The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  146.  On Northern honor, see Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (New York: NYU, 2010), 96 and passim; Kanisom Wongsrichanalai, Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War (New York: Fordham, 2016); Robert S. Levine, “‘The Honor of New England’: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Cilley-Graves Duel of 1838,” in Mayfield and Hagstette, The Field of Honor, 158–59; Freeman, Affairs of Honor.

  147.  “A Looker On” [French], Chicago Democrat, dateline February 13, 1835, BBFFP.

  148.  “Letter of Leonard Jarvis to his constituents of the Hancock and Washington District, in Maine” (n.p.), 15. See also H. W. Greene, “Letters Addressed to Francis O. J. Smith, Representative in Congress from Cumberland District (Me.), Being a Defence of the Writer Against the Attacks Made on Him by That Individual—And a Sketch of Mr. Smith’s Political Life” (n.p., 1839), 13–14; History of Penobscot County, Maine, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches (Cleveland: Williams, Chase & Co., 1882), 673–74; William Leo Lucey, Edward Kavanagh: Catholic, Statesman, Diplomat from Maine, 1795–1844 (Worcester, Mass.: College of the Holy Cross, 1946), 114–15; “Mr. Smith’s Review of the Letter of Leonard Jarvis, to his Constituents” (n.p.); Daily Pittsburgh Gazette, February 27, 1835, news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1125&dat=18350227&id=JzYPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=04UDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4187,6604027, accessed June 13, 2012. See also Thomas Todd to F.O.J. Smith, January 17, 1835, F.O.J. Smith Papers, NYPL.

  149.  Grimsted, American Mobbing, 86, 13.

  150.  Adams, Memoirs, April 21, 1840, 10:271.

  151.  On sectional patterns or “systems” of violence, see Grimsted, American Mobbing; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice. Much scholarship on sectional modes of manhood agrees with Amy Greenberg’s seminal Manifest Manhood, which delineates two prevailing modes of antebellum manhood, restrained and martial, the former more common among Northerners, the latter more common among Southerners. Congressional combat confirms but complicates this idea. In the national arena of Congress, comfort with personal combat gave Southerners a literal fighting advantage over Northerners that they used to full effect. But over time, Northerners became more violent, adapting their sense of manhood to the demands of the moment—a reminder of manhood’s fluid and contested nature. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. 11–14, 272–75. On sectional patterns of emotion, see Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict.

  152.  Grimsted, American Mobbing, ix. On fighting men, see for example comments of Andrew Stewart (W-PA), Globe, 28th Cong., 1st Sess., January 20, 1844, 173; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, March 20, 1848, DOP.

  153.  Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, 2 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 1:145. Her comments should be taken with a grain of salt since she was likely venting antislavery frustration at doughfaces.

  154.  Harriet Martineau, Society in America (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1837), 2:92. See esp. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice. Grimsted aptly sums up the Southern mode of justice: “Being a Southern rioter meant seldom having to say you were sorry.” Grimsted, American Mobbing, 13–16. On Southern violence in a political context, see Dickson Bruce, Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800–1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956); Sheldon Hackney, “Southern Violence,” American Historical Review 74 (1969): 906–25; John S. Reed, “Below the Smith and Wesson Line: Southern Violence,” in One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1982), 139–53; Kenneth Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1985); Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi; Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict; as well as Wyatt-Brown’s seminal Southern Honor; idem., Shaping of Southern Culture. On Northern collective violence and institutional solutions, see Weinbaum, Mobs and Demagogues.

  155.  Globe, 30th Cong., 1st Sess., March 10, 1848, 454–55; National Era, March 16, 1848, 43. The two publications have identical accounts of Wick’s speech, but only the National Era gives a full account of the fight. George Jones (D-TN) and Hugh Haralson (D-GA) were the two combatants.

  156.  My thanks to Tony Rotundo for suggesting this pattern.

  157.  On the eve of the Civil War, slaves were 12.7 percent of the population in border states; 30 percent in the middle South; and 58.5 percent in the lower South. Of border-state blacks 21.2 percent were free, as opposed to only 1.5 percent of lower-South blacks. Freehling, South Against the South, 18–19, 24; idem., Road to Disunion, 33–35.

  158.  This section is particularly indebted to Freehling, South Against the South, 23.

  159.  On Whigs and violence, see also Howe, Whigs, 128. Delaware and Kentucky were Whig-dominated and Maryland was consistently mixed.

  160.  Compromisers included John Crittenden (W-KY), Cost Johnson (W-MD), Louis McLane (J-DE), “Great Pacificator” Charles Fenton Mercer (W-VA), and “Great Compromiser” Henry Clay (W-KY). On Clay, compromise, and culture, see also Howe, Whigs, 123–49. To see him in action as the “universal pacificator,” see Brattleboro Messenger, March 7, 1834, and Connecticut Gazette, March 12, 1834, describing a near duel between George Poindexter (AJ-MS) and John Forsyth (J-GA). Mercer lived in Loudon County, not far from Washington. For “the great pacificator,” see The Liberator, May 13, 1836; “Funeral Oration Delivered at the Capitol in Washington over the Body of Hon. Jonathan Cilley, With a Full Account of the Late Duel, Containing Many Facts Never Before Published” (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1838), 24; and “Nominis in Umbra” [French], Chicago Democrat, dateline February 23, 1838, BBFFP, which notes that Mercer is the “general peace maker in the House” during disputes that seem “likely to end in a duel.” On Johnson, see “The Polite Duel,” Thomas William and Folger McKinsey, History of Frederick County Maryland, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1979), 1:308–309. On “border pacifiers,” see also Freehling, Road to Disunion, 432.

  161.  See for example French, diary entry, January 22, 1838, Witness, 74.

  162.  French to Henry Flagg French, March 9, 1834, BBFFP; Journal of the Senate, 23rd Cong., 1st Sess., February 28, 1834, 163; Globe, 23rd Cong., 1st Sess., February 28, 1834, 208; Salem Gazette, March 7, 1834; Pittsfield Sun, March 13, 1834. Poindexter was objecting to Jackson’s removal of funds from a Mississippi bank.

  163.  “Nominis in Umbra” [French], “Washington Correspondence, No. 4,” Chicago Democrat, dateline January 19, 1838, clipping in BBFFP. Jonathan Cilley told his wife that people expected a duel; Cilley to Deborah Cilley, January 16, 1838, in Eve Anderson, A Breach of Privilege: Cilley Family Letters, 1820–1867 (Spruce Head, Maine: Seven Coin Press, 2002), 146.

  164.  On parties as a counterbalance, see esp. Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Norton, 1978).

  3. THE PULL AND POWER OF VIOLENCE

      1.  John Wentworth, Congressional Reminiscences: Adams, Benton, Calhoun, Clay, and Webster (Chicago: Fergus Printing Company, 1882), 13.

      2.  French to Henry Flagg French, April 24, 1844, BBFFP. Emphasis in original. The gun was fired during a fight between John White (W-KY) and George Rathbun (D-NY), who were arguing about the presidential contender Henry Clay. Globe, 28th Cong., 1st Sess., April 23, 1844, 551–54, 577–80; 28th Cong., 1st Sess., H. Rpt. 470, May 6, 1844, “Rencounter Between Messrs. White and Rathbun.” The House voted to give Wirt $150 in compensation, but he never fully recovered from the wound. 34th Cong., 3rd Sess., H. Rpt. 29, December 19, 1856, “John L. Wirt.”

      3.  For contemporary accounts of the Graves-Cilley duel, in addition to French’s various writings and H. Rpt. 825 (mentioned below), see Niles’ National Register, July 27, 1839; “Funeral Oration Delivered … Over the Body of Hon. Jonathan Cilley�
��; “Autobiography,” in John Carl Parish, George Wallace Jones (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1912), 157–70; E. M. Boyle, “Jonathan Cilley of Maine and William J. Graves of Kentucky, Representatives in Congress. An Historical Duel, 1838, as Narrated by Gen. Geo. W. Jones, Cilley’s Second,” Maine Historical and Genealogical Recorder 6 (1889), 392. For accounts of Cilley’s college friend Horatio King, see “History of the Duel Between Jonathan Cilley and William J. Graves,” Collections and Proceedings of the Maine Historical Society 2 (April 1892): 127–48; King, Turning on the Light: A Dispassionate Survey of President Buchanan’s Administration, from 1860 to Its Close (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1895), 287–316; “Death of Cilley,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 4 (November–December 1840): 196–200. See also Bruce R. Kirby’s excellent “The Limits of Honor: Party, Section, and Dueling in the Jacksonian Congress” (M.A. thesis, George Mason University, 1997), 133–84; Don C. Seitz, Famous American Duels (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1929), 251–83; Myra L. Spaulding, “Dueling in the District of Columbia,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 29–30 (1928): 186–210; Lorenzo Sabine, Notes on Duels and Duelling (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Co., 1855), 89–108; Eve Anderson, A Breach of Privilege: Cilley Family Letters, 1820–1867 (Spruce Head, Maine: Seven Coin Press, 2002); Jeffrey L. Pasley, “Minnows, Spies, and Aristocrats: The Social Crisis in Congress in the Age of Martin Van Buren,” JER 27 (Winter 2007): 599–653; Ryan Chamberlain, Pistols, Politics and the Press: Dueling in 19th-Century American Journalism (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009), 55–62; Robert S. Levine, “‘The Honor of New England’: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Cilley-Graves Duel of 1838,” in The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity, John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette, eds. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017), 147–62; Roger Ginn, New England Must Not Be Trampled On: The Tragic Death of Jonathan Cilley (Camden, Maine: DownEast Books, 2016). My thanks to Mr. Ginn for sending me his book.

      4.  French, diary entry, February 28, March 10 and 12, April 4 and 27, 1838, Witness, 75–80. His drawing appears in his diary entry of April 4, BBFFP.

      5.  National Freemason 2, no. 6 (November 1864); ibid., 8 (February 1865).

      6.  On “rough play,” see Richard Stott, Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2009).

      7.  25th Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Rpt. 825, April 21, 1838, “Death of Mr. Cilley—Duel” (hereafter cited as H. Rpt. 825).

      8.  French, diary entry, February 28, 1838, Witness, 75.

      9.  French to Daniel French, January 30, 1835, BBFFP.

    10.  French, diary entry, March 18, 1842, Witness, 139.

    11.  Ibid., February 22, 1848, 199.

    12.  Ibid., April 15, 1865, 469–71. Also ibid., April 15, 1866, 507.

    13.  French thought that he had witnessed Cilley’s acceptance of Graves’s challenge, but Cilley received it at his boardinghouse. French, “Congressional Reminiscences,” National Freemason 2, no. 6 (November 1864).

    14.  Most details in this paragraph are from ibid.; ibid., 8 (February 1865); French, diary entry, February 28, March 10, April 4, 1838, Witness, 75–76, 78–79; “Nominis in Umbra” [French], Washington Correspondent No. 10 and No. 12, dateline February 23, 1838, and undated, Chicago Democrat, BBFFP.

    15.  French, “Congressional Reminiscences,” National Freemason 2, no. 6 (November 1864); Caleb Cushing to John Cushing, July 7, 1836, in John M. Belohlavek, Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University, 2005), 92.

    16.  “Washington Correspondence No. 12,” Chicago Democrat, [April 1838], BBFFP; French, “Congressional Reminiscences,” National Freemason 2, no. 6 (November 1864).

    17.  Cilley served from September 4 to October 16, 1837, and December 4, 1837, to February 24, 1838. French, “Congressional Reminiscences,” National Freemason 2, no. 6 (November 1864); ibid., 8 (February 1865); Cilley to Deborah Cilley, September 24, 1837, in Anderson, Breach of Privilege, 120. On Cilley, see Anderson, Breach of Privilege; Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Biographical Sketch of Jonathan Cilley,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 3 (September 1838): 69–77; King, Turning On the Light, 287–316; Cyrus Eaton, History of Thomaston, Rockland, and South Thomaston, Maine, from Their First Exploration A.D. 1605; With Family Genealogies, 2 vols. (Hallowell: Masters, Smith, 1865), 1: passim (esp. 391–93); Memoirs and Services of Three Generations (Rockland, Maine: reprint from Courier-Gazette, 1909). On his fighting temper, see also John Ruggles to F.O.J. Smith, August 17, 1833, F.O.J. Smith Papers, NYPL (which notes the “violence” and “bitterness of his invective”); and an anonymous contemporary biographical sketch in the Cilley Biographical File at Bowdoin College Library, which mentions his “harsher traits” and “almost terrible energy.”

    18.  General Joseph Cilley appears in Trumbull’s “The Surrender of General Burgoyne.” On the portrait, see Cilley to Deborah Cilley, January 16, 1838, in Anderson, Breach of Privilege, 144. Bradbury Cilley (F-NH) was a representative from 1813 to 1815; Jonathan’s older brother Joseph (Liberty-NH) was a senator from June 13, 1846, to March 3, 1847, filling the vacancy caused by the resignation of Levi Woodbury. See also Memoirs and Services of Three Generations.

    19.  Cilley to Deborah Cilley, January 13, 1833, in Anderson, Breach of Privilege, 84.

    20.  Hawthorne, journal entry, July 28, 1837, Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 9 of The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883), 9:75–77. Along similar lines, after the duel, Cilley’s brother-in-law Hezekiah Prince, Jr., described him as “prompt, independent, and even obstinate,” noting that the only way to understand his actions was to understand his character. Prince to Franklin Pierce, undated, in F. B. Wilkie, “Geo. W. Jones,” Iowa Historical Record 2 (April 1887), 446.

    21.  French, “Congressional Reminiscences,” National Freemason, vol. 2, no. 6 (November 1864).

    22.  Cilley to Deborah Cilley, September 24, 1837, in Anderson, Breach of Privilege, 120.

    23.  Cilley to Deborah Cilley, January 12, 1838, ibid., 143.

    24.  On Wise, see Simpson, A Good Southerner; Barton H. Wise, The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia, 1806–1876 (New York: Macmillan, 1899); James Pinkney Hambleton, “A Biographical Sketch of Henry A. Wise, with a History of the Political Campaign in Virginia in 1855” (Richmond, Va.: J. W. Randolph, 1856); Clement Eaton, “Henry A. Wise, a Liberal of the Old South,” Journal of Southern History 7, no. 4 (November 1941): 482–94; Clement Eaton, “Henry A. Wise and the Virginia Fire Eaters of 1856,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 21, no. 4 (March 1935): 495–512; Henry A. Wise, Seven Decades of the Union (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1872); William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia, passim. For a different side of Wise, see Clayton Torrence, ed., “From the Society’s Collections: Letters of Mrs. Ann (Jennings) Wise to Her Husband, Henry A. Wise,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 58, no. 4 (October 1950): 492–515; John Sergeant Wise (Wise’s son), The End of an Era (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1902).

    25.  French, diary entry, July 12, 1838, Witness, 90.

    26.  Wise, Life of Henry Wise, 13.

    27.  Ann Jennings Wise to Wise, January 4(?), 1836, in Torrence, ed., “Letters of Mrs. Ann (Jennings) Wise to Her Husband, Henry A. Wise,” 512.

    28.  Buckingham, America, 2:324; [Memorandum of life in Washington], 21, Daniel R. Goodloe Papers, UNC.

    29.  Globe, 26th Cong., 2nd Sess., February 24, 1841, 206.

    30.  French, diary entry, March 12, 1838, Witness, 77.

    31.  Cilley to Deborah Cilley, January 16, 1838, in Anderson, Breach of Privile
ge, 146.

    32.  Dickens to Albany Fonblanque, March 12, 1842, The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, 12 vols. (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1974), 3:118.

    33.  “Address of Mr. Wise, Representative in Congress from the State of Virginia, to His Constituents,” in Washington Intelligencer, March 16, 1838.

    34.  Daily National Intelligencer, March 9, 1839, reporting Wise’s speech of February 21.

    35.  Daily National Intelligencer (Washington), January 25, 1838; Globe, 25th Cong., 1st Sess., January 23, 1838, 127; Adams, Memoirs, January 23, 1838, 9:475.

    36.  Globe, 25th Cong., 2nd Sess., February 12, 1838, 173. This turned out to be Senator John Ruggles (D-ME), Cilley’s former patron and next-door neighbor turned enemy back in Maine. Convinced that Cilley didn’t support Ruggles’s run for the Senate in 1832, Ruggles and his supporters had dedicated themselves to destroying Cilley’s career. Now Ruggles was charged with using his influence to help a friend get a patent in exchange for a cut of the profits. On the Ruggles dispute, see Ginn, New England Must Not Be Trampled On, 65–74, 140–45; Senate Report No. 377, “Report on the Investigation of John Ruggles, Senator from Maine,” 25th Cong., 2nd Sess., April 12, 1838.