The Field of Blood by Joanne B. Freeman
The elevator pitch for this book is easy: it is all about the violence in Congress during the decades leading up to the Civil War—a period marked by intense turmoil. Through Benjamin Brown French’s eleven volumes of diary entries, Joanne Freeman vividly brings to life a chapter of history I was previously unfamiliar with, and she does so with remarkable insight. What I recognize best is the dysfunction of Congress today—the persistent narrative of polarization and the assumption that it causes gridlock. However, after reading this, I am convinced that the core issue is not polarization itself but a lack of will among members of Congress to fulfill their duties effectively.
But I digress. This is not about Congress in the 21st century. This is about Congress in the 1830s, a time when that august body was full of men who were truly representative of the people they came from. Some were notable, like John Quincy Adams, a former president, while others came and went without leaving even an inkling of a record of their passing, not even a portrait. The country was already divided between North and South, and Freeman explores this theme of divergent cultures throughout. Her use of French’s journals illuminates violence in Congress — and, really, in everyday life — during the antebellum period, and it tells us that institutional breakdown and political intimidation are neither new nor far from the surface.
One particularly colorful story, which actually comes out of Arkansas, demonstrates the flavor of the time:
“The Arkansas House deserves special mention. In 1837, when a representative insulted the Speaker during debate, the Speaker stepped down from his platform, bowie knife in hand, and killed him. Expelled and tried for murder, he was acquitted for excusable homicide and reelected, only to pull his knife on another legislator during debate, though this time the sound of colleagues cocking pistols stopped him cold.”
The Speaker’s name was John Wilson, and the man he killed on the floor of the Arkansas General Assembly was Representative Joseph J. Anthony. Newspapers across the United States covered the incident. Decades later, Frederick Douglass recalled the killing and noted that the evil reputation cast abroad by that event still clung to the fair name of Arkansas.
French himself is one of the book’s great pleasures — though he didn’t arrive in Washington City as a man in love with it. Freeman tells us that French set out for the capital in 1833, driven more by debt than ambition, leaving his wife behind in New Hampshire and trundling south by stagecoach and steamboat to take a clerk’s job in the House of Representatives. What he found there, over the course of decades, transformed him. He became a cheerful Yankee deeply attached to Washington City during his lengthy sojourn there as a congressional clerk. He was a friend to many of the power brokers of the time, especially President Franklin Pierce, but also familiar with Abraham Lincoln. He even appears standing behind the President in a photograph taken at Gettysburg. And in one of the book’s most poignant moments, French visited Lincoln as he lay dying at the Petersen House, comforting Mary Todd Lincoln and Robert Lincoln. In his diary entry the day after the shooting, French recalled: “I went up to the house where the President lay. He was surrounded by the members of his cabinet, physicians, Generals, members of Congress, etc. I stood at his bedside for a short time. He was breathing very heavily, and I was told, what I could myself see, that there was no hope for him.”
The man was something of a “Where’s Waldo” of the era — present at all sorts of historical events, almost completely by accident, including, just weeks before the assassination, pushing John Wilkes Booth back during what Freeman believes was Booth’s first attempt on Lincoln’s life at the second inauguration.
In The Field of Blood, we see a Congress in which intimidation and a culture of violence were part of daily life. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by cocked pistols, mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. The book’s most gripping set piece may be the Cilley-Graves duel of 1838 — the only time two sitting members of the House of Representatives killed each other in a duel. On a cold afternoon on a dueling pitch outside Washington, Representatives Jonathan Cilley of Maine and William Graves of Kentucky traded fire with Kentucky rifles, missing and reloading, until Cilley finally fell, fatally wounded. The House investigated, produced three conflicting reports, and punished no one. Freeman uses the episode to show how the code of honor had become so tangled with sectional pride that even men with no personal quarrel could end up on a killing field, bound by obligations none of them could easily refuse.
Southern “bullying” was a broader strategy — an outgrowth of a culture in which Southerners spoke and treated Northerners as effete cowards. Northerners tried to stanch their losses with parliamentary rules, earning what John Quincy Adams dismissively called “lamentation speeches.” The most famous episode of Southern aggression — familiar to many readers even before they pick up this book — is the 1856 caning of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who beat Sumner on the Senate floor with a metal-tipped cane until it shattered. Freeman’s treatment of the caning is illuminating precisely because she places it in context: it was not an aberration but the logical endpoint of a culture of intimidation that had been building for decades. What shocked the North was not just the brutality, but that Brooks had done it on the Senate floor itself — crossing a line that even the roughest congressional combatants had generally observed.
Representatives saw themselves as truly representing their home states and their regions, and every insult and threat in Washington was seen as an insult and threat against the North or South — and against the home state of the representative personally. The local press played a surprisingly central role in all of this, often suppressing the violence through euphemism and printing a sanitized version of events. In contrast, as the national press — and the telegraph — developed, greater transparency actually made things worse: more rapid reporting home incentivized congressmen to stand up against insults from their opponents rather than quietly absorb them. The partisan press amplified this dynamic by weaponizing conspiracy thinking on both sides, peddling theories about a brutal Slave Power on one hand or ruthless Northern aggressors trying to seize control of the nation on the other.
Does any of this sound familiar?
It should. Freeman draws explicit parallels to our own day, noting that she realized she was writing a book about extreme polarization, splintering national political parties, a partisan press spinning conspiracy theories, people losing faith in national institutions, and Americans losing trust in each other. In her own words: “Extreme polarization; splintering political parties; distrust in national institutions; rampant conspiracy theories; a powerful new technology of communication — the telegraph; an increasingly dysfunctional Congress: this cluster of problems drove Americans not only to distrust their government, but to distrust each other.”
In a year when we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country, there is great value in remembering that our history has not been a continuous arc of glorious improvement but a constant struggle between the virtues and vices of human nature. Few places demonstrate this more vividly than the violence in Congress during the antebellum years. Freeman’s story is ultimately one of institutional failure — of a constitutional system strained nearly to breaking by men who used the mechanisms of self-government as weapons against each other. And yet the system held, at least long enough to elect Lincoln and fight the war that finally settled what congressional violence could not. It is worth remembering, as we mark 250 years, that our Constitution splits, separates, and checks power among different institutions, at different levels of government, and among different governments altogether. As Madison wrote famously in Federalist No. 51, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” and nowhere is that more clear than in the violence on the floor of Congress in the early years of our republic, and in many ways I see it as among the most insightful innovations of the Founders’ system of government. The system survived not because it was perfect, but because it was designed to absorb the worst of us — and, eventually, to outlast it.
The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War
History
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 11, 2018
Hardcover
480 pages
Historian Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery.
These fights didn’t happen in a vacuum. Freeman’s dramatic accounts of brawls and thrashings tell a larger story of how fisticuffs and journalism, and the powerful emotions they elicited, raised tensions between North and South and led toward war. In the process, she brings the antebellum Congress to life, revealing its rough realities―the feel, sense, and sound of it―as well as its nation-shaping import. Funny, tragic, and rivetingly told, The Field of Blood offers a front-row view of congressional mayhem and sheds new light on the careers of John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and other luminaries, as well as introducing a host of lesser-known but no less fascinating men. The result is a fresh understanding of the workings of American democracy and the bonds of Union on the eve of their greatest peril.
About Daniel