The Violence at the Heart of Our Politics
In Congress before the Civil War, partisan disagreement often featured Bowie knives and pistols. Are we headed back toward that way of life?
Mike Huckabee waxed historic this week while denouncing protesters who interrupted Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. “Clear the room or start caning them when they open their yaps!” he tweeted, making a backhanded reference to the most famous caning in American history: the 1856 attack on Senator Charles Sumner. Outraged by one of Sumner’s antislavery speeches, Preston Brooks of South Carolina brutally beat him to the ground in the Senate chamber a few days later, stopping only when his cane broke.
Clearly, the United States has a long and storied history of polarizing crises. The 1960s was one such time, as were the late 1790s; in both cases, Americans of opposing politics turned on each other with violent outcomes. The 1850s were even more severe. The period’s raging debate over slavery fractured political parties, paralyzed the national government and divided the nation. In time, this struggle tore the nation apart.
In many ways, the crisis of the 1850s played out on the floor of Congress, the focus of national politics for much of the 19th century. A forum for national debate with the power to decide the fate of slavery, it became a bullpen for sectional combat, with armed clusters of Northerners and Southerners defending their interests with fists and weapons as well as legislation.
Some of the furor wasn’t slavery related; antebellum America was inherently violent, as was its politics, and Congress is a representative institution. The mighty oratory of the 1830s and ’40s was accompanied by an undercurrent of brute force. Threats and fistfights were part of the political game, and congressmen sometimes put such violence to legislative purpose.
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More often than not, such bullies were Southerners or Southern-born Westerners. So-called fighting men promoted their interests and silenced their foes with insults, fists, canes, knives, pistols and the occasional brick, giving them a literal fighting advantage over “noncombatants,” who were usually Northerners. Sumner’s brutal caning was far from the only violent incident in Congress.
In fact, in the course of researching how the culture of politics changed after the 1790s — the subject of my first book — I uncovered roughly 70 physically violent political confrontations between 1830 and the Civil War, most of them in the House and Senate chambers, a few on nearby streets and dueling grounds. Fistfights, shoving matches, weapon wielding, mass brawls: Largely forgotten now, these clashes show a momentous political struggle unfolding in real time.
Initially, most of the fighting centered on matters of personal honor, party loyalty or regional pride. Take, for example, the 1838 duel between Representatives Jonathan Cilley, a Democrat from Maine, and William Graves, a Whig from Kentucky. Although their duel had dire consequences, it was sparked by little more than political name-calling in the House. When Henry Wise, a Virginia Whig and a notorious bully, suggested that an unnamed Democratic congressman was corrupt, Cilley leaped to the defense of his party. Wise then did what bullies were wont to do: He tried to silence his opponent by taunting him with a duel challenge and then declaring him too cowardly to fight. Like many a Northerner, Cilley faced a difficult choice. Should he ignore Wise’s taunts and risk dishonoring himself and his constituents by proxy? Or should he risk fighting a duel and be ostracized by his constituents for engaging in a barbaric Southern practice?
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In the end, Cilley opted to fight, though not with Wise. Because of the niceties of the code duello, and a chain of Whigs who took offense at Cilley’s actions, he ultimately fought a duel with Graves, who had done nothing more than hand Cilley a message from a far more belligerent Whig. Cilley and Graves liked each other fine; there was no ill will between them. But for the sake of their regions, their states, their parties and their reputations, both men felt compelled to fight a duel, and only one man survived it. Cilley was 35 years old when he died.
The growing immediacy of the problem of slavery made matters worse. Congressional brawling increasingly pitted North against South, fracturing national parties across sectional lines and rendering routine congressional violence far less tractable. Westward expansion set off a desperate debate over the slavery status of new states, and Southern congressmen defended their slave regime by attempting to silence antislavery advocates with threats and violence.
Take, for example, Representative John Dawson, a Democrat from Louisiana. Dawson routinely wore both a Bowie knife and a pistol, and he wasn’t shy about using them in the House, particularly when someone dared to attack slavery. In 1842, when Thomas Arnold, a Whig from Tennessee, defended John Quincy Adams’s right to discuss antislavery petitions, Dawson strutted over to Arnold with his knife plainly visible and threatened to cut his throat “from ear to ear.”
Dawson went even further three years later in what may well be the all-time greatest display of firepower on the floor. When the Ohio abolitionist Joshua Giddings gave an antislavery speech, Dawson, clearly agitated, positioned himself in front of Giddings, vowing to kill him, and cocking his pistol. Four armed Southern Democrats immediately joined him, which prompted four Whigs to position themselves around Giddings, several of them armed as well. After a few minutes, the pistoleers sat down. But the potential for bloodshed was very real.
The 1854 debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act made matters worse. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had drawn a virtual line across the country separating the free North from the slaveholding South. The Kansas-Nebraska Act seemingly undid that compromise, enabling future states to decide slavery’s fate on their own through popular sovereignty. Not surprisingly, debate over the act raised the passions of the slavery debate — and congressional violence — to new heights.
The press amplified the crisis. In their efforts to rouse public sentiment for or against the act, newspapers promoted conspiracy theories about sectional plots to seize control of the Union. Antislavery papers argued that an organized “Slave Power” was trying to spread slavery throughout the Union by stifling Northern opposition. Pro-slavery papers insisted that Northern aggressors were trying to isolate and destroy the slaveholding South. New technologies like the telegraph broadcast these accusations with ever-increasing speed and reach throughout the nation, and did just what editors and reporters hoped they would do: outrage the public and encourage them to fight for their rights and demand the same of their congressmen.
The Republican Party was born of this furor. The arrival of a Northern antislavery party in Congress caused violence to spike. Dedicated to fighting the Slave Power, Republican congressmen did their duty, confronting Southerners as never before, and Southerners replied in kind. Sumner’s caning was of a piece with this wave of violence. Slavery supporters saw his raging antislavery rhetoric as proof of Northern attempts to degrade and subjugate the South. Antislavery advocates, in turn, saw Brooks, Sumner’s attacker, as part of a Slave Power plot to dominate the North. Joined with some recent assaults on Northern congressmen and the rising intensity of antislavery efforts, for Northerners and Southerners alike, the caning seemed to prove the existence of a sectional conspiracy to seize national control.
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One House brawl in 1858 shows such thinking in action. During an overnight debate about slavery in Kansas, Galusha Grow — a feisty Pennsylvania Republican — raised an objection while standing amid Southern Democrats. One of those Democrats — the equally feisty Laurence Keitt of South Carolina — immediately took offense, insisting that Grow object on his own side of the House. When Grow declared that it was a free hall and he could do as he liked, Keitt stalked over to Grow, mumbling “We’ll see about that,” and grabbed his throat in preparation to throw a punch. Grow responded by slugging Keitt hard enough to knock him flat.
A horde of Southern Democrats — many of them armed — immediately rushed toward the combatants, some to calm things down, others to attack Grow, a living embodiment of Northern aggression. Seeing the rush of Southerners, a stream of Republicans — some of them also armed — raced to the point of conflict, leaping onto chairs and desks in their hurry to save a fellow under fire. The end result was an enormous brawl in front of the House speaker’s chair featuring punching, shoving and tossed spittoons.
To onlookers in Congress and the country alike, the implications of the Grow-Keitt rumble were clear: North and South had gone to war in the House chamber. Congressmen on each side assumed that the other side was angry, overbearing and itching for a fight. This distrust was no back-of-the-mind matter of speculation. It was immediate. Both sides jumped into action in seconds. And the public shared these suspicions. By the late 1850s, Northerners and Southerners alike were urging their congressmen to fight — literally — for their rights. Some Northerners even gave guns to their congressmen, who were less likely to carry arms than their Southern colleagues. Distrustful of each other and of Congress’s ability to contain their struggle, Americans were prepared for open combat in the Capitol.
The lessons of this breakdown are severe. It shows what can happen when polarized politics erodes the process of debate and compromise at the heart of republican government. Americans lose faith in their system of government and ultimately lose faith in one another. Splintering political parties can’t contain the damage. Violence begins to seem logical, even necessary. And the press can fuel this distrust with conspiracy theories and extremist spin; the antebellum press wasn’t in the business of objectivity — and it mattered.
The destructive power of the press becomes even more marked when spread with new technologies. In the 1850s, the telegraph confronted Americans with a steady stream of virtually instant information: contradictory, confusing, overlapping and inaccurate, it scrambled and intensified the political climate. Today, social media is doing the same. At its heart, democracy is a continuing conversation between politicians and the public; it should come as no surprise that dramatic changes in the modes of conversation cause dramatic changes in democracies themselves.
At the center of this conversation is the United States Congress, the only institution in which representatives from throughout the nation come together to hash out national policy. In the 1850s, a crisis over fundamental American values and institutions — the slavery crisis — eroded the process of debate and compromise that gives Congress its purpose and power. In 2018, a crisis over different fundamentals — immigration, the rule of law, the status and safety of women and people of color — is doing much the same. If Congress’s checkered past teaches us anything on this score, it teaches this: A dysfunctional Congress can close off a vital arena for national dialogue, leaving us vulnerable in ways that we haven’t yet begun to fathom.
Joanne B. Freeman is a professor of history and American studies at Yale, a co-host of the history podcast “BackStory” and the author of the forthcoming book “The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War.”
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