The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  There were also two assaults, one more dramatic than the other. William Kellogg (R-IL) assaulted the Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill for denouncing Kellogg’s compromise position on slavery.19 But Charles Van Wyck (R-NY) suffered the more serious attack. In the previous session of Congress, Van Wyck had given a rousing antislavery speech that provoked threats of a duel challenge on the House floor and death threats for months thereafter.20 He repeated the insult in a speech on January 29, 1861. A few weeks later, three men with knives attacked him on the Capitol grounds. Van Wyck pulled a gun and shot one of his assailants; a folded copy of the Globe kept a knife from piercing his heart. Although the Republican press deemed the attack a foiled assassination, the attackers were never identified.21 This burst of passions marked the last physical violence for some time to come.22

  The dynamics of Congress were changing again. With Republicans in power and secessionists departing, bullying lost much of its power, in part because the decidedly Southern custom of dueling had lost much of its cachet. During a heated debate about forts in seceded states in March 1861, William Fessenden (R-ME) scoffed when Stephen Douglas (D-IL) hinted at a duel challenge. Men who bullied men with a “code” different from their own were cowards, Fessenden declared.23 It was cowardly to insult a man who you knew full well wouldn’t fight back on your terms. Such bravado was possible with a Northern majority and the prospect of Union forces preparing to fight. Just as French said, Union men were no longer cowards. The North was prepared to do some bullying of its own.

  Not every Northern congressman was as bold as Fessenden or as disdainful of dueling. Even after secession, a few hinted darkly at duel challenges when embroiled in a fight. But little came of it. Press coverage of such spats was equally laconic; what little there was focused on juicy details rather than broad implications.24 Times had changed. With the outbreak of war, the Southern reign of violence in Washington ended.

  And people noticed. “The change in a short six months is most striking,” noted The New York Times early in 1862. On the street, congressmen no longer “throw hasty glances on either side, to see that no fellow-member has put himself in ambush.… A short time since it was a constant practice to carry concealed weapons—or rather, to carry them in a most ostentatious manner.” The war had changed all that. “[T]he great rebellion suddenly freed Washington from barbarians” who would now be forced “to submit, by main force, to the civilization of the North … [H]ow inexpressible the sense of relief when the yoke of an intolerable bondage is thrown off.”25 The reporter was speaking for effect. And the supposedly civilized North wasn’t always civilized, as violent outbursts such as the New York City draft riots in 1863 show all too well. But after decades of kowtowing to Southerners in Washington, the release of open warfare was sweet.

  Of course, the departure of the Slave Power alone didn’t quash congressional violence. The onset of bloody civil warfare likely played a role. Internecine clashing may have seemed unpatriotic or even dangerous during a war of brother against brother, and probably wouldn’t have won plaudits from a war-weary public. It’s also worth noting that a nonviolent Congress wasn’t necessarily well behaved. Quite the opposite: with the drop in violence, verbal abuse soared. “Nothing can palliate the brutality of old,” one reporter observed in 1864, “the faction-fights, the duels, the assassinations; but the personal insults that stain the air of the Capitol today are louder than then, and the reply they seem to call forth is not cleansing blood, but responsive blackguardism.”26 Coward, liar, scoundrel, drunkard, traitor: the halls of Congress rang with words that would have drawn blood (or at least fists) in the Congress of old.27 “[T]he barbarism of anti-slavery” had transformed Congress into a den of “verbal bullies,” sniped The New York Herald in 1866.28 Ironically, a Slave Power–less Congress confirmed a long-held truism about the code of honor: it did indeed force men to watch their words.

  But regardless of the verbal fireworks in the wartime Congress, its lack of physical violence is striking, particularly in comparison with the Confederate Congress, which most decidedly was not violence free.29 Notably, some fighters in the U.S. Congress remained fighters in its Confederate equivalent. Among its moments of glory was a scramble between Senators Benjamin Hill of Georgia and the former congressional duelist William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama; after exchanging insults over loyalty to the Confederacy, Hill threw an inkwell at Yancey and then rushed him with a chair.

  And then there was Henry Foote, who continued to be Henry Foote. He “does not seem to have changed his habits one whit by going to Richmond,” noted The New York Times in 1864. Unquestionably the Confederate Congress’s most frequent fighter, he almost shot a Tennessee colleague and, during one particularly eventful committee meeting, knocked a witness into a corner and tore a member’s shirt. He was also attacked with a bowie knife on the House floor, beaten in a committee-room, and clubbed with an umbrella.30 He took a remarkably Bentonian stance during the knife attack: once his attacker was safely pinned to the floor by several congressmen, Foote melodramatically bared his chest and declared, “I defy the steel of the assassin!”31 When it came to congressional clashes, he was a quick study. Somewhat predictably, by the end of the war Foote had been banished by both South and North. Exiled after fleeing the Confederacy in the middle of the war, he was then cast out of the North for being generally troublesome. He lived briefly in England and then Montreal, where he earned a pardon from the U.S. government by preventing a group of Confederate refugees from mobbing the American consulate and tearing down its flag.32

  Clearly, battlefield bloodshed and concerns about patriotism didn’t stem the tide of violence in the Confederate Congress, and seceded Southerners brought brawling back to Washington when they returned. This was true even of the first states readmitted to the Union.33 When Union troops captured New Orleans in 1862, Lincoln decided to use Louisiana as a showcase for his plan of reconstruction; for readmission to the Union, one-tenth of the state’s voting population had to take a prescribed oath of loyalty to the Union, and the state needed to organize a government that abolished slavery. Radical Republicans in Congress wanted stronger terms, including black suffrage. Unfortunately for the Louisiana delegates who arrived in Washington in 1864 seeking their seats in Congress, this standoff kept them in limbo for months. On January 22, 1865, the would-be Louisiana representative Alexander P. Field snapped. Spotting the radical Republican William Kelley of Pennsylvania in the dining room of Willard’s Hotel—that perennial fighting-man favorite—he asked why Louisiana was being kept “out in the cold.” After a brief heated exchange, Field stormed off. A short while later, after lying in wait for Kelley in a hallway, Field attacked him with a knife, stabbing him in the hand he raised in self-defense, then swaggering around the hotel bragging about it, a jolting reminder to congressional onlookers to consider carefully the South’s reentry to the Union.34

  The next violent incident—yet another Southern attack on a Northerner—was even more dramatic. During a February 1866 debate over the Freedmen’s Bureau, a government agency established to help freed slaves, Lovell Rousseau (UU-KY) sneered that he would kill any man who arrested him based on a black man’s testimony. The radical Republican Josiah Grinnell of Iowa returned the sneer, blasting Rousseau’s loyalty to the Union. The two continued to toss insults back and forth over the next few months, until June 11, when they hit their peak. During a debate about seating Southern delegates, Grinnell ridiculed the Kentuckian’s Civil War record. A few days later, Rousseau confronted Grinnell in the Capitol’s east portico and demanded an apology. When Grinnell refused, Rousseau caned him, raining down blows on Grinnell’s head and shoulders with an iron-topped rattan cane, stopping only when it shattered.35 Grinnell, having blocked most of the blows with his arms, suffered only minor injuries, and immediately stalked off to buy a gun and seek revenge. But he was dissuaded from taking violent action by two caning experts who were waiting at his lodgings when he got home that night: Senators Henry Wil
son and Charles Sumner.36

  Sumner’s involvement signals perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Grinnell’s caning; it was a virtual reenactment of Sumner’s caning ten years past. Like Preston Brooks, Rousseau felt that he was defending his state’s honor. Like Brooks, he staged his attack in the Capitol, though he deliberately avoided disgracing the House floor. Like Brooks, he bore down on his victim until his cane shattered. And like Brooks, he had friends at hand to fend off interference and promote a “fair fight,” though here Rousseau outdid his illustrious forebear. Lawrence Keitt used a cane as his weapon of defense; Rousseau’s three friends had guns.37

  The congressional response also mirrored events of 1856. As before, the House appointed a committee that delivered a split decision, the majority recommending expulsion for Rousseau, the minority proposing a reprimand. As before, the report sparked a heated debate about the caning’s congressional implications, with moderate Republicans arguing that expulsion was too severe given the severity of Grinnell’s insults. In its long history of brawling and bullying, the House had never expelled anyone for violence, argued Henry Raymond (R-NY), offering as evidence a roll call of congressional combatants who kept their seats, including Preston Brooks. Brooks escaped expulsion “because there were enough bullies in the House to keep him in his seat,” countered James Garfield (R-OH). At the dawning of a new era, Congress had to take strong action “to show that no man shall hereafter hope to gain any glory by becoming a bully.”38 Keep Rousseau in his seat and he would be feted with gifts of canes, Garfield warned. He was right. Like Brooks, Rousseau was reprimanded, resigned his seat, received trophy canes (though only a few), and was reelected.39 In some ways, little had changed. Congress sanctioned rule-bound violence and a violent congressman won popular acclaim.

  But some things had changed, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the press. A Southerner had caned a Northerner within the walls of the Capitol: the offense was mighty. But the press response was minimal. In Northern papers, there was some ranting about the revival of “plantation manners” and the “spirit of slavery,” and some crowing about how Congress had “reconstructed” its decorum once the Slave Power left. In Southern papers there was some snickering at Grinnell’s alleged cowardice.40 But there was little indignation and few dire predictions. The same was true of the muted response to Field’s attack, which included some offhand references to the “old bowie-knife rule of the slavery programme,” but little more.41 Equally striking, there was less Northern support for Northern non-combatants; Grinnell was disparaged in the North for not fighting back.42

  The war had made fighting men of people North, South, and West, but the furies of sectional combat no longer centered on the halls of Congress. Defeated in war and politically disempowered, Southern whites vented their outrage and asserted their control in a new arena, inflicting a reign of violence on the Reconstruction South and once again bullying their way to power, using terrorism and Black Codes to assert white supremacy.43 The Ku Klux Klan was born in this period; a secret vigilante group founded in Tennessee in 1865, it spread rapidly throughout the South.

  Not all white Southerners followed that path. Ever the contrarian, Henry Wise veered toward becoming a Republican in his final years, sensing the possibility of reconciliation in their rule. Even so, too stubborn to apply for a pardon (or even admit that he needed one), he remained unreconstructed. He died in 1876, fending off Cilley-Graves accusations until the end.44

  French certainly became more of a fighting man during the war. Reviewing his past year’s diary entries in 1862, he saw the change. “Up to ‘Sumter’ I was in favor of letting the Southerners, who desired it, go. I was for peace. I dreaded the terrible issue of war & bloodshed.” But now? Characteristically, he put his changed feelings in verse:

  If they still advance,

  Friendly caution slighting,

  They may get, by chance,

  A belly full of fighting!45

  Taken from a song written during the War of 1812 which itself hearkened back to the American Revolution, these warmongering lines show how far French had come. His feelings about Frank Pierce had progressed as well. Hearing in 1863 that Pierce had given a Fourth of July speech denouncing Lincoln and the war, French gave Pierce “over to Secesh & Rebeldom.” His old friend had “disgraced himself and the name he bears.”46

  For French, the war years were busy. As commissioner of public buildings, he had to tend to railroad tracks and bridges as well as oversee the extension of the Capitol. One month into his commissionership, he was surprised to learn that he also supervised the “Old Capitol Prison,” occupied by Congress after the burning of the Capitol during the War of 1812 and now used for prisoners of war. An executive appointee, French was in and out of the White House on an almost daily basis and became friendly with Lincoln, on one occasion handing him a pair of socks knitted by a friend that placed the Confederate flag beneath each foot; Lincoln was amused.47

  With the city filled with the trappings of war, French longed for Washington to “once more be a civil city,” but he enjoyed mingling with New England soldiers encamped in and around Washington. The feelings must have been mutual: when the 34th Regt. Massachusetts headed to the train station to leave town, two companies gave three cheers for French.48 When the Confederate capital, Richmond, fell in April 1865, Commissioner French posted his feelings for all to see on an enormous transparency hung on the Capitol’s west portico. Its motto—“This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes”—could be seen well up Pennsylvania Avenue.49 A few days later he gloried in the victory during a visit to Richmond with the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, asking someone to play “Yankee Doodle” on Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s piano.50

  French enjoyed some personal victories during wartime as well. In 1862, he married Mary Ellen Brady, his brother Edmund’s sister-in-law. Thirty-one years French’s junior, Mary Ellen had gotten to know French while nursing Bess through her final illness and keeping house for French for months thereafter. Tall, stately, and gentle, she was a calming influence on French’s life.51 By April 1862, he felt that he couldn’t live without her. After their marriage on September 9, he didn’t have to.

  A second moment of glory took place on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of a national soldier’s cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, an event that French helped organize. Told during a planning session a few days earlier that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant had declined to write a hymn for the occasion, French decided to try his hand at it. By breakfast the next morning he had written a five-stanza elegy that concluded with a plea to God to “save a people’s freedom from its grave.”52 Seeing it sung before the crowd of roughly 20,000 spectators and dignitaries was a proud moment for French. Indeed, he was moved by the entire ceremony. Standing beside the orator Edward Everett as Everett delivered a two-hour speech (after which Lincoln delivered a remarkably powerful 272-word, three-minute address), French thought back to another great speech by a great man long dead. In 1834, French had stood beside John Quincy Adams in the House when Adams delivered a eulogy for the Marquis de Lafayette. If Adams were here today, French thought, his “heart would swell with the patriotism that has followed his own great efforts to bring about that emancipation of the negro race which is so rapidly approaching.”53 The change in French’s politics was profound.

  Detail of a photograph of the crowd gathered before the speaking platform on the day of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863. Lincoln can be seen seated to the left. French is standing to the right. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  As suggested by French’s presence at Gettysburg, he continued to be a history stalker of the first order, particularly when it came to Lincoln. In 1861, French had welcomed Lincoln to Washington by conducting his inaugural ceremonies. At Lincoln’s second inauguration, French probably saved Lincoln’s life. As French explained to his son, as the president’s proc
ession passed through the rotunda, a man jumped out of the crowd and ran behind Lincoln. French ordered a policeman to grab the intruder, who insisted so strenuously that he had a right to be there that French thought he must be a new member of Congress and let him go. By that time, the procession had passed. Later shown a photograph of John Wilkes Booth, the stunned French felt sure that he had waylaid the assassin.54

  Even the Lincoln Memorial has ties to French; in 1920, his nephew Daniel Chester French—his half brother Henry’s son—sculpted the colossal Lincoln statue at its center. (“Dan is a sculptor. I mean it,” French wrote in his diary after seeing an early example of his young nephew’s work.)55 To Daniel, French was “Uncle Major.”56

  But French’s history stalking reached its height of intensity on April 15, 1865. Puzzled that the streetlamps were still lit when he rose that morning, he went down to the street and heard about the night’s grisly events: Lincoln had been shot and Secretary of State William Seward had been slashed, perhaps fatally.57 Worried about security, French immediately began to shut down government buildings, first closing the Capitol. He then rushed to Lincoln’s bedside. Seeing that Lincoln was beyond help, he sat with Mary Lincoln for a time, then fetched some of her friends. He next raced to close the White House. He was there when Lincoln was taken inside, and for a time he stayed by Lincoln’s side, watching as his body—“all limp and warm”—was laid upon a cooling board.58 He then began arranging Lincoln’s funeral. The Capitol needed to be clothed in mourning. A catafalque had to be built for Lincoln’s coffin in the rotunda. French had his son Benjamin design it.59