The Field of Blood

Much of the fighting at the core of The Field of Blood is hidden between the lines of public records or scattered in personal correspondence and diaries. Finding and confirming it raised interesting questions about the trustworthiness of evidence. Of course, the craft of history relies on finding, interpreting, and evaluating things long hidden; that’s nothing new. But from the outset of this project, the rich vein of congressional violence that I was uncovering raised an obvious question: How could I track and confirm the pieces of a deliberately suppressed story?

I stumbled across that story almost by accident. Thinking of my first book—Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic—and curious about the fate of honor culture after the 1790s, I investigated a political honor dispute from a few decades later—the Cilley-Graves duel of 1838—in the hope of sensing a shift of tone or logic. I started with the letters of Cilley’s Maine colleague Representative John Fairfield. As luck would have it, Fairfield wrote to his wife frequently, sometimes daily, and many of his letters mentioned congressional violence. Congressmen rolling up their sleeves to throw a punch. Full-fledged fistfights. Henry Wise behaving like Henry Wise, often and with vigor. (Fairfield described him as “one of those men who would as soon fight as eat.”)1 Intrigued, I turned to the correspondence of other congressmen. In three months of research at the Library of Congress, I never opened a congressman’s papers without finding at least one fight or confrontation. Clearly, there was a story to tell.

Personal letters and diary entries were vital points of entry. Not only did they reveal congressional clashes, but they discussed the details: their causes, tone, and temper, their personal and political implications. Some congressmen even confessed their feelings about a clash, often in letters to their wives. Such personal insights are invaluable in trying to understand the culture of a people or an institution. It’s one thing to note a pattern of behavior in the past and quite another to grasp how people understood and experienced it.

But the very thing that gave such evidence its value—its subjectivity—presented challenges. How could I judge its truthfulness? Was Fairfield inventing stories to amuse his wife? (The thought did cross my mind.) Was he playing up or playing down what happened? The fragmentary nature of personal letters and diary entries was also problematic. They represent part of a conversation—with another person or with oneself—that relies on context and background for meaning. “It is said here that Fremont is ‘going’ to challenge Toombs” is a tantalizing bit of evidence, particularly tacked on to a letter (by Henry Wise!) as a juicy piece of gossip in a postscript. But it suggests very little in and of itself. Years later, I stumbled across its context in some letters to the New-York Evening Post editor John Bigelow. Writing to Bigelow, Ohio congressman Timothy Day urged him to convince the renowned explorer and leading Republican John C. Fremont to challenge Toombs to a duel. Toombs had insulted Fremont, who was deciding how to respond. It would “be the making” of Fremont, Day insisted, “and he cannot avoid it with honor. He must not listen to such chuckleheads as Greeley, or such pious men as Beecher. The masses like a brave man.”2 Day was focused on the masses because Fremont had just lost the presidential election of 1856 with no support from the slave states. A duelist might play well in the South; Day was thinking of Fremont’s future. The Fremont-Toombs affair (which seems to have sputtered) was bound up with electoral politics.

Given the subjectivity, incompleteness, and needle-in-a-haystack randomness of my evidence, I had to go further. The Congressional Globe was my next step. Most of the clashes underlying this book are not detailed in the Globe. Those that are there are often masked as “sudden sensations” or “unpleasantly personal” discussions. Add the enormous size of the Globe—each session of Congress produced some six thousand poorly indexed, three-columned pages of close text—and it’s easy to see how the violence has remained undercover. You have to know to look for it, you need to dig to find it, and a lot of what you’re seeking isn’t there.

My research in letters and diaries solved this problem. When I cross-checked dates and names gleaned from that evidence against the Globe, I found “unpleasantly personal” confrontations hidden in plain view. I also discovered how to scan the Globe for conflicts, which was essential given the sheer volume of text. Interspersed between lengthy speeches were occasional rapid-fire exchanges: A sentence. A very brief response. An equally brief rejoinder. Some of these exchanges proved to be moments of conflict. In time, I became so good at sight-scanning clashes that I spotted one while glancing at a record of the mid-nineteenth-century French Assembly in a Paris museum; when I translated the text, it was indeed some name-calling.

Such searching taught me how revealing a cultural document the congressional record can be. Historians don’t often mine the Globe or National Intelligencer for cultural input. They use it to track the ins and outs of specific debates; to judge the politics and politicking of individuals; to track the course of national politics; to study the institutional workings of Congress. But much like congressional violence, the culture of Congress was hiding in plain sight. What words drew objections? What actions garnered protests? How did congressmen talk to one another between their speechifying and voting? What was the tone of their conversational exchanges, and how did it vary? How did they discuss their constituents? And what about the press? When and how were individual reporters mentioned, and why? What kind of press coverage upset congressmen? What kind pleased them? How did they interact with editors and reporters? All this and more lies within the pages of the Globe, revealing the character, customs, tempo, and temper of the antebellum Congress, and offering a window into the culture of the period’s politics.

Newspapers offered similar evidence of congressional culture, but with important differences. Given the rise of a spicier style of political press coverage in this period (as well as the rise of the slavery crisis), newspapers increasingly offered evidence of personal exchanges and personalities, highlighting lines crossed and amends made. Even better, they offered editorial opinions to weigh in the balance. Sometimes newspapers even judged themselves. But how could I evaluate their truthfulness? More than once, an incident played up in the press was explicitly denied in Congress. Did John Wright (D-TN) really kick John “Bowie Knife” Potter (R-WI) in March 1858, as the Southern Argus suggested? (The Argus claimed that Wright “made a very brisk application of his pedal extremity.”) On the House floor, Potter vehemently denied it in a personal explanation. So did it happen?3 I still don’t know.

Thus the process of triangulation that I used in my research. For the most part, the incidents in this book appear in at least two of my three main forms of evidence: newspapers, the congressional record, and personal letters and diaries; or they are extensively covered in one of them. (For this very reason, the Wright-Potter kick-fest didn’t make the cut.)

The burden of proof becomes particularly challenging when detecting emotions in the historical past. How do you prove the existence of an emotion? How do you explore it in the context of its time? How do you evaluate its impact? And how do you weave that impact into a historical narrative? This was one of my foremost challenges in writing The Field of Blood. Emotions gave congressional bullying and violence their power. Humiliation, fear, shame, degradation: displayed before colleagues, friends, constituents, and a broader public, such feelings could wound a person to the core. This was particularly true in the case of congressmen whose livelihood rested on their reputation, and whose honor was bound up with the honor of all that they represented. Emotions were also contagious, boomeranging between the national center and the public through the vehicle of the press, a product of events as much as a cause of them. Then as now, strong emotions were a shaping influence on the People’s Branch, and indeed, on politics as a whole.

But they weren’t the only shaping influence. Some revisionist historians in the mid-twentieth century suggested as much, arguing that the Civil War was caused by the “emotionalism” of antebellum politics, and blaming those emotions on a “blundering generation” of politicians and politicos.4 This book makes no such claim. Emotions are only part of the story told on these pages. The degradation of violated rights did indeed cause a stream of emotions that ran powerfully and deep. But these feelings didn’t cause the war. Rather, they framed the period’s sectional crises, giving the growing rift between national sensibilities and sectional loyalties a profoundly personal impact that had political consequences. French and his contemporaries weren’t pushed into civil warfare through blind emotion. But strong emotions highlighted and shaped sectional conflicts in ways that eroded the mutual trust that bound the Union as one.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve deployed emotions in my scholarship. In Affairs of Honor, they were a vital source of evidence in tracking the cultural norms of politics at the national center in the 1790s.5 But in The Field of Blood, emotions are more than tools. They are a fundamental part of the story. They reveal the emotional logic of disunion among national lawmakers, or rather, the emotional logic of dis-Union, the wrenching experience of plotting a political path in a nation being torn in two. Disunion is a political condition. Dis-Union is the lived experience of reaching that condition, and the close consideration of shifting emotions helps to tell that story.

Benjamin Brown French was an essential starting point in my search for such evidence. Finding an eyewitness to the story that I was telling was invaluable. Finding an eyewitness who so readily expressed his thoughts and feelings on paper was providential. Of course, one person’s experience of events isn’t representative. But it can show the personal impact of change over time with powerful specificity. Sensing the lived reality of historical change requires a kind of double vision, joining an awareness of contingencies with knowledge born of hindsight. French’s feelings as portrayed in his writings helped me gain that perspective. Properly contextualized in the historical past and taken beyond the merely anecdotal, the study of emotions shows people reacting to events in a specific place and time, offering insight into how they understood and experienced those events.6 Particularly when studying a period that lies in the shadow of the Civil War, the immediacy and power of emotions is an invaluable pathway to the sense of contingency that shaped events for people living through them.

Although congressmen threatened, feared, and sometimes even expected disunion, they didn’t see war as inevitable. They fought to effect outcomes. The contingencies of the moment fueled their fires. (The word antebellum—literally “before the war”—is problematic for just this reason, though it’s hard to discuss the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s without it.) To fully grasp the logic of their decisions, we need to understand their process of discovery. We need to see events unfolding as they were lived.7 We need to join the nation on the road to civil war, a long and winding trail with no clear destination.