such as Miles, Keitt, Crawford, Pryor, and Clingman were ready for open combat—in Keitt’s case, regardless of what his people thought.203 Yet even such extremists framed their violence as defensive. Governor Gist of South Carolina was fully prepared for “war to begin at Washington,” but he wanted it to “begin in sudden heat & with good provocation, rather than a deliberate determination to perform an act of violence which might prejudice us in the eyes of the world.”204
In a sense, America was backing its way into civil warfare. The fire-eating rhetoric, the threats and dares, the talk of bloodying the Capitol, the pervasive guns and knives, and now the group fights on the floor: they were clear signs of a nation being torn in two. They were also blunt reminders of a lack of faith in the institution of Congress, even on the part of congressmen; a body of armed legislators is a body of men with no confidence in the power or practices of their own institution. The implications of this loss of faith were profound. If the nation’s representative body couldn’t function, could the nation long survive? Where else but in Congress could the interests of America’s many regions and constituencies be addressed through debate and compromise? As Illinois Republican E. W. Hazard wrote shortly after Sumner’s caning, “If we can no longer look to Congress … what remains to us but a resort to the means given us by the God of nature for self-defence?”205
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