The Wall Street Journal
The 19th-century ‘golden age’ of the Senate was also an era when violence among representatives was routine.The ‘emotional logic of disunion’ meant more to the South than slavery, states’ rights or material self-interest
Congressman Preston S. Brooks attacks Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate chamber, 22 May 1856. PHOTO: SARIN IMAGES/GRANGER
Why do people vote against their own self-interest? The phenomenon infuriated Republican editor William Allen White, who in the 1890s denounced his Populist neighbors in a blistering essay called “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” It dismayed liberal Thomas Frank, who borrowed White’s title for a book that puzzled over why Kansas had turned so Republican by the early 21st century. It has flummoxed present-day Democrats, who keep waiting for working-class voters to discover they’ve been conned by Donald Trump.
Much of the answer lies in how the question is framed. It presumes that material self-interest is the only kind that really matters. The Populists were driving successful entrepreneurs out of Kansas with their socialist laws, White complained. The Republicans were cutting the social safety net from beneath ordinary Americans, Mr. Frank argued. Mr. Trump’s tax reform favors the rich, the Democrats assert, and his trade war will destroy jobs in the very industries he promised to restore. All this was or might well be true, but still people voted the way they did.
THE FIELD OF BLOOD
By Joanne B. Freeman
FSG, 450 pages, $28
FSG, 450 pages, $28
Joanne B. Freeman helps explain why, in a fascinating book on a seemingly different subject. Ms. Freeman is the author of “Affairs of Honor,” about dueling and related matters in the early American republic; “The Field of Blood” pushes the frontier of violence a few decades further into the 19th century. And it demonstrates the historic truth of an observation by black activist H. Rap Brown in the 1960s: “Violence is a part of America’s culture; it is as American as cherry pie.” The duelists, bullies and brawlers of Ms. Freeman’s tale aren’t figures from the margins of society; they occupy its very center: the Congress of the United States. The author’s research uncovered at least 80 incidents of violence between members of Congress in the three decades before the Civil War.
Identifying these took no little digging, for congressional violence occupied an ethical limbo. Individual members, especially from the South, insisted on maintaining reputations for brooking no insults. But at a time when the larger American culture was trying to contain violence—by passing anti-dueling laws, for instance—blood on the floor of the Capitol made Congress as an institution look bad. Thus the official journal of the legislature elided or euphemized most tussles. Many newspapers (in those days often party organs) contributed to the coverup.
But Ms. Freeman found an informant: Benjamin French was a clerk in the House of Representatives, a frustrated politico and a gossipy diarist. From the 1830s until after the Civil War, French filled in what the House journal and the Washington newspapers filtered out. Besides adding detail, French and his diary provide continuity to Ms. Freeman’s story. Her cast of characters is colorful but at times unwieldy, and French helps anchor things and move them along.
The period described in the book was the golden age of the Senate, when giants Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster waged rhetorical battle over the meaning of democracy, liberty and the Constitution. Ms. Freeman’s preference though, is for parliamentarians who battled with real weapons. Her favorite—“the hands-down winner of the Frequent Weapon Wielder award,” as she puts it—is John Dawson, a Louisiana Democrat who didn’t feel dressed without a bowie knife and pistol, both of which he employed to emphasize political points.
From the safe distance of the present, the hijinks Ms. Freeman reports can seem good fun. And often they were treated that way in the contemporary press, when they were treated at all. The author includes cartoons lampooning the pretensions of duelists and the ludicrousness of congressmen wrestling in the aisles of their chambers.
Yet to those involved, the fighting was serious business. Reputations for courage and honor had to be acquired and defended; in the infancy of American democracy, voters rewarded men who stood up for themselves—and, by extension, for their constituents. This was especially true in sections of the country where violence or its threat was part of daily life. As Ms. Freeman points out, white rule in the South continually depended on violence, actual or potential, against slaves. In the West, violence drove Indian tribes off their land and made it available to settlers. Andrew Jackson, an offstage figure in Ms. Freeman’s tale, was a hard-scrabble Carolina kid who first made his reputation in Tennessee as an Indian fighter. He became a national hero by defeating the British at New Orleans in 1815. When he ran for president in the 1820s, many Easterners were appalled to learn he had killed a man in a duel. Westerners and Southerners took the opposite view, praising Jackson for avenging an insult to his wife.
At one point, Ms. Freeman details an 1838 duel between William Graves of Kentucky and Jonathan Cilley of Maine. Until the 1830s, slavery had been one bone of contention between North and South, but not the only or always most important one. South Carolina as late as 1833 threatened to leave the Union over taxes—to wit, the federal tariff. But slavery gradually pushed other issues aside, and the debate over slavery acquired moral overtones often absent earlier. Northern abolitionists denounced slavery as evil, and slaveholders as sinners. Southerners responded with an ideology of slavery as a beneficent institution and condemned abolitionists for trying to start a war.
This weaponization of morality provided context for the duel between Graves and Cilley. As in all such matters, personalities played a large role. Cilley was unusually pugnacious for a New Englander; Graves, in the words of a Northern congressman, was a “Kentucky rowdie.” Cilley didn’t like the swagger of Southerners and their hair-trigger habit of threatening violence if they didn’t get their way; he decided to call their bluff, starting with Graves. Words were exchanged and a challenge issued. It was accepted, and the dueling ground was chosen and prepared.
The two men squared off. Or rather each turned sideways, to present a narrower target. Unusually they chose rifles, rather than pistols. They stood 80 paces apart. The duelists’ seconds, hoping to keep their principals from actually getting killed, took extra-long paces to increase the distance between the antagonists.
The signal was given. Both men fired. Both missed.
The seconds huddled, trying to negotiate an end to the affair. But after 20 minutes the negotiations failed.
Again the signal was given. Again both men fired. Again both missed. Once more the seconds negotiated. Once more they failed.
On the third round Graves’s bullet hit Cilley. It severed an artery, and Cilley died within minutes.
As it happened, Cilley’s death was the only fatality in a duel between congressional representatives. But other acts of violence were almost lethal. The one that gained the most attention occurred in 1856. Charles Sumner, a vehement abolitionist from Massachusetts, delivered a speech in the Senate that excoriated the South for its efforts to spread slavery into the Western territories. Sumner identified Andrew Butler of South Carolina as a leader of this effort, and he insulted Butler in the most personal terms.
Preston Brooks, kin to Butler and a South Carolina member of the House, decided to defend the honor of family, state and region by attacking Sumner. He strode into the Senate carrying a heavy cane; finding Sumner at his desk, he began beating him about the head and shoulders. Sumner tried to rise from his desk but got tangled in it, giving Brooks additional time to bludgeon him. Before he ceased, Brooks had nearly killed Sumner.
Ms. Freeman’s book goes far toward explaining why there was a Civil War. She doesn’t put it so directly, but her evidence makes clear that by the time the war came, its causes transcended slavery. They also transcended states’ rights. And they resisted efforts at compromise based on the economic differences between North and South. By 1860 a critical mass of Southerners conceived of themselves as a people apart. (A subcritical mass of Northerners, mostly abolitionists, felt the same way, arguing the free North should cut itself loose from the slave South.) A Southern identity, based on notions of aggrieved honor, made secession all but inevitable.
Secession was not in the economic self-interest of most of those who fought for the Confederacy. The great majority of the rank and file didn’t own slaves and never reasonably hoped to. Marxists, if any still exist, might chalk this up to “false consciousness.” But those soldiers’ consciousness—as displayed, for example, in letters to loved ones—was very real to them, and it centered on a feeling that their homeland was under attack. This feeling—what Ms. Freeman calls the “emotional logic of disunion”—was more important to them than slavery, states’ rights or any rational calculation of material self-interest.
There is nothing unusual about emotions mattering more than material interest. We praise their precedence in affairs of the heart. We expect that soldiers will put love of country ahead of love of life. We shouldn’t be surprised when we observe emotions having a decisive effect in politics, past or present.
Yet we might be sobered. Ms. Freeman’s book is a good-news, bad-news story. The good news is that America survived a period of greater polarization than we experience today. The bad news is that the means of survival included the most destructive war in our nation’s history.
Mr. Brands teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. His next book, “Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster,” will be published in November.