Self-defense: Hazard’s wording is noteworthy. In truth, most congressmen didn’t want to dissolve the Union; they were taking up arms in defense of their people, their state, their section, and themselves. Republicans urged their congressmen to fight—in self-defense. Southerners would start a war in Washington—in self-defense. Conspiracy theories encouraged this kind of magical thinking. If there really was a brewing plot to subjugate the North or South, if the security of a people and the stability of their society were under attack, then any and all extreme measures were justifiable as self-defense.206 Indeed, the situation demanded such measures. Yet even now, there wasn’t total mayhem in Congress. People weren’t itching to fight. They were afraid that they might have to.
This ethos of “aggressive defensiveness” pervaded the presidential election of 1860.207 Many Northerners campaigned on that idea, citing the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the battle over the proslavery Lecompton constitution, and the Dred Scott ruling as a holy trinity of Southern aggression that proved their intentions to swallow up the Union and had to be repulsed. Southerners, in turn, told horror stories about the Republican Party infiltrating the South and destroying it from within. Former representative William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama told such tales in a rip-roaring speech before hundreds in New Orleans. With Lincoln in power, Southern federal officers were bound to be Republicans, he argued. As a result, in the South, “there will be free speech, as they call it, everywhere for the propagation of Abolition opinions. There will be a free press, as they call it, for the circulation of Abolition documents.” And once there were more free states in the Union—which there most assuredly would be, with Republicans in power—their antislavery regime would abolish slavery throughout the Union, their unwavering goal. To Laurence Keitt, the future was clear: slave insurrections, slaveholders poisoned, and plantations put to the torch.208 His wife, Susanna, was of like mind. “Submission to Lincoln” meant “sectional disgrace, sectional subjugation, poverty, exile and ruined homesteads.”209
For North and South alike, the election of 1860 seemed like a mandate on the future of slavery, and the outcome of that mandate was clear. Not only was Lincoln elected president, but Republicans took both houses of Congress, taking 49.1 percent of the House and 55.5 percent of the Senate. At the opening of the next session of Congress in December, the election’s emotional impact was apparent. Senator Albert Gallatin Brown (D-MS) condemned the “triumph of principles, to submit to which would be the deepest degradation that a free people ever submitted to.”210 Thomas Clingman (D-NC)—who had threatened to bloody the Capitol in 1850, and was now a senator—swore that the outcome would be secession. Senator Alfred Iverson, Sr. (D-GA), saw the first signs of secession even as he spoke. Seated before him were “two hostile bodies,” he told Republicans. “You sit upon your side, silent and gloomy; and we sit upon ours with knit brows and portentous scowls. Yesterday, I observed that there was not a solitary man on that side of the Chamber came over here even to extend the civilities and courtesies of life; nor did any of us go over there.”211
Distrust, defensiveness, and degradation. Years of conflict had brought both Congress and the nation to this point. Given that long history, what came next? After decades of defending the South’s rights, honor, and interests with their words, deeds, and fists, and years of raging against Northern degradation, could Southerners succumb to being governed by the enemy? Could Southern congressmen or their constituents stomach such disgrace? For many Southerners, the answer was no.
Congressional violence didn’t cause this sectional standoff, but it intensified it. By performing sectional warfare in the halls of Congress during a crisis of the Union, congressmen exposed the emotional power of sectional degradation to a watchful national audience, giving human form to the fraying of national bonds. In the process, they stoked the flames of disunion.
That same long history of bullying and violence encouraged Northerners to downplay Southern threats of secession, even as late as 1860. French was typical of many in suspecting that they were a mere opening gambit—a ploy for Southerners to get their way. Threats had long served slaveholders well. Perhaps this was more of the same. “They will all come to their senses by & by,” he thought.212 Others agreed. “Maryland and Virginia have no idea of breaking up the Union,” wrote the New-York Tribune, “but they would both dearly like to bully the North into a compromise.”213 Here is a rich irony. Southerners themselves had taught Northerners to dismiss Southern disunion threats as crying wolf.214
But Southerners stayed true to their word. Between December 20, 1860, and June 1861, the fact of disunion was performed in human form in the House and Senate. As one Southern legislature after another resolved their state out of the Union, Southern congressmen rose to their feet one by one and bade farewell to the Union and their colleagues, some of them in tears.215 When three state delegations withdrew in one day, Senator James Mason (D-VA) stated the obvious in terms so bald that they silenced the chamber. Pointing to the now empty seats surrounding him, he declared: “The Union was now dissolved.” A reporter for The New York Herald witnessed the impact: with those five words, the “momentous events now daily occurring—the dissolution of the Union, the breaking up of the government, and the awful imminence of civil war” seemed unavoidably at hand.216
French was as stunned as any, but he remained convinced that soon enough, the seceded states would be in ruins, begging to return. If not, so much the better. The North would thrive without them. In the meantime, he wished those states well, but he wished them gone.217
Yet even as he minimized the crisis, French was preparing for disaster. On the home front, in the midst of the political chaos, his wife, Bess, took ill. After months of failing health, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy, leaving her weak and languid.218 Suddenly, French faced the terrifying possibility of losing his life’s love after thirty-five years of marriage.
Matters on the political front were also rocky. In January 1861, French heard rumors that “some misguided scoundrels” intended to prevent Lincoln’s inauguration “by force,” perhaps by assassination. Though he declared in his diary that he couldn’t believe it, he held himself ready “at a minute’s warning” to repel an attack—particularly after hearing whispers about a plot in Baltimore.219 French breathed a huge sigh of relief when Lincoln arrived in Washington on February 23 and was whisked away to safety at Willard’s Hotel.220 Three days later, when Lincoln visited the House and Senate, French was watching. Fellow Republicans crowded around the president-elect, shaking his hand with more enthusiasm than French had ever seen. Democrats were less enthusiastic, but cordial. A week later, on March 4, Lincoln’s inauguration went off without a hitch, with Marshal-in-Chief French presiding.221
The Southern violence feared by French took another month to surface. Although South Carolina had been the first state to leave the Union in December 1860, Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor was still in Union hands four months later, though in dire need of supplies. On April 12, 1861, knowing that supply ships were on their way, Confederate troops took action. At 4:30 in the morning, they launched a cannonade against the fort that continued for thirty-four hours. The sound and fury were dramatic; people in Charleston sat on their roofs and watched. Two days later, on April 14, Fort Sumter was surrendered and evacuated. Civil war had begun.
Hearing the news, French made one final, desperate attempt to stay the crisis. As a Mason, he considered it his “solemn duty” to do everything in his power to prevent civil warfare, and as Grand Master of the Knights Templar of the United States, he actually possessed some power. So on April 16, he put pen to paper in defense of the Union, as he had so many times before, addressing a circular to “all True and Patriotic Templars,” pleading with them to use their influence to fend off civil war.222 There were tens of thousands of Templars in America, he argued; if every one did his part within his circle to encourage peace, they might just have an influence. If ever there was a moment t
o wield the power of Masonic brotherhood, that moment was now. French wasn’t asking people to surrender their principles, he assured his readers; he was asking them to cast politics aside. With the Union in the balance, French was trying to get the Masons to do what Congress seemed unable to do: prove that national bonds of sentiment crossed sectional lines.
Less than two weeks later, French received a response from E. H. Gill, Grand Commander of Virginia. Why was French preaching peace and brotherhood to Virginians? Gill asked. Southerners had already tried every honorable means of avoiding war, casting aside politics and working for peace. And yet the North had trampled the South’s constitutional rights and was now “about to invade their soil, their homes and their fire-sides.” Northerners were the problem. Southerners were only acting in self-defense. The “God of Battles” would sustain Virginians in their fight against “this Cain-like and marauding attack of the Vandals of the North,” Gill felt sure. He and his fellow Virginians were only too happy to help Northerners into their graves. And with that, Gill declared that the Grand Encampment of Knights Templar of the State of Virginia was no longer under the jurisdiction of the Grand Encampment of the United States. Virginia had seceded from the Masonic union. As Grand Master, French was suffering a secession crisis of his own.223
A few weeks later, French got a letter from a commander in western Virginia saying that his commandery refused to secede. Deeply moved, French replied with grateful thanks. Gill’s letter had astonished him, he admitted. Gill seemed to have gone out of his way to stab at French’s feelings. If he had known when and where French wrote his circular, Gill might well have held his tongue, French thought; French had written it at midnight at Bess’s sickbed, hoping that this one last desperate effort might slow, if not stop, the nation’s march toward civil war. But Gill hadn’t heard French’s heartfelt words of brotherhood. Gill didn’t seem to have heard French at all. Unwilling to respond in anger and knowing that words of peace would fall on deaf ears, French left Gill’s letter unanswered.224
For French, this was a turning point; the nation’s crisis of communication had come to a head. Viewed through the distorting haze of conspiracy thinking, even a call for peace became a call for war. The pull of that thinking was so powerful that even French couldn’t escape it. Even as he wrote his circular, grasping at straws for the sake of the Union, he was ranting about “Southern hotspurs” and invoking the “God of Battles” in his diary. “The United States is no longer to be triumphed over as if it were a coward and dared not protect himself!,” he ranted, an eerie echo of his praise for Northern fighters in years past, now a rallying cry for the nation.225 Given a choice between fighting and submitting to a domineering South, French wanted to fight.
And so French watched Virginia secede from the Masonic union, much as he had watched Southern states leave the national Union, one by one. Beginning the eighth volume of his diary on January 1, 1861, he put pen to paper with a sense of foreboding. “I commence this Journal at what still continues to be the seat of Government of ‘The United States of America,’” he wrote, envisioning a future when that might not be true. Twenty-seven years ago as a newcomer to Washington, French had gazed at the Capitol and wondered if it would “always be the capitol of my happy country.” He had never stopped wondering. Now the fight to answer that question was at hand, and French welcomed that fight. After a lifetime of compromising, politicking, singing, rhyming, denying, dodging, and ultimately fighting to save the Union, French was ready to let the Union slide.
EPILOGUE
“I WITNESSED IT ALL”
French’s life during the secession crisis echoed the state of the nation. For months, his diary entries were divided between his fears for the Union and his fears for his wife, and all of his worst fears came true. Between December 1860 and June 1861, eleven states left the Union. And on May 6, 1861, Bess died. Although friends flocked to his side that day, he spent most of its long, lingering hours by her side or with his diary. He wrote in it more than once that afternoon, concluding his last entry with a moan: “Oh how lonely—lonely—lonely.”1
His workday offered no escape. Appointed clerk of the House Committee of Claims in 1860, French was charged with evaluating 487 claims for damages by citizens of Kansas. For two months, he reviewed a veritable litany of destruction: homes and stores plundered and burned, crops destroyed, horses stolen. Pressman that he was, he took special note of the destruction of the Lawrence Herald of Freedom; witnesses described a band of roughly seventy armed men riding from the scene waving bayoneted books above their heads as war trophies. He was particularly generous to the free-state governor Charles Robinson, who claimed to have lost a six-hundred-page manuscript history of California when his house burned down. French granted Robinson damages for his lost work as well as his home, assigning him almost $24,000 out of a grand total of roughly $450,000.2
The one ray of hope in French’s diary throughout this period was Abraham Lincoln. French liked the unassuming president virtually from the moment that he met him. When Lincoln—drafting a letter in a room full of visitors—asked aloud how to spell the word missile, French was charmed. “Is there another man in this whole union who, being President, would have done that? It shows his perfect honesty and simplicity, & that he is truly a great man.”3 The liking seems to have gone both ways. Lincoln reappointed French commissioner of public buildings in September 1861, a position that ensured French close and frequent contact with the president, particularly given the city’s wartime disruptions.4
Benjamin Brown French, ca. 1855–65. The statue of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, is a not-so-subtle reference to French’s name. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
French’s relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln was more complex; he admired her independence but as commissioner he had to reckon with it. One of his duties was to present visitors to her at White House receptions, and he was both bemused and put off by her “Queenly” manners.5 He had the same mixed response when she outspent the $20,000 budget for White House furnishings and asked French to appease her husband; by law, the president had to approve the expenditures.6 When French undertook his “mission,” Lincoln exploded. “[I]t would stink in the land” to spend such money at a time when freezing soldiers went without blankets, he roared, vowing not to approve any bills for “flub dubs for that damned old house!”7 “Not very pleasant,” French wrote in his diary that night, “but a portion of it very amusing.” In later years, when asked to write a book of reminiscences of Lincoln, he demurred. It would be impossible to do so without mentioning “Mrs. Abraham … in an unpleasant way.”8
With the firing on Fort Sumter, Washington braced for conflict. In April 1861, French watched Union troops pour into the city as Maryland secessionists tore up railroad tracks and cut telegraph lines, cutting off the District from the outside world. Even Lincoln was uninformed of doings outside Washington, French noted with alarm.9 With Congress out of session, thousands of soldiers were barracked in the Capitol and on its grounds.10
At a flag-raising ceremony in June, French saw what he took to be an omen. When the president grabbed the halyard and began to pull, the flag got caught. Lincoln responded by tugging “with a will,” tearing the flag in two. “I felt a sorrow that I cannot describe, at seeing the torn flag,” French confessed. His only consolation was Lincoln’s utter determination to get the job done. Whatever challenges were to come, he trusted Lincoln to “meet them with the same energy, and bring us out of the war, if with a tattered flag, still it will all be there!”11
Union troops in front of the Capitol at the opening of the Civil War, May 13, 1861. From a photo album French created for his son Frank. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
In July 1861, the dam broke in Washington: the war came to Congress and Congress went to war. Lincoln called a special session of Congress to begin on July 4; on July 21, Union and Confederate forces met at the First Battle of Bull Run, less than a day’s march from Washington. Excited c
ongressmen rushed to the battleground, some to witness a Union victory, others to take part in it. Some of these would-be soldiers were proven fighting men shifting their skills to a new field of battle; Wade, Chandler, and Secretary of War Cameron were present, as was one of the fighting Washburn brothers, and at least fifteen others.12 Their presence is a reminder that battlefield violence wasn’t a break from politics as normal; the outbreak of warfare wasn’t a thing apart from the coming of the war. Congressmen had been rehearsing civil warfare for years. Congressional violence framed the opening of the war.
But for congressional fighting men, there wasn’t much cheering at Bull Run. When congressmen got near the point of battle, they found the Union army in a frantic full retreat. Upon seeing the flood of panicked soldiers headed their way, Wade and Chandler jumped out of their carriage and threatened to shoot any soldier who passed them by—the sixty-year-old Wade, his hat askew, waving the rifle that he had brought from home when he entered Congress.13 But they were brushed aside. The only congressional casualty was Alfred Ely (R-NY), who strayed too close to the battleground and became a prisoner of war for six months.14 In the Capitol that afternoon, the gloom was palpable to French as soldiers straggled into the city “in all sorts of shapes. Some without guns—some with two. Some barefooted, some bareheaded, & all with a doleful story of defeat.”15
As violence descended on wartime battlefields, it retreated from the floor of Congress, though not before a cluster of clashes during the secession crisis early in 1861. Even as Southern congressmen were leaving Congress and the Union, there were six sectional wrangles, though only a few were violent. Fire-eater Louis Wigfall (D-TX), who remained in the Senate even after his election to the Provisional Confederate Congress, provoked two nasty exchanges, one of them with the future president Andrew Johnson (D-TN), the other outside of the Senate with James Jackson (W-KY), who slapped Wigfall for insulting the former senator John Crittenden of Kentucky. Lingering in Washington largely to cause trouble, Wigfall was wildly successful.16 Another off-the-floor wrangle took place at a dinner party when Robert Toombs (D-GA) said that he hoped the U.S.-government-hired steamship Star of the West—sent to supply Fort Sumter in January 1861—would sink; seventy-four-year-old General Winfield Scott responded by rushing at Toombs but the men were pulled apart.17 When Albert Rust (D-AR), of Greeley assault fame, charged Republicans with supporting John Brown, William Dunn (R-IN) threw the lie; friends negotiated apologies.18
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