The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

    34.  Benton denounced Calhoun, the “Address,” and the resolutions in a speech in Jefferson City, Missouri, on May 26, 1849. Foote responded in a letter addressed to Wise, dated June 23, 1849, that appeared in several newspapers. See for example the Washington Union, June 24, 1849; Richmond Enquirer, July 3, 1849; Baltimore Sun, June 25, 1849. For more on the Benton-Calhoun clash, see Joseph M. Hernon, Profiles in Character: Hubris and Heroism in the U.S. Senate, 1789–1990 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), esp. chapter 2, “Thomas Hart Benton vs. John C. Calhoun”; Clyde N. Wilson, Shirley Bright Cook, and Alexander Moore, eds., The Papers of John C. Calhoun: 1848–1849 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), vol. 26. On the blend of electioneering and political principles that motivated Benton, see John D. Morton, “‘A High Wall and a Deep Ditch’: Thomas Hart Benton and the Compromise of 1850,” Missouri Historical Review 94 (October 1999): 1–24; Benjamin C. Merkel, “The Slavery Issue and the Political Decline of Thomas Hart Benton, 1846–1856,” Missouri Historical Review 38 (July 1944): 3–88; Clarence McClure, Opposition in Missouri to Thomas Hart Benton (Warrensburg: Central Missouri State Teachers College, 1926); Robert E. Shalhope, “Thomas Hart Benton and Missouri State Politics: A Re-Examination,” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 25 (April 1969): 171–91.

    35.  Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., July 30, 1850, 1480.

    36.  31st Cong., 1st Sess., S. Rpt. No. 170, July 30, 1850, “Thomas H. Benton of Missouri and Henry S. Foote of Mississippi,” 93–113, quote on 99. For Wise’s role in egging Foote on, see A.Y.P. Garnett to Muscoe Russell Hunter Garnett, June 29, 1849, Papers of the Hunter-Garnett Family, UVA. Outraged at Benton’s attack on Calhoun and the South, A.Y.P. Garnett (Wise’s son-in-law) asked Foote to “come out against Benton” and then asked Wise to urge Foote “to come out and address his letter to Wise,” so that Wise might also have an excuse to publicly attack Benton. Some people at the time believed—rightly—that Foote had been chosen by Southerners to attack Benton. See Meigs, Life of Thomas Hart Benton, 401; Meigs says that he learned of this allegation from James Bradbury (D-ME), one of Benton’s colleagues in the Senate.

    37.  Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., April 18, 1850, 773.

    38.  French, diary entry, December 21–22, 1850, Witness, 215.

    39.  Bess to French, August 11, 1852, BBFFP.

    40.  French, diary entry, January 8, 1844, BBFFP.

    41.  On antebellum Masonry, see Ann Pflugrad-Jackisch, Brothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia (Athens: University of Georgia, 2010); Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 1998).

    42.  Francis O. French, diary entry, April 3 and 5, 1850, Growing Up on Capitol Hill, 10. French wrote the poem on February 22, 1850; it appeared in Pennsylvania newspapers in March and April. Scrapbook, BBFFP; Mountain Sentinel (Ebensburg, Pa.), April 18, 1850.

    43.  Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict, 33; John C. Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003), 8.

    44.  On Foote generally, see Jon L. Wakelyn, “Disloyalty in the Confederate Congress: The Character of Henry Stuart Foote,” in Confederates Against the Confederacy: Essays on Leadership and Loyalty, ed. Jon L. Wakelyn (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), 53–76; John E. Gonzales, “The Public Career of Henry Stuart Foote, 1804–1880” (Ph.D. dissertation, UNC, 1957); George Baber, “Personal Recollections of Senator H. S. Foote,” Overland Monthly 26 (July–December 1895): 162–71; James P. Coleman, “Two Irascible Antebellum Senators: George Poindexter and Henry S. Foote,” Journal of Mississippi History 46 (February 1984): 17–27; John E. Gonzales, “Henry Stuart Foote: A Forgotten Unionist of the Fifties,” Southern Quarterly 1 (January 1963): 129–39; Henry S. Foote, Casket of Reminiscences (Washington: Chronicle, 1874); idem, The Bench and Bar of the South and Southwest (St. Louis: Thomas Wentworth, 1876). Foote was a “distant cousin” of the historian Shelby Foote. William C. Carter, ed., Conversations with Shelby Foote (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 154.

    45.  Luke Lea of Mississippi was testifying; he said that he had known Foote for about ten years. Benton-Foote Report, 33.

    46.  Ibid., 7, 10–11, 26, 129. See also J.[ames] S.[hepherd] P.[ike], “Benton, Clay, Foote,” April 18, 1850, in Littell’s Living Age 25 (April 1850): 331.

    47.  Foote, Casket of Reminiscences, 76.

    48.  See ibid., 187. According to one account, in one of his two duels with S. S. Prentiss, when one of Foote’s bullets passed over Prentiss’s head, Prentiss called to a small boy watching from a tree: “My son, you had better take care; General Foote is shooting rather wild.” Encyclopedia of Mississippi History: Compromising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions and Persons, ed. Dunbar Rowland, 2 vols. (Madison, Wis.: Selwyn A. Brant, 1907), 2:469.

    49.  Oliver Dyer, Great Senators of the United States Forty Years Ago (New York: Robert Bonner’s Sons, 1889), 140.

    50.  On the Davis dispute, see James T. McIntosh, ed., The Papers of Jefferson Davis, 1856–1860 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1974), 2:86, note 38; and Felicity Allen, Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 163, which quotes a letter from Davis describing how he “knocked him [Foote] down, jumped on him and commenced beating him.” On the Cameron dispute, see Dyer, Great Senators, 140. On the Fremont dispute, see Foote, Casket of Reminiscences, 340–43; Jones, “Personal Recollections,” in Parish, George Wallace Jones, 273. On the Borland fight, see Saturday Evening Post, March 23, 1850; Daily Evening Transcript (Boston), March 16, 1850; Boston Daily Atlas, March 16, 1850; Constitution (Middletown, Conn.), March 20, 1850; Washington Union, in The Independent, March 28, 1850; Alexandria Gazette, March 16, 1850; Missouri Republican (St. Louis), March 19, 1850; New-York Tribune, March 16, 1850.

    51.  Savannah Daily Republican, April 23, 1850.

    52.  Boston Evening Transcript, April 23, 1850; Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), March 23, 1850. The verse was modeled on the frequently reprinted Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs for Children, a hymnal of sorts first published in 1715. On Borland’s fights, see Steven Teske, Unvarnished Arkansas: The Naked Truth about Nine Famous Arkansans (Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2013), 49–57.

    53.  Herald (Port Gibson, Miss.), July 4, 1844, in The Papers of Jefferson Davis: June 1841–July 1846, ed. James T. McIntosh, 2:176.

    54.  David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 9, 1850, DOP.

    55.  French, diary entry, April 11, 1858, Witness, 291. When told that his opponents called him vain, Benton supposedly replied: “G—d—them, I’ve got something to be vain and egotistical of. I know more than all of them put together.” Jones, “Personal Recollections,” in Parish, George Wallace Jones, 271.

    56.  Benton to unknown correspondent, 1813, in Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998), 184–86; Dick Steward, Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 62; Huron Reflector (Norwalk, Ohio), June 4, 1844.

    57.  Benton became involved in three disputes with the opposing lawyer Charles Lucas. Lucas called Benton a liar during the case and Benton challenged him to a duel, but Lucas argued that it impinged on his rights at the bar. Nine months later when they clashed again, Benton called Lucas a puppy and Lucas challenged him; Lucas was shot but recovered. Not long after, Lucas’s friends began whispering that Benton had been too scared to shorten the distance between the two men on the dueling ground; the two men dueled again, and this time Benton killed Lucas. Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 59–65; Steward, Duels and the Roots of Violen
ce in Missouri, 58–78.

    58.  French to Harriette French, April 24, 1834, BBFFP. French assumed that his sister “must have heard of Col. Benton … He is the man who had such a fight in Nashville.”

    59.  William Nisbet Chambers, Old Bullion Benton: Senator from the New West (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), 185–86.

    60.  David Outlaw told his wife that when Benton didn’t respond to Butler’s challenge, a “peremptory note” was sent via Senator Reverdy Johnson (W-MD) demanding a response by 5:00 p.m., or the matter would be considered closed. Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, August 17, 1848, DOP. For a detailed account of the negotiations, see New York Herald, August 15 and 19, 1848; Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, 329.

    61.  David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 17, 1850, DOP; New Hampshire Sentinel (Keene), April 25, 1850; Adams, diary entry, April 8, 1840, Memoirs, 10:257. Adams, sitting next to Benton at funeral services for a senator, was watching Benton entertain one of his daughters on his knee.

    62.  George Julian, Political Recollections, 92.

    63.  Adams, Memoirs, August 16, 1841, 10:533.

    64.  On Benton’s dictatorial, aggressive personality and Missouri’s desire for a “fighting leader,” see Perry McCandless, “The Political Philosophy and Political Personality of Thomas H. Benton,” Missouri Historical Review 2 (January 1956): 145–58. On Benton more generally, see Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); Elbert B. Smith, Magnificent Missourian: The Life of Thomas Hart Benton (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1958); Chambers, Old Bullion Benton; Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years View; or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1856).

    65.  Henry A. Wise, Seven Decades of the Union: The Humanities and Materialism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1872), 137. For references to “bully Benton,” see for example Ohio State Journal (Columbus), November 16, 1842; Daily Madisonian (Washington, D.C.), March 22, 1843; Baltimore Sun, March 5, 1847; Trenton State Gazette, March 8, 1847.

    66.  Dyer, Great Senators of the United States Forty Years Ago, 203.

    67.  Albany Evening Journal, August 17, 1848; New York Herald, August 15, 1848; Semi-Weekly Eagle (Brattleboro, Vt.), August 17, 1848. For a good account of the negotiations between—and arrest of—Benton and Butler, see New York Herald, August 19, 1848. See also Dyer, Great Senators, 203, 200.

    68.  Globe, 30th Cong.,1st Sess., August 12, 1848, 1077.

    69.  Holt, The Fate of Their Country, 71–73; Stegmaier, Texas, New Mexico, and the Compromise of 1850, 103, 373, note 13. For some of Foote’s proposals, see Stegmaier, Texas, New Mexico, and the Compromise of 1850, 93–96; Holt, Political Crisis, 86.

    70.  See esp. Varon, Disunion!

    71.  Ibid., 199–231; and more generally, Mark E. Neely, Jr., “The Kansas-Nebraska Act in American Political Culture: The Road to Bladensburg and the Appeal of the Independent Democrats,” in The Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854, ed. John R. Wunder and Joann M. Ross (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 13–46, esp. 13–23; Amy S. Greenberg, “Manifest Destiny’s Hangover: Congress Confronts Territorial Expansion and Martial Masculinity in the 1850s,” in Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s, ed. Finkelman and Kennon, 97–119; Olsen, Political Culture and Secession, 44–54; Kenneth A. Deitreich, “Honor, Patriarchy, and Disunion: Masculinity and the Coming of the American Civil War” (Ph.D. dissertation, Western Virginia University, 2006).

    72.  On the personal dimensions of sectional rights (and particularly, Southern rights), see Paul D. H. Quigley, “Patchwork Nation: Sources of Confederate Nationalism, 1848–1865” (Ph.D. dissertation, UNC, 2006), 113–37; Wyatt-Brown, Shaping of Southern Culture, 177–202; Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi, 169–95.

    73.  Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., January 22, 1850, 205. New York’s Commercial Advertiser stated that sometimes the telegraph “works wonderfully well in the transmission of both doings and sayings: and sometimes it works so that we do not know what to make of it.” In Clingman’s case, “Either the gentleman has talked an inconceivable mass of nonsense, or the telegraph has made him say something very different from his real utterance.” Commercial Advertiser, January 23, 1850.

    74.  Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., January 22, 1850, 205.

    75.  Ibid., February 18, 1850, 375–85.

    76.  Ibid., February 21, 1850, 418.

    77.  See for example Daily Union (Washington), March 1 and 19, 1850; Trenton State Gazette, March 1, 1850; Richmond Whig, March 1, 1850; Baltimore Sun, February 27, 1850; Philadelphia Inquirer, March 4, 1850; Albany Evening Journal, March 4, 1850.

    78.  Philadelphia Inquirer, March 4, 1850.

    79.  David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, March 3, 1850, DOP.

    80.  David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January [?] 1850, DOP.

    81.  Philadelphia Inquirer, March 4, 1850. For a range of opinions, see Journal of Commerce, March 4, 1850; Trenton State Gazette, March 1, 1850; Daily Union, March 1, 1850; Boston Evening Transcript, February 28, 1850.

    82.  Horace Mann to Charles Sumner, March 4, 1849, in Mann, Life of Horace Mann, 277. The three fights on the evening of March 4, 1849, pitted Robert Ward Johnson (D-AK) against Orlando Ficklin (D-IL); Richard Kidder Meade (D-VA) against Joshua Giddings (W-OH); and Henry Foote (D-MS) against Simon Cameron (D-PA). Johnson shoved Ficklin over some desks; Meade charged at Giddings; and Foote punched Cameron.

    83.  David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, March 4, 1850, DOP. Outlaw described the crowds as “strangers”—suggesting that they weren’t local Washingtonians.

    84.  David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, March 1, 2, and 3, 1850, ibid; Horace Mann to Samuel Downer, August 17, 1852, in Mann, Life of Horace Mann, 380; Mann to E. W. Clap, February 14, 1850, ibid., 289.

    85.  David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 16, 1849, ibid.

    86.  John Parker Hale to Lucy Hale, December 22, 1848, John Parker Hale Papers, NHHS.

    87.  Varon, Disunion!, 210. On the parliamentary use of disunion threats to “control government,” see ibid., 7–10.

    88.  French to Henry Flagg French, January 20, 1850, BBFFP. For a similar sentiment from a few years earlier, see William Pitt Fessenden to Ellen Fessenden, February 6, 1842, in Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, 23; Robert J. Cook, Civil War Senator: William Pitt Fessenden and the Fight to Save the American Republic (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2013), 55.

    89.  French, diary entry, January 21, 1849, Witness, 207–8; French, “To the Hon. J. R. Giddings, upon reading his great speech in the Ho Reps U. S. on Presidential nominations,” July 11, 1852, BBFFP.

    90.  Liberator, March 6, 1849; Giddings’s diary, March 2–4, 1849, in Stewart, “Joshua Giddings, Antislavery Violence, and Congressional Politics of Honor,” 184; Boston Herald, March 6, 1849; Louisville Daily Journal, March 10, 1849; Walter Buell, Joshua R. Giddings: A Sketch (Cleveland: William W. Williams, 1882), 189–90; Cabinet (Schenectady, N.Y.), March 13, 1849.

    91.  Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., February 13, 1850, 343–44. The press noted Hale’s unusual flare-up; see for example Milwaukee Sentinel, February 16, 1850; Newark Daily Advertiser, February 13, 1850.

    92.  Globe, 30th Cong., 1st Sess., May 20, 1848, 511–12.

    93.  Ibid., 31st Cong., 1st Sess., December 14, 1850, 32.

    94.  David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 15, 1850, DOP; Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., December 15, 1850, 36. Essentially, the House voted for the doorkeeper and sergeant at arms from the Thirtieth Congress to enforce what had been Rule 17 in that Congress. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 14, 1850, DOP. With a Speaker elected, the House
was debating its rules. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., January 14, 1850, 146–48.

    95.  Alexandria Gazette, April 19, 1850.

    96.  Commercial Advertiser (N.Y.), April 19, 1850.

    97.  Boston Recorder, April 25, 1850.

    98.  Globe, 31st Cong, 1st Sess., January 22, 1850, 205. On expansion and sectional rights as personally reconciled realities and not abstractions, see also Morrison, Slavery and the American West; Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict.

    99.  On the ambiguities of sectionalism and sentiment about national unity and nationalism, see Rogan Kersh, Dreams of a More Perfect Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), esp. 141–52; Morrison, Slavery and the American West. On the idea of an “affective theory of the Union,” see Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict, 21–31.

  100.  French to Henry Flagg French, January 20, 1850, BBFFP.