7

REPUBLICANS MEET THE SLAVE POWER

CHARLES SUMNER AND BEYOND (1855–61)

French was a Republican, but a moderate one. As he put it in 1860, he was “an ultra Union man.”1 Even as he championed Northern rights, he desperately wanted to save the Union—at least, the Union as he now understood it, with the North no longer in thrall to the South. As sincerely as he supported the Republican cause, if the party went too far, French wouldn’t go with it. “When Republicanism becomes in the least treasonable,” he wrote in 1859, “I am no longer a Republican. My Republicanism teaches me to stand by my Country & her Constitution.”2

French’s Republicanism was grounded on a moral balancing act between rights and order. He saw events in Kansas as ample proof of an entrenched Slave Power plot to spread slavery and deny Northern rights, yet he deplored the abolitionist John Brown’s extreme actions in fighting that foe. Brown’s massacre of proslavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, in 1856, and his attempt to launch a slave revolt by seizing a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 outraged French. As much as he admired Brown’s bravery, he could “feel no admiration for the high qualities of any man who uses those qualities to overturn the Constitution and Laws of my Country!”3 Along similar lines, although French didn’t want slavery “to extend one inch into territory now free,” he believed that the Fugitive Slave Act should be enforced in the North because it was the law. Hearing of a violent attempt to free a fugitive slave in Boston in 1854, French poured abuse on the abolitionists Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips, whose speechifying had helped to rouse an angry crowd. “[O]pposed as I am to hanging people in general,” he told his brother, “I really should glory in putting the ropes around their traitor necks—pulling the caps over their traitor eyes, & launching their traitor souls into hell—the only fit place for them!! Savage, aint it?”4

In essence, French was a member of the leave-the-South-alone school of thought. As much as he wanted to uphold Northern rights and interests and prevent the spread of slavery into free territory, he didn’t want to violate Southern rights under the Constitution by “a single hair’s breadth.”5 He was more than willing to let the slave regime solve its own slavery problems, as long as it didn’t push beyond the bounded South.6

There were many such people in the Republican ranks. People who wanted to quash the Slave Power and champion the North, but who weren’t all that eager to stamp out slavery in the South. People who wanted to defend Northern rights without endangering the Union. People who saw the Union as dependent on a pact between North and South that had to be upheld. There were other kinds of people in the Republican Party too: racists who wanted to protect free soil for white men; radicals promoting equal rights between the races; nativists suspicious of anti-American influences; working-class and middle-class people who distrusted the “money-power.”7

The Republican Party was born of this mix, but only gradually. Although the opening of the Thirty-fourth Congress in December 1855 saw the arrival of 108 anti-Nebraska men in the House and 15 in the Senate, there was no single party banner uniting them in a shared cause.8 Some were Know Nothings; by then, the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant movement had cohered as the American Party. Some considered themselves Free Soilers. Some called themselves Independent Democrats. Others were ex-Whigs who had broken with their party as it slipped out of existence, fractured by the slavery debate. Still others simply considered themselves an opposition to the Democratic majority. And some had already adopted the Republican label. Regardless of their party name, many of these people were antislavery and anti-administration.

As inchoate as this new party was, the arrival of an explicitly Northern opposition had an enormous impact on Congress. Not only did the number of fights spike precipitously after 1855, but their dynamics fundamentally changed. Republicans promoted themselves as a new kind of Northerner who was willing to fight back, and they were true to their word. They fought to wrest control of Congress and the Union from the Slave Power.9

Not surprisingly, the most radical members of this new party were the most confrontational.10 John Parker Hale, Zachariah Chandler, Benjamin Wade, Elihu Washburne, Henry Wilson, Owen Lovejoy, John Covode, James Lane, Galusha Grow, John Potter, William Fessenden, and, of course, the ever fight-ready Joshua Giddings were essentially Northern fighting men, hoping to radicalize their party and galvanize the public by displaying the emotional power of Northern aggression. They accomplished their purpose with a potent blend of extreme rhetoric and—in some cases—an apparent willingness to defend their principles with their fists. Their bold antislavery talk, the kind that had subjected Giddings to at least seven physical assaults, was virtually guaranteed to provoke a Southern backlash.

These fights served a more complex purpose than past imbroglios sparked by men such as Giddings, Adams, and Hale to denigrate slavery by putting slaveholder savagery on display. Republicans were trying to do something concrete; their numbers were large enough to affect and possibly effect policy and the balance of power in the Union. They also were a nascent party that desperately needed widespread public support. And the core agenda of that party—mentioned in countless petitions and resolves from their constituents—was combating the Slave Power plot to dominate the federal government and spread slavery throughout the Union. Republican aggression in Congress and the Southern belligerence that it provoked served the Republican agenda; in a sense, it was campaigning. By promoting their cause in the face of raging threats, or by provoking those threats, Republicans weren’t just proving a point. They were engaging in party politics.

Admittedly, by 1855 the threshold of fight-worthy offenses for congressional slavery supporters was low and getting lower all the time. They, too, believed that they were fighting a powerful foe: Northern aggression was threatening to strangle if not extinguish the South’s hold on the Union, and perhaps even to infiltrate the South.11 By Southern logic, their interests and honor required forceful action, and fight Southerners did. By threatening, insulting, and even assaulting their foes, they, too, were promoting their cause and drumming up support. For both North and South, violence was politics.

Which brings us to the most dramatic innovation in congressional violence after 1855: Northerners fought back.12 When confronted by screaming slaveholders wielding weapons, Republicans stood firm, often exchanging blow for blow, sometimes with weapons, often with numbers. More than once, when a Republican drove Southerners into a fury, brother Republicans rushed to the rescue, armed and ready to fight.

These men stood their ground deliberately, aggressively, defiantly. They did so knowing that the simple fact of their resistance sent a powerful message. It revealed the presence of a united North willing to fight for its interests and rights. The very act of speaking in the face of howling resistance was a declaration of Northern rights, because it asserted the right of free speech on the floor, a right long violated by Southerners.

The Republican war for free speech wasn’t purely symbolic. To promote their party, to get things done, to serve their constituents, to fully represent the North, and to fulfill the pledges that had won them office, Republican congressmen had to say their piece; they had to confront and demand and accuse. Pledged to combat the Slave Power’s hold on the federal government, they were pledged to fight bullying Southerners as best they could.

Southerners were equally bound to resist Northern aggression, and Republicans were Northern aggression personified, as well as a fount of dangerous words; to Southern slaveholders, Republican antislavery rhetoric was personally insulting, sectionally degrading, and a threat to the security and stability of the South that had to be silenced. Most congressional clashes between 1855 and 1861 centered on this core dynamic. Republicans propounded their cause; slaveholders tried to gag them with threats and violence; and Republicans fought back. The arrival of a Northern opposition in Congress marked the start of a death struggle over free speech on the floor, which was in truth a fight for control of Congress, and thereby for the fate of the nation.

Free speech was the most powerful weapon in the congressional arsenal.13 Any words spoken loudly enough to be heard by the press could be heard by the nation. Free speech was also a much heralded sacred right, the essence of democratic representation. A congressman without free speech couldn’t fully represent his constituents, as victims of bullying and their supporters said time and again. Cilley said so in the midst of his wrangle. Adams championed that truth as a holy cause for years. Through Adams’s persistence and the prodding of the press, the Northern public eventually awoke to this fundamental violation of their rights and rose up in outrage against such degradation to demand their due. Republicans followed in Adams’s footsteps, championing the right of free speech on the floor by exercising it often and with feeling, even fighting for it when necessary, sometimes explicitly declaring themselves defenders of that right. They did so with an approving Northern public looking on.14

Even as they fought for their rights, Republicans appealed to that public by highlighting their bravery in Congress and its implications. During yet another contentious contest for Speaker in 1859, when Southerners threatened violence if a Republican won the post, the ever sardonic Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) said that he didn’t blame Southerners for their threats, “for they have tried it fifty times, and fifty times they have found weak and recreant tremblers in the North who have been affected by it.” When Stevens’s quip brought Martin Crawford (D-GA) to his feet uttering threats, Stevens added, “That is right. That is the way that they frightened us before.” At this, Crawford headed toward Stevens, fists waving, muttering in an undertone that had clear implications. Within seconds, Republicans and Southern Democrats were rushing down the aisles, several of them reaching for guns. But despite what the Globe characteristically called “great confusion,” nothing happened, people returned to their seats, and Stevens dismissed the matter as “a momentary breeze,” raising a laugh.15

Republicans were announcing that they were a different kind of Northerner, and they had to be. Both sides in this battle were playing for the rafters, appealing to their publics to sustain them with support. And their pleas worked. Increasingly, Americans sent their congressmen a clear and consistent message in mass meetings, private letters, petitions, the press, and the ballot box: fight for our rights. Fight.

Thus the fight-filled Thirty-fourth, Thirty-fifth, and Thirty-sixth Congresses, and thus their depiction in the independent press. North and South alike, newspapers emphasized the surge in violence as the ultimate proof of Kansas-fueled sectional conspiracies to dominate the Union—proof of a powerful kind, because it gave those conspiracies names and faces. Many Americans saw their worst fears brought to life on the floor of Congress as congressmen embodied the crisis of the Union, clashing in armed combat over sectional rights. In the process, Americans lost faith in the institution of Congress.

They also lost faith in one another. The full impact of this perfect storm of conspiracy theories, policy conflicts, physical violence, and press coverage was growing distrust between North and South. Not only did the public become ever more distrustful of their sectional foe, but congressmen did too. The fact that large numbers of congressmen armed themselves in this period speaks volumes. These men were prepared for sectional warfare in the halls of Congress. They believed that the driving impact of aggression on aggression could spark a firestorm that would bring the Union down, and if things went that far, they considered it their duty to fight with and for their people. To reverse a much quoted aphorism: politics was becoming war by other means.16 When congressmen themselves lost faith in the institution of Congress and in one another—when they no longer believed that the institution was powerful enough to prevent sectional bloodshed within the Capitol—a line had been crossed. Resolution would have to come from elsewhere, if not from mediation, then in open war.

In the midst of this sectional strife, French remained moderate, though at a time of violent extremes, the nature of moderation changed. As always, he politicked and paraded on behalf of his cause, organizing mass mailings of Republican pamphlets and campaigning for presidents. As always, he worried about the fate of the nation. As late as 1860, he declared himself “for concession & conciliation.”17 As Grand Master of the Knights Templar of the United States, he even tried to yoke Masonic brotherhood to the cause of Union.

But French was also publishing antislavery poems and protests. He socialized primarily with Republicans, some of them abolitionists. Joshua Giddings remained a favorite; French sometimes stood near Giddings’s seat on the floor to hear him speak. Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the abolitionist National Era, was also a good friend, as was the New Hampshire antislavery advocate Amos Tuck, one of the founders of the Republican Party, whose daughter Ellen married French’s son Frank in 1861. Tuck introduced French to the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier; after talking about politics and poetry for a while, the two men wandered out to measure an enormous tree stump.18 And of course, French spent hours with New England Republicans; at times, his social calendar reads like a roster of the New Hampshire delegation, now devoid of Democrats.19

Perhaps most striking of all during these years, French began to consider the possibility of disunion. As much as he hoped to avoid that final outcome, he felt that a Union dominated by the Slave Power was no Union at all. If disunion was to come “merely because the South cannot have all the old cow’s teats to suck,” he wrote in 1860, then he could only say, “in John Quincy Adams’s words ‘Let it come!’” This was the period when French published his ode to Banks without its conditional “Then” in the title.

Like countless others, French now saw the firm assertion of Northern rights against the Slave Power’s encroaching grasp as fundamental to the Union. Many people were far more radical than French in demanding those rights. French was more anti–Slave Power than he was antislavery, as were many Northerners.20 These people experienced these years of crisis as a sectional power struggle more than a battle against an immoral wrong, although a sense of moral rectitude powered their resistance. But however individual Northerners interpreted the crisis, when it came to the balance of power in the Union, for most of them there was no turning back.

Until the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861—and even beyond—French hoped that the Union would survive this trial as it had survived many trials before. But even as he prayed for peace, he was preparing for war. Events in 1860 pushed even this man of moderation to extremes, compelling him to arm himself to defend the Republican cause.

THE MOST VIOLENT CONGRESS IN OUR HISTORY

In the months before the opening of the Thirty-fourth Congress in December 1855, Americans North, South, and West predicted tough times ahead. The reasons were many. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had divided the nation into two warring factions. Union-rending conspiracies seemed to be afoot. Events in Kansas offered bloody evidence of those plots in action, flooding a watchful national audience with graphic images of slave-state and free-state settlers in open combat. Politicos in Washington were prepared to go to the wall on Kansas’s slavery status. A Northern opposition was rising in Congress. And as if this wasn’t enough, a presidential election would take place the following fall. After discussing Kansas with “knowing ones” in the summer of 1855, French felt sure that the Union would soon “receive such a shock as it never received before.” If so, he was ready “to stand by the North in resisting the unjustifiable attempts now making by the South to add more slave states to this Union.”21

People throughout the nation echoed French’s thoughts. In Massachusetts, Henry Wilson, a Know Nothing on his way to becoming a Republican, had dire predictions for the coming session of Congress. Wilson, a shoemaker, schoolteacher, and newspaper editor who had found his way into politics in the 1840s, had spent a week in June at the national convention of the nascent nativistic American Party, bound and determined to “blow the whole thing to hell and damnation” unless they adopted an anti–Slave Power plank in their platform.22 When the party refused, Wilson led antislavery Northerners out of the convention, though not without resistance; during one of his speeches, he was threatened by a gun-waving Virginian. “At Philadelphia, for eight days, I met the armed, drunken bullies of the Black Power, without shrinking,” he wrote to the abolitionist Theodore Parker in July, “and I hope to do so at the next session of Congress, if it shall be necessary.” The South had to understand that threats of disunion, civil war, or personal violence wouldn’t carry. “The next Congress will be the most violent one in our history,” Wilson predicted. “[I]f violence and bloodshed come, let us not falter, but do our duty, even if we fall upon the floors of Congress.”23 By 1855, this once shocking image of bloody combat in the halls of Congress had become commonplace.

At the other end of the Union, Laurence Keitt (D-SC) drew the same conclusions. Keitt, a self-described man of “nervous irritability” soon to be a congressional frequent fighter, was a fire-eating extremist who was passionately protective of Southern honor.24 He predicted a “strong struggle” in the pending session, a chance to “marry one’s name to mighty events, to mighty measures,” and to the South’s “immortal future.” Writing from London, Keitt’s friend Virginian Ambrose Dudley Mann agreed. Because of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the “time has arrived when the South is compelled to measure strength with the North.” If Northerners tried to block slavery from western territories, make Kansas a free state, or repeal the Fugitive Slave Act, “it would be the duty of the South to take possession of the Capitol … and expel from it the traitors to the Constitution.”25

The same rhetoric pervaded the election for Speaker. When slaveholders began to grill candidate Nathaniel Banks (A-MA) about his antislavery views (among other things, pressing him on his “let the Union slide” statement, which had been far more hesitant when he uttered it and was transformed into a rallying cry after the fact), the second-termer Preston Brooks (D-SC) took a stand. Resistance to Northern aggression should begin among the South’s appointed leaders in the House, Brooks said. “We are standing upon slave territory, surrounded by slave States, and pride, honor, patriotism, all command us, if a battle is to be fought, to fight it here upon this floor.”26

Despite such talk, there was no bloodshed during the speakership election, though there were uproars aplenty and two assaults, both against members of the press.27 On December 21, William “Extra Billy” Smith (D-VA)—so called because of the extra fees he raked in as a government contractor—assaulted the Evening Star editor William “Dug” Wallach for calling him a Know Nothing in his paper. The two clinched on the Avenue, and although Wallach routinely carried a “big knife, with which to settle such little controversies,” the two men did little more than scratch and claw each other, though one of Wallach’s fingers was “catawompously chawed up” by Smith.28 (Noting the incident, the British foreign minister warned the folks back home that no foreign minister should ever—under any circumstances—go down to the House floor; congressmen were too dangerous.)29 A few weeks later, when the New-York Tribune denounced Albert Rust (D-AR) for trying to disqualify Banks for the speakership, Rust assaulted the Tribune editor Horace Greeley twice, first punching him in the head on the Capitol grounds, then hitting him with his cane near the National Hotel a short while later. (Rust must have been contemplating a duel because, before striking a blow, he asked Greeley if he was a non-combatant.) Greeley did as many embattled Republicans would do for years to come, portraying himself as a heroic enemy of the Slave Power. “I came here with a clear understanding that it was about an even chance whether I should or should not be allowed to go home alive,” he wrote in the Tribune. Even so, he would stay true to the cause, refusing to run “if ruffians waylay and assail me.”30 William Pitt Fessenden believed him. “I do not think he would run to save his life,” he concluded after dining with Greeley shortly after the incident.31 Greeley and a “fighting party of Northern men” went armed thereafter. In private, Greeley let down his fighting-man mask, admitting that he was “too sick to be out of bed, too crazy to sleep, and … surrounded by horrors.”32

It took two months and 132 ballots to resolve the election, but ultimately, something remarkable happened: the House elected an antislavery Northern Speaker: Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, another Know Nothing on his way to becoming a Republican. Banks’s election was a stunning victory for the nascent Republican Party. When it was announced on the evening of February 2, 1856, the Republican side of the House erupted in a shout of triumph followed by hearty handshakes and heartfelt embraces. The stalwart Joshua Giddings, the oldest House member with unbroken service, was given the honor of administering the oath of office. “Our victory is most glorious,” he wrote home the next day. “I have reached the highest point of my ambition … I am satisfied.”33

Even in victory, the Republican press predicted trials to come. “There is a North, thank God; and for once it has asserted its right to be a power under the Constitution,” cheered The New York Times.34 “We shall see whether or no the North can take care of the Union.” Such concern was well founded given the feelings of at least some Southerners, as reflected in a letter to Speaker Banks. Not long after his election, he received a two-page string of insults signed “John Swanson & 40,000 others.” Condemning Banks as “a poor Shit ass trator tory Coward,” Swanson told him to “Quit the US God damn you and your party if you don’t like us.” (And in a sentence that raises interesting questions about Swanson’s image of hell, he swore that “Hell is full of Such men as You.… So full that their feet Stick out at the Window.”)35 Banks must have been amused, or at least struck, because he saved the letter. Doubtless it wasn’t his only piece of hate mail. Nor was it Swanson’s only commentary on the Thirty-fourth Congress; he had nothing but praise for Preston Brooks (D-SC) for caning “the Damn Rascal liar tory and Traitor Sumner.”36

From the moment that Brooks inflicted his savage blows, the caning of the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) on May 22, 1856, has been steeped in meaning. Generations of historians have plumbed its depths in explaining the coming of the Civil War and exploring American values at a peak moment of strife.37 But in the distance of time, its full context has been lost. As violent as it was, Sumner’s caning wasn’t shocking only because it was violent. It was the nature of the caning’s violence, its timing, and its connection to swirling conspiracy theories that gave the assault its full sectional punch and national impact. That impact, in turn, profoundly affected public expectations of congressmen, and in so doing changed the workings of Congress.

The caning was prompted by Sumner’s “Crime Against Kansas” speech, a monumental effort that took five hours over May 19 and 20, filling 112 printed pages. Two months past, Sumner had been itching to confront the “Slave oligarchy.”38 His speech fulfilled that goal and more.

This wasn’t Sumner’s first oratorical stab at the Slave Power, nor would it be his last. Like most of his speeches, it was polished to a sheen before delivery, typeset, and ready for mass mailing as he stood to speak. As was his habit, Sumner was reaching for a broad national audience, hoping to rouse widespread public support for his cause. In many ways, given the unlikelihood that persuasion would solve the seemingly irresolvable slavery problem, Sumner wasn’t really speaking to the Senate at all.

With that larger audience in mind, Sumner let loose. He first discussed the brutal “rape” of Kansas by proslavery forces, and condemned Southern “plantation manners” and his Southern colleagues’ habit of “trampling” congressional rules “under foot”—an echo of John Quincy Adams’s complaint of fifteen years past.39 The next day, he outlined proposed remedies for the Kansas problem, demanding its admittance to the Union as a free state. Biting, defiant, and filled with sexual innuendo about slaveholders and their love of slavery, Sumner’s speech was a tour de force. It also fulfilled the wishes of many of his constituents and supporters, who had been urging him to strike at “Southern bravado” and “crush these fellows into submission.”40

Throughout his speech, Sumner took special aim at three senators who had attacked him during the Kansas-Nebraska debate two years past—James Mason (D-VA), Stephen Douglas (D-IL), and Andrew Butler (D-SC), a relative of Preston Brooks—insulting them personally as well as politically. Many Southerners felt the sting. “Mr. Sumner ought to be knocked down, and his face jumped into,” declared Representative Thomas Rivers (A-TE).41 Butler’s friends felt that he was “compelled to flog” Sumner.42 Even as Sumner had been drawing his speech to a close, Douglas—pacing impatiently in the back of the chamber—had muttered, “That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damn fool.”43 Given that Sumner wasn’t a fighting man, he seemed to be asking Southerners “to kick him as we would a dog in the street.”44 Fearing that was the case, a few of Sumner’s friends asked to walk him home, but he refused.

Charles Sumner, ca. 1855–65 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The next day, Brooks decided to take action. A newspaper account of Sumner’s speech confirmed that he had insulted Butler, South Carolina, and indeed, the entire South. Considering it his duty as a South Carolina representative to resent the dishonor, Brooks decided to beat Sumner rather than challenge him to a duel because he knew that the New Englander would never accept a challenge and because sending a duel challenge “would subject me to legal penalties more severe than would be imposed for a simple assault and battery.”45 Here was the dark logic of the anti-dueling law. Better to beat Sumner than to run the more severe legal risk of challenging him to a duel.

So on May 22, as Sumner sat at his Senate desk franking copies of his Kansas speech for mailing, Brooks entered the Senate, cane in hand. Noticing several women in the chamber, he sat down and impatiently waited for them to leave. (Pointing to the last remaining woman, he asked a Senate secretary, “Can’t you manage to get her out?” When the secretary joked that ousting her would be “ungallant” because she was “very pretty,” Brooks took a second look and replied, “Yes; she is pretty, but I wish she would go.”) Finally, the moment was right. Walking up to Sumner’s desk, Brooks declared: “Mr. Sumner, I read your speech with care and as much impartiality as was possible and I felt it was my duty to tell you that you have libeled my state and slandered a relative who is aged and absent and I am come to punish you for it.” At that, he raised his cane and began to beat Sumner over the head, inflicting more than a dozen brutal blows before his cane shattered, with his friend Laurence Keitt fending off intervention.

Preston Brooks, ca. 1856, allegedly taken shortly after he caned Sumner (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

This 1856 print captures Northern outrage at Sumner’s caning. Representative Laurence Keitt, hiding a gun behind his back, stands to the left of Brooks and Sumner, preventing intervention. In the background, Senator John J. Crittenden is being held back. (Arguments of the Chivalry by Winslow Homer. Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Stunned and bloodied, Sumner struggled to get away, but was held fast by his desk, which was bolted to the floor; he ultimately wrenched it free before collapsing. As luck would have it, the elderly Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky—who had watched Jonathan Cilley die in 1838—happened to be in the Senate chamber, and he ran toward Brooks yelling, “Don’t kill him!” But by the time he reached Sumner, Brooks had stopped. Bloody and barely conscious, Sumner was carried from the chamber.

Although Brooks couldn’t possibly have imagined the full impact of his actions before his assault, he made several choices that would amplify its power a thousandfold. Initially intending to obey the rules of congressional combat, he violated them in ways that couldn’t be forgiven. His first instinct was good: before attacking, he confirmed the precise wording of Sumner’s insults in the press. But from there his decisions went downhill.

Take, for example, his decision to attack Sumner in the Senate chamber. Physical violence on the floor was usually spontaneous; angry words or hostile charges escalated until someone jumped to his feet and headed toward his antagonist with no good intentions. Men who staged violent “collisions” in the House or Senate were usually chastised, as was Foote for arming himself before picking a fight with Benton. As people insisted after the resulting scuffle, deliberate assaults belonged on the street. Sam Houston’s 1832 caning of William Stanbery (AJ-OH) on Pennsylvania Avenue was typical of this kind of predetermined clash; before the assault, Houston had hefted his stout hickory cane in the House in full view of Stanbery as an advance warning.46 Brooks’s first impulse was in line with this tradition; he fully intended to attack Sumner out of doors. Only after two fruitless days of watching for Sumner on the Capitol grounds did he decide to confront him in the Senate, and even then he initially planned to ask Sumner to step outside.47

The powerful symbolism of a senator beaten to the ground on the Senate floor shows the wisdom of staging such attacks outdoors. Nothing that happened in the Capitol seemed purely personal, and everything that happened there could be played up by the press. This was particularly true in the context of the late 1850s, when a Southern assault against a Northern congressman in the Capitol, inflicted with calm intention, seemed like Slave Power brutality and arrogance personified. Even some Southerners felt that a line had been crossed. “All agree that if Brooks had beaten him anywhere but on the head & in the Senate, he would but have served him right,” wrote Charlotte Wise, wife of the flame-throwing Henry Wise’s cousin Henry.48 Brooks’s friend Henry Edmundson (D-VA) of Campbell-fighting fame, acting as an advisor of sorts, had good reason for questioning the wisdom of staging the confrontation in the Senate, asking a colleague for advice on the matter even as the assault began.49

Brooks also failed to make his fight fair. Of course, his most grievous sin along these lines was caning an unarmed man pinioned by his desk. But attacking that man without warning was also foul play. Unlike Houston, Brooks didn’t warn his victim of his violent intentions, nor did his confidants Edmundson and Keitt, and Sumner wasn’t known to carry weapons for self-defense. The committee report on the caning recommended the House “declare its disapprobation” of both Edmundson and Keitt for this “reprehensible” lapse, as well as recommending that Brooks be expelled for the caning.50 (A minority report suggested taking no action, claiming that the matter was a case for criminal courts.)

When it came to boosting sectional hostilities, the caning’s timing couldn’t have been better. One day past, the town of Lawrence, Kansas, founded by antislavery settlers, had been ransacked by proslavery assailants, and the press was rife with bloodshed. Newspapers were also filled with talk of the murder of a waiter at Willard’s Hotel by a California congressman. On May 8, the Southern-born Philemon Herbert (D-CA) had shot a waiter dead for refusing to serve him breakfast past the appointed hour (though not before provoking a dish-throwing, chair-tossing brawl). Even before the caning, the Northern press had portrayed the murder as proof of a “systematic” Slave Power reign of violence.51 Brooks’s attack seemed like more of the same but ten times worse. As the New Hampshire Statesman put it, the assault on Sumner had created a “hostility against the Slave Power more intense than ever.” It was another “link in the chain of flagitious outrages upon the North by which we are debased forever.”52 Violence in Congress and in Kansas were now inseparably linked.

In essence, Sumner’s caning was a final, brutal insult that drove home the meaning of a string of violent encounters, and the Northern press was quick to spread that message—very quick; thanks to the telegraph, The New York Times received its first news of the caning a mere forty-five minutes after it happened.53 The Boston Atlas heard that message loud and clear, noting: “We understand perfectly well that nothing could give [Southerners] more exquisite pleasure than to kill us all.”54 Linking the beatings of Wallach, Greeley, and Sumner with the murder at Willard’s Hotel and events in Kansas, the New York Courier and Enquirer editor James Watson Webb—now a Republican—concluded, “No reasonable man should doubt that the Slave power have unalterably determined to extend the area of their now merely local institution; and if possible to render it National. The bowie-knife, the pistol, and the bludgeon … to be used in effecting this result.”55 Webb’s column was reprinted widely, in part because, as the Lowell Daily Citizen explained, Webb, once a “highly conservative” defender of the slavery status quo, was now preaching resistance to the Slave Power with its own weapons. Webb’s conversion was a powerful story in and of itself.56 His harsh attack on the caning also earned him a letter from Brooks hinting at a duel.57

This print from the presidential election of 1856 attacks the Democratic platform as proslavery, pro-South, and pro-violence, linking “Bleeding Kansas” (in the left background) with the caning of Sumner (in the left foreground). (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Republican congressmen were just as quick to stress the caning’s meaning, as was Sumner, who seized on the power of the moment even as he was carried off the Senate floor; moments later, still bloodied from the beating, he told William Seward that he hoped it would serve the antislavery cause.58 It did. Sumner’s speech became a national sensation. The New York Times printed 40,000 copies and sold out by May 28; within a month, 90,000 copies had been sold.59 Caught up in the wellspring of outrage that surrounded the caning, Republican congressmen voiced their grievances with gusto, raising fears of violent outcomes. Hannibal Hamlin (R-ME) believed that someone would be shot down before the session closed. “Let it come,” he wrote to William Pitt Fessenden. “If we do not stand manfully and fearlessly to the work before us, we ought to be slaves.”60 Fessenden was more optimistic; he thought that violence might subside for a time, but not because of cooler heads. Southerners might think twice before attacking because Northerners had “made up their minds not to be beaten to death without making such an experiment dangerous, and in my judgment such a determination is a duty of the Country, & the cause.”61 This was a severe message indeed: it was the patriotic duty of good Republican congressmen to fight. Brooks heard that message, admitting to his brother that his main risk was “assassination, but this you must not intimate to Mother.”62

Southerners also were enraged and prepared to take action; by their account, Sumner’s speech had been an outrage, Northern aggression was flaming out of control, and Brooks’s response was praiseworthy. As Governor Henry Wise of Virginia put it, “How can we stand continual aggression everywhere—in Congress, in the pulpit, in the Press?”63 Even the mere idea of a Southern conspiracy was insulting; hearing the claim, the ever extreme Thomas Clingman (D-NC) jumped to his feet and declared the Northerner who uttered it a liar. When Lewis Campbell of Kansas fame responded by asking if Clingman meant anything personal—an opening for a duel—the matter fizzled.64 If Brooks was punished for combatting Southern degradation, the result might be ugly, many claimed. Visiting Washington a week after the caning, Wise’s cousin Henry thought the House might “ring with vollies from revolvers” when Brooks’s expulsion came up for debate.65 Laurence Keitt thought that if Northerners fought force with force, the nation’s capital would “float with blood.”66

As Wise predicted, the debate of Brooks’s expulsion in July was explosive. The feeling on the floor was made apparent in a letter sent to Speaker Banks on July 10 by a Democratic congressman so fearful of being exposed as a compromiser that he didn’t sign his name, identifying himself only as “A Well Wisher.” Because of the intense feelings on the floor, the writer feared an “impending calamity.”

Do you know, Sir, that there exists at this time an almost murderous feeling, between certain members of the North and South, and that it is with some difficulty that a few peace-loving and happily influential associates, can prevent demonstrations upon the floor, which in the present state of excitement, would almost certainly lead to a general melee and perhaps a dozen deaths in the twinkling of an eye.

A number of Southerners were “constantly on the qui vive to prevent the throwing of missiles first from their side.” Would Banks do the same among his friends? Would he discourage them from exploiting the crisis with Buncombe speeches full of abuse that would “goad their opponents beyond bearing?”67 Clearly, as much as congressmen were performing for a national audience, the feelings on the floor were real.68 Not everyone was ready to throw missiles, but a few missile-throwers could cause chaos.

Despite that warning, one Republican after another condemned Brooks and the “Sumner outrage,” and howled defiance at the Slave Power. Brooks saw it coming and swore that “if this is done there will be an exciting time.” He stayed true to his word. Although he initially planned to “degrade the most prominent” Republican “to degrade their party too,” he went on something of a degradation spree, initiating duels with three Republicans who spoke out against him, insultingly dismissing a fourth Republican as not worth dueling (after allegedly threatening him in the lobby of Willard’s Hotel), and trying to bludgeon two Republicans at that same hotel while roistering with friends in a drunken haze.69 Keitt also nearly fought a duel with a Republican, and Robert Toombs (D-GA) was rumored to have considered one. Alexander Campbell (R-OH), who proposed a House investigation of the caning, was also threatened with violence.70 All told, the caning spawned at least eight confrontations that session, as well as countless threats.

Brooks’s two most notable wrangles were with Massachusetts Republicans Henry Wilson and Anson Burlingame; in response to their speechifying, he challenged both men to duels. Wilson saw trouble coming and armed himself with a revolver. “[H]e is just the man to use it,” chirped French, who also predicted trouble for James Watson Webb. Webb’s newspaper piece would doubtless “stir up the Chivalry,” and as French knew all too well from “Cilley scenes” of years past, “Webb is a man who fights.”71 French was calculating congressional combat, as was most of Washington.

Faced with that eternal conundrum for Northern congressmen—a duel challenge—Wilson and Burlingame took different paths. Wilson denounced the barbarity of the code of honor but upheld “the right of self-defence,” essentially making himself available for a street fight, as was widely understood at the time.72 Burlingame issued a hedgy apology for his words, saying that he meant nothing personal, but then retracted his statement and accepted Brooks’s challenge, naming the Canadian side of Niagara Falls as their dueling ground. Burlingame’s second claimed to have headed north—far north—because congressional insiders told him that Jonathan Cilley had been disadvantaged by fighting his duel in the South.73 In both cases, nothing further happened, though Brooks emerged from his non-encounter with Burlingame tainted by a whiff of cowardice for declining to fight, despite his insistence that he had good reason; as he explained in the press, had he traveled north he would have been killed in “the enemy’s country.”74 (French was still thinking about the non-duel during a trip to Niagara Falls a year later, quipping “Burlingame not there!”)75 More than one Southerner noted that Brooks clearly didn’t want to fight, and that Burlingame and his clueless Yankee friends had missed their cues and almost stumbled into a duel.76

Although in the end neither Wilson nor Burlingame did any fighting, they showed what their contemporaries would have called “pluck,” and were applauded for it in the North and Northwest, Wilson for spurning a challenge without backing down, and Burlingame for not spurning a challenge; as ever, Northerners were conflicted about the code of honor and their congressmen. Although there was a good deal of murmuring about Burlingame’s acceptance of a challenge (including on the part of Sumner himself, who deplored Burlingame’s surrender to “Southern barbarianism”), in light of the grievous insult of Sumner’s caning, the criticism was outweighed by the praise heaped on Burlingame’s head for standing tall before the Slave Power.77 He received reams of fan mail praising his “manly” spirit.78 Barnstorming out west for the coming elections, he was feted like a hero. In Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, people sang his praises, celebrating him with parades and processions and flocking by the thousands to hear him speak. In Indiana, people traveled in horse teams to see him. One event featured women dressed as states and men as “border ruffians,” revealing the close link between the caning and Kansas in the public mind. “It touches my heart Jennie to find how, on account of that Brooks affair, the people seem to regard me with tenderness,” Burlingame told his wife. The “whole population of the west seems wild to see your naughty husband because he did not run away from Brooks … [T]he people like such ‘bad’ men as I am.”79 Wilson, too, was heralded with pomp and circumstance. At a massive protest meeting in Faneuil Hall, he was praised as “a gentleman who believed in the defence of freedom, and also in self defence.”80

Sumner’s caning had made heroes of fighting Republicans. Burlingame was right; in the context of a rising Slave Power plot, with the humiliation of Sumner’s caning fresh at hand, people in the free states did like “bad men.” The fist-raised fighting posture of Republicans became so marked that Democrats mocked it in electioneering fodder, as in a campaign song sung to a popular tune titled “Wait for the Wagon,” which smacked at swaggering Republicans in its opening lines:

Will you come with me good Democrats,

And rally round our flag,

To fight the black Republicans

Who play the game of brag?81

This perfect storm of events—the pull of the Slave Power plot, the chain of events that seemed to prove it, the savvy of Republicans who connected the dots and sold their party as the way to stem the tide, the stunning brutality of Sumner’s caning, and the presence of Republican congressmen willing to step up and fight—fueled the Republican Party’s rise to power.82 Although the presidential election of 1856 went to Democrat James Buchanan, the Republicans did remarkably well for a new party, garnering 33.1 percent of the electoral vote.83 The attack on Sumner and public support of the congressional fighting men who championed him were an inherent part of that telling feat.84 Congressional violence ushered in the Third Party System.

The fuel that powered the rise of the Republican Party was emotion: fear of Southern dominance, anger at Northern degradation, horror at the brutal realities of slavery.85 Thus the many heavily attended “indignation meetings” throughout the North after Sumner’s caning. As a speaker at a meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put it, Brooks was guilty of an “indignity offered to Massachusetts, a sovereign state, in the person of her Senator.” Others considered the assault an insult not only to Massachusetts, “but to New England and all the Free States.”86 For many Northerners, an attack on Sumner was an attack on them all.

Beneath the indignation was a blunt reality, long known but now unavoidably exposed: Northern congressmen were routinely silenced by Southerners. In Northern meetings, demonstrations, and printed resolutions, the same points were made again and again. Northern representatives were being denied freedom of debate on the floor. Their constituents were being denied their representative rights in Congress. As a speech at an indignation meeting at Union College expressed it: the attack on Sumner had been a “blow aimed at the Freedom of debate,” a “bold attempt to terrify the representatives of a free people in the exersise of their constitutional rights.” A Maine newspaper agreed: “the blows showered upon bleeding Sumner, are blows directed at us, for using rights that we have enjoyed every day of our lives.”87 For this writer, the right of free speech wasn’t an abstraction. It was a routine part of everyday life that had to be defended, a thought echoed in dozens of letters to Sumner.

Congressmen had long acted as surrogates for all that they represented, fighting and even dying for the rights and honor of their people, their states, and their sections when duty called. The caning raised awareness of that fact to new heights in both North and South. To countless Americans, Sumner was the North suffering at the hand of the South and Brooks was the South enforcing its command. As one newspaper put it, the assault was a “representative act.”88 “I have lost my individuality in my representative capacity,” Brooks said after the caning. “I am regarded to a great extent as the exponent of the South against which Black Republicanism is war[r]ing in my person.”89 French knew that the caning “in itself, was a personal matter.” But he also knew that it would create “a feeling throughout the Union that cannot easily be calmed.”90

The Cilley-Graves duel had touched a similar nerve. Both men fought for the honor of their people, their state, their section, and their party, and the North had responded to Cilley’s death with horror and outrage. But national parties had cushioned the blow. Although a Southerner had killed a Northerner using a Southern weapon—the code of honor—the tragedy came to be viewed as an unfortunate moment of excess in an ongoing party struggle. The lesson learned, if any, was that Northerners were at a disadvantage in the sectional middle ground of Congress.

The lessons of Sumner’s caning were more severe; Brooks’s savage blows hit their mark. Northern audiences learned what Northern degradation felt like; they saw its power in the near-speechless outrage of Northern congressmen as depicted in the press. The all-too-appropriately named Northern indignation meetings show the intensely emotional public response, as did the fleeing of many a man’s son to Kansas to champion its admission to the Union as a free state. French calmed his son after the caning, but William Fessenden wasn’t as lucky; his son Sam ran away from college to fight in Kansas, though he was tracked down in Illinois and brought home.91

Northerners also learned what it felt like when their representatives fought back—and they liked it.92 Having witnessed Southern bullying in Congress and in Kansas, they found resistance “refreshing.”93 This was a lesson that Northern voters and congressmen would take to heart in years to come. Thus the Richmond Whig’s half-joking plea to Southern senators not to cane, kick, or spit on Henry Wilson (R-MA), who seemed “fatally bent” on sparking a fight to ensure his reelection.94

Southerners learned equally powerful lessons. Sumner’s speech, and to an even greater degree the tirades by Republican congressmen after his caning, schooled Southerners in the emotional power of Northern aggression. Reading the Northern hail of accusations and insults against the South, and seeing in newsprint the red-faced fury of their representatives as they absorbed those blows, they learned what that aggression felt like as never before, and they wanted it put down. Indeed, it had to be put down. As a Southern paper put it two years later, in the name of Southern security, interests, and honor, any such aggressors should be “Sumnarized.”95 Had Sumner not been caned, wrote one Southerner, “the impression would have been confirmed, that the fear of our slaves had made us such cowards that we could be kicked with impunity.”96

Brooks was also of this mind, as his last speech in Congress made clear. Although the House ultimately voted against his expulsion, he resigned his seat and went home—but not before having his say. He had caned Sumner to defend his state and his kinsman, he declared, nothing more. He didn’t want to set a precedent that would end in “drenching this Hall in blood.” But a blow struck at him by a Northerner could result in revolution, he warned. Sectional tempers were high, and the South would defend him with bloodshed if necessary. (And indeed, at this point in Brooks’s speech, Southerners in the visitors’ gallery cheered.) Brooks was calling for a cease-fire but issuing a threat. He then left the House and went home, as did Laurence Keitt two days later when he was formally censured. Both men were immediately reelected.97

Given the ongoing congressional floor show, public perceptions of Congress became increasingly dark and dire. Writing home from Harvard a few days after the caning, French’s son Frank called Congress “a slaughter house.”98 In a letter to Sumner, his fellow Bay State abolitionist Reverend John Turner Sargent described the floor of Congress as a “field of blood.” He had fully expected that “blood would flow,—somebody’s blood, either yours or Wilsons, or Hales, or Giddings before the expiration of your present session on that field of blood, the floor of Congress.”99 Former Massachusetts congressman Edward Everett echoed that thought. He had long foreseen that “the crisis in our political relations at home would be brought on by some personal collision at Washington.”100

Admittedly, such feelings were extreme. In years to come, violence would rise and fall in Congress. The extreme emotion in the wake of the caning didn’t—indeed, couldn’t—last forever; by the end of July it had passed.101 But the “Sumner outrage” and the rise of the Republican Party fundamentally changed public expectations of their congressmen, and in so doing, changed the nature of Congress. Violence would be more than a parliamentary ploy in years to come. It would be a declaration of rights, a banner struck for the cause, a battle cry played for the rafters, and Congress would come to seem more like a battleground than ever before.

Given the extreme emotion, it’s easy to forget that not everyone shared it. But even in the midst of the uproar, some moderate people remained moderate, at least in private; the din of sectional battle cries silenced most such voices in public. “Nothing but denunciation & defiance seem to be tolerated by the masses,” moaned the former Massachusetts congressman Robert Winthrop, commiserating with his former Virginia colleague William Cabell Rives.102 “Timid men” fear speaking out “for fear of being stigmatised … as disloyal to the South,” said Virginian Alexander Rives. Edward Everett said much the same. “No one dares speak aloud on the subject except to echo the popular voice.” Even failing to be angry enough was dangerous; Everett was assailed in the press when he didn’t attend a large indignation meeting in Boston.103 Ironically, in their fervor to defend free speech, Northerners were stifling it.

French was one such moderate man, but by 1856, the nature of moderation had changed. For many Northerners, preserving the Union meant defending Northern rights. As much as French urged compromise and conciliation, his hunger to champion Northern rights didn’t waver. Neither did his commitment to the Republican Party. At its first national convention, in June 1856, French played an active role, just as one would expect of a clerk assisting in the launching of a national organization. He was on the committee that confirmed delegate credentials, and when the convention created a committee composed of a member from each state to draft the party’s platform, it was French who reminded the gathering to include someone from Kansas, which was not yet a state.104

But even French was getting swept up in the tide of emotions. In January 1857, when thirty-six-year-old Preston Brooks died of suffocation from an acute sore throat—an event that Northerners deemed providential—French thought back to his first encounter with Brooks a few years back. He had liked the man immediately, and liked him more over time. Months before the caning, spotting Brooks seeking votes for a pension for a “poor old soldier friend,” French had introduced him to Amos Granger (R-NY), who helped get Brooks’s bill passed. French’s congratulations were his last words to the South Carolinian. When they next met about ten days before Brooks’s death, French and a friend were strolling down the Avenue, but although Brooks chatted with French’s friend for several minutes, Brooks and French refused to acknowledge each other.105 As much as French liked Brooks, in the context of the times he was unable to speak with him, almost despite himself.

In this sense, the crisis of the Union was a crisis of communication. Northerners were waging war against the South with dangerous words; Southerners were trying to stifle those words with force, and the cross-fire was cutting off conversation, particularly in Congress, an institution grounded on open debate and free speech. The Constitution granted congressmen immunity for their words for a reason, though that right had long been violated by bullies inflicting gags and by their victims spurning privilege of debate in honor disputes. The slavery crisis of the 1850s made this gap between ideals and realities glaringly apparent.106

For French and countless Northerners, the “fight for freedom,” as French called it, was thus fundamentally bound up with the right of free speech.107 The Northern press celebrated it. Indignation meetings rallied behind it. It was heralded as the pride of Northern democracy, the heart of democratic governance, and the soul of the Union. More than anything else, this was the Northern lesson learned from Sumner’s caning. Northern rights, Northern honor, and democratic governance required free speech, and the Slave Power was brutally suppressing it to advance its regime, a violation that called for extreme measures of resistance.

Thus the concern over dangerous words at the national center, where they had the power to tear Congress and the nation in two. The anonymous letter to Nathaniel Banks made this threat clear. The only way to fend off disaster in Congress was to avoid throwing “missiles” of inflammatory words. “Let gentlemen who may choose to take part in this debate, scrupulously avoid the utterance of unnecessarily harsh language.”108 Israel Washburn (R-ME) said the same thing when debating Brooks’s expulsion: “Let us not irritate each other. Let us avoid disagreeable language to each other.”109 Franklin Pierce echoed that request a few years later from retirement in New Hampshire, pleading for “temperate words” in Congress.110 During this same period, Thomas Hart Benton was removing dangerous words from the congressional record in the hope of soothing tempers and saving the “brotherly Union.” He spent his last years writing an abridgement of congressional debates from 1789 through 1856 with the threats and insults removed, including his infamous 1850 clash with Henry Foote. Sick with cancer and working in intense pain, he died the day after he completed it.111 As Benton well knew, for Congress and the Union to survive this crisis—for cross-sectional conversation to be even possible—people had to watch their words. The alternative was Union-rending violence.

Free speech and violence were thus dangerously intertwined.112 For the South, they always had been; to suppress dangerous words was to suppress slave insurrection. In Congress, another kind of insurrection was at hand. Northern congressmen were rising up and their chief weapons were the right of free speech and their willingness to fight for that right. Massachusetts Republican Chauncey Knapp’s constituents said as much in June 1856 when they saw him off as he headed back to Washington. Just before Knapp boarded the train, a small assembly of people gave him a parting gift for use in Congress: a revolver inscribed with the words “Free Speech.”113

“A HELL OF LEGISLATION”

Knapp had been given his marching orders: fight—literally fight—for our rights. Such was the legacy of 1856: a heightening of sectional tensions and a spike in congressional violence, as well as an ever more intense emotional investment in the fate of Kansas. Knapp wasn’t the only person being presented with weapons by enraged Northerners; this was the period when Northerners began shipping cartons of rifles to free-state settlers in Kansas.114 Noting the crowded House and Senate galleries in 1858, French thought that the “intense feeling … from this political centre has radiated the fever heat to all quarters of the Union.” French was doing his part to spread that heat. At the end of January 1857 he became president of the National Republican Association of Washington. Founded in 1855 as a club of roughly twenty-nine members (including the exceedingly clubbable French), within a few years its membership had climbed to several hundred.115 Its main purpose was to disseminate Republican political tracts and speeches throughout the nation, aided by the inner workings of Congress, congressional clout and mailing lists, and free postage courtesy of the congressional frank. By all accounts, the association did its job admirably; during the 1856 presidential campaign, it claimed to have circulated four million documents.116

As president, French set out in earnest to gain Republican seats in the midterm elections of 1858. A newspaper announcement in May showed the association’s strategy. First, it needed Republicans around the country to send good Republican cash—“the freest offering of a free people in the Free States.” Then, it would produce and disseminate mass mailings. A newspaper announcement a few months later revealed the fruits of its labor: an extensive list of speeches and tracts for sale, ranging in price from 75 cents to $1.75 per hundred copies. With a handful of exceptions, every publication was about Kansas.117

By spreading around his name in the press as president, French spread news of his new party loyalties. In June, the Albany Evening Journal took notice. “Major B. B. French, an old line democratic politician of New Hampshire, for many years an office-holder at Washington, has become president of the National Republican Association in the capital, which is not agreeable to his old friends.”118 Battle lines were being drawn.

In Congress, that was no mere metaphor. Thinking back to this period after the Civil War, veterans of the Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Congresses remembered the years between 1857 and 1861 as a time of fierce sectional violence on the floor. These were the years that drove Senators Benjamin Wade (R-OH), Simon Cameron (R-PA), and Zachariah Chandler (R-MI) to create their pact to “fight to the coffin” regardless of the consequences. The “gross personal abuse” inflicted by their slave-state colleagues was insulting their manhood and depriving their constituents of their representative rights. Yet, because of Northern anti-dueling sentiment, Northern congressmen held back and were treated like cowards. “I feel it frequently,” Wade admitted.119

The abuse that produced their pact probably took place during a Senate debate over Kansas’s constitution. In 1855, free-state advocates had produced an antislavery constitution in Topeka; two years later, slaveowners drafted a competing proslavery constitution in Lecompton, the state’s capital. After a messy and corrupted vote on the two constitutions, Kansans had sent both documents to Washington for congressional approval. During an all-night session on March 15, 1858, hostilities peaked. Eager to push through the Lecompton constitution, Robert Toombs (D-GA) threatened to “crush” the Republican Party, provoking an outburst of Republican outrage.120

As a result, Republican nerves were already on edge when later that evening Cameron accused James Green (D-MO) of dictating terms to the Republicans; in the course of the argument that followed, each man threw the lie at the other, Cameron took responsibility for his words, and Green hinted at a duel challenge.121 Cameron’s subsequent consultation with Wade and Chandler led to their decision to put an end to such taunts by challenging future offenders to duels. There seemed to be no other way to counter the “deep humiliation” of the “people of the Free States,” and to some degree, their ploy worked. Their willingness to fight checked some abuse. As they later concluded, risking their reputations, their careers, and perhaps even their lives was the price of fighting slavery in Congress.122

For Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA), these years marked the start of armed sectional combat in the House. Discussing the imminent return of Southerners to Congress after the Civil War a decade later, he urged colleagues not to be hasty. The new congressmen seated around him had no memory of Congress as a “camp of armed men.” They hadn’t seen Robert Toombs and his “gang” render the halls of Congress “a hell of legislation” by rushing with knives and guns “as one yelling body” at Northerners who dared to denounce slavery. Bring the Southerners back, but “first rearm yourself,” Stevens counseled, and “wait until I am gone.”123

Stevens was speaking for effect, but he was very specific about the first instance of full-fledged sectional combat on the floor: the February 6, 1858, House melee caused by a clash between the radical Galusha Grow (R-PA) and the equally radical Lawrence Keitt (D-SC), the first time that a group of Northerners confronted a group of Southerners “force against force.”124 The “battle-royal in the House … was the first sectional fight ever had on the floor,” wrote former congressman and future vice president of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens, noting that although no blood was shed, there were bad feelings in abundance.125 The press agreed. “This is the most important and significant of all the fights that ever occurred in Congress,” declared the Charleston Mercury. It was “a sectional and not a personal quarrel. It was North and South—not Grow and Keitt.” Unlike previous fights, “members fought in battalions. They did not go into a corner or a lobby to fight, or entangle themselves as heretofore, between chairs and desks. They took an ample area—the open space before the Speaker’s chair.”126

The reasons for this change were many. Sectional passions were already flaring because of the Supreme Court’s landmark Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled that enslaved people and their descendants could not be American citizens, and that the federal government could not ban slavery in western territories. Endorsing the spread of slavery and suggesting that the Court was a tool of the Slave Power, it was deeply felt by Northerners.127

Lawrence M. Keitt, 1859 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Galusha A. Grow, 1859 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

It didn’t help matters that the fight took place in the middle of an overnight session, virtually a guarantee of violence. The topic of debate—Kansas’s proslavery Lecompton constitution—was also sure to enflame tempers and push people to extremes. Democrats made matters worse by delaying a vote because some Southerners were missing in action and every vote counted. Liquor also played a role, as it almost inevitably did during evening sessions; many of those missing Southerners, boozing at bars, were so dead drunk when dragged into the House that they were kept out of the chamber until it was their turn to vote.128

The two men at the heart of the fight were also lightning rods of conflict, though for different reasons; the combative Grow was a leading House Republican with a cut-and-thrust style of debate and strong antislavery views, and Keitt was an almost comically hot-tempered fire-eater who was ever and always defending Southern honor.129 Their confrontation was the spark that set the congressional tinderbox aflame.

Not surprisingly, Keitt set things off. At about two o’clock in the morning, Grow was conferring with a Pennsylvania Democrat on the Democratic side of the House. As Grow headed back to his seat, someone asked to submit a motion out of order, and Grow objected. Keitt, who by some accounts was dozing and by many accounts was tipsy, was alert enough to yell that Grow should object on his own side of the House. Grow replied that it was a free hall and he could stand where he pleased, at which Keitt (supposedly muttering, “We’ll see about that”) stalked up to him and demanded to know what Grow meant, perhaps assuming that talk of a “free hall” was a backhanded slap at Southerners, or perhaps—knowing Keitt—assuming nothing at all; it didn’t take much to set him off. When Grow repeated his words, Keitt grabbed Grow’s throat, vowing to teach the “black republican puppy” a lesson. Knocking Keitt’s arm away, Grow declared that he refused to be bullied by a slave driver cracking his whip. Keitt responded by grabbing Grow’s throat again, at which Grow slugged him hard enough to knock him flat. And here the trouble began.

A group of Southerners immediately rushed over, some to aid Keitt, some to attack Grow, and some to calm things down, though the latter group ultimately got swept up in the scrimmage. Seeing a pack of Southerners descend on Grow, Republicans rallied to his aid, streaming across the chamber from their side of the hall, jumping on desks and chairs in their haste to save a brother Republican, bringing a rush of Southerners in their wake. The end result was a free fight in the open space in front of the Speaker’s platform featuring roughly thirty sweaty, disheveled, mostly middle-aged congressmen in a no-holds-barred brawl, North against South.

A comical view of the Keitt-Grow rumble (Barksdale’s toupee is on the ground) (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

Press accounts of the fight vary, but they generally agree that John “Bowie Knife” Potter (R-WI) and the fighting Washburn brothers—Cadwallader (R-WI), Israel (R-ME), and Elihu (R-IL)—stood out in the rumble, with the barrel-chested Potter jogging straight into the scrum, throwing punches as he tried to reach Grow.130 At one point, he slugged William Barksdale (D-MS), who mistakenly reeled around and socked Elihu Washburne in return. (Elihu liked his Washburn with an e.) Potter responded by grabbing Barksdale by the hair to punch him in the face, but to his utter astonishment, Barksdale’s hair came off; he wore a toupee. Meanwhile, John Covode (R-PA) had raised a spittoon above his head and was looking for a target, while the ashen-faced Speaker pounded his gavel for all it was worth and ordered the sergeant at arms to grab the mace and do something. Within a few minutes, people had settled back in their seats—thanks, in part, to the hilarity of Barksdale’s flipped wig—and the House went back to arguing until its adjournment at 6:30 a.m. With the exception of a few black eyes and some cuts and scrapes, most of the combatants were none the worse for wear; a few men had reached for weapons, but none used them. (The Globe summed up the episode as a “violent personal altercation” between Keitt and Grow in which “several members seemed to participate.”)131

The most notable aspect of the fight was the mass rescue by Republicans, who had rushed over to Grow with fists flying because they thought that Southerners were staging a group assault. This was Slave Power thinking; it was knee-jerk distrust of Southerners as brutal, domineering, determined to cow Northerners, and on the attack. This distrust was no back-of-the-mind matter of speculation. It was immediate; Republicans jumped into action in seconds. They also felt that at long last, they had taught Southerners a lesson. As Grow put it, Southerners had long been “under the delusion that Northern men would not fight.” By running “from one side of the Chamber to the other … with fists clenched and arms flying,” Republicans had taught Southerners that “Northern men will fight in a just cause.”132 In essence, Republicans were a different kind of Northerner. French’s friend Daniel Clark (R-NH), boarding with French during this Congress, declared this to Robert Toombs when Toombs threatened to crush the Republican Party. He wouldn’t have an easy time of it, Clark warned. “A different class of men now came from the North … They are sent not to bow down, but to stand up.”133

The Republican press echoed Grow, glorying in the show of strength and savoring the vicarious pleasure of slugging Southern blowhards. The Boston Traveler listed a string of “comforting reflections” about Northern “pluck.” Several newspapers gleefully noted that Reuben Davis (D-MS), who had recently given a rabid speech about conquering the North, got a black eye from Potter. (Davis claimed to have tripped over a chair.)134 Best of all was the knockdown of the swaggering Keitt. “The great State of South Carolina (in the person of her valorous (!) representative, Mr. Keitt,) lies kicking in the dust,” gloated Frederick Douglass’ Paper, particularly relishing the fact that Grow, a representative of David Wilmot’s district, had floored a man who helped Brooks cane Sumner.135 In this rematch of the caning, the North had won. Many papers thought that after years of bullying Northerners, Southerners had finally learned a lesson. They had been “beaten with their own weapons, in their own way, and on their own ground.”136 “The South is cowed,” claimed a New York Times letter-writer. “I know what I say—COWED.”137 (Hard-pressed for a comeback, the Democratic New York Day Book said that Keitt made a manly apology.)138

Judging from the Southern press, the South wasn’t cowed. It was angry and defensive. Southern newspapers aimed most of their venom at the “Black Republican” press, so brutal in its accusations that it “cannot fail to be imitated in Congress.”139 The Northern press was full of lies, charged Southern papers. Grow, not Keitt, had started the fight. Grow, not Keitt, was insolent. Grow, not Keitt, had violated rules of order by not objecting from his seat. Nor was this fight anything special; such tussles happened all the time.140 Equally grating, Northern papers were full of “vulgar boasting.”141 Northerners were entirely too focused on “the mere powers of the pugilism” and Grow’s “chance-blow,” charged the Virginia Sentinel. They didn’t understand that honor wasn’t a matter of muscle.

In truth, the Sentinel cared quite a bit about that blow, as did the many Southern newspapers that went out of their way to prove that Grow most assuredly had not punched Keitt, who had tripped over a desk. Or stubbed his toe. Or been thrown off his feet when pulled away from Grow, who stood by, paralyzed with fear.142 The Charleston Mercury went so far as to admit that Grow might have tried to hit Keitt, but he certainly never touched him. A felling blow from a “Black Republican” was not easily swallowed in the South.

This desperate need to prove that Keitt hadn’t been punched spawned a cottage industry in jokes, puns, and poetry at Keitt’s expense, none of it from the South, which wasn’t laughing. Nor was Keitt, who tried to save face, first by claiming that he didn’t know if he’d been struck, then by denying it.143 The British were particularly amused at both the fuss and the rough-and-tumble of American politics. One humorist published a poem titled “How Mr. Keitt of South Carolina Stubbed His Toe.”144 Punch magazine outdid itself with an epic poem in the style of Homer’s Iliad.145

Sing, O goddess, the wrath, the untamable dander of KEITT—

KEITT of South Carolina, the clear grit, the tall, the undaunted—

Him that hath wopped his own niggers till Northerners all unto KEITT

Seem but as niggers to wop, and hills of the smallest potatoes.

The description of Keitt’s fall to glory is classic:

Prone like a log sank KEITT, his dollars rattled about him.

Forth sprang his friends o’er the body; first, BARKSDALE, waving-wig-wearer,

CRAIGE and MACQUEEN and DAVIS, the ra’al hoss of wild Mississippi;

Fiercely they gathered round GROW, catawampously up as to chaw him.

Americans also tried their hand at poetry. In “Grow vs. Keitt,” the New London Chronicle had this to say about Keitt’s moment of glory:

Just then came a stunner beneath his left ear;

And “the gentleman from South Carolina” felt queer;

(’Tis whispered that “stunner” was “planted” by Grow,

But “Chivalry” fancies he just “stubbed his toe.”)

Keitt “stubbed his head against Grow’s fist and fell down,” charged one newspaper.146 There was punning: “According to one Washington correspondent, Grow struck Keitt twice in the face. First the eyes had it, and then the nose.”147 During a theater performance a few days after the brawl, an actor even referenced the fight with an impromptu quip.148

Keitt’s stubbed toe was an international sensation, though it was hardly the only fun poked at Congress in this period. The rise of congressional violence saw the rise of Congress-bashing in popular culture, and with it a healthy sampling of boxing culture, as countless references to “side licks, back handers, and stomach winders” attest.149 Mocking do-nothing Congresses and congressmen was nothing new. There was a long and storied history of ridiculing the People’s Branch that went back to the dawn of the republic. What changed in the 1850s was the amount of ridicule, its cutting edge, and its focus on violence.

A cartoon depicting a congressional rumble as a boxing match. A “mauly” is a fist. (Harper’s Weekly, February 20, 1858. Courtesy of HarpWeek)

By far the best practitioner of this new school of journalism was Vanity Fair, a New York–based humor magazine that had the good fortune to publish its first issue in December 1859, at the start of the months-long struggle to organize the Thirty-sixth Congress, a stalemate that guaranteed more material than any one humor magazine could handle.150 For a time, almost every issue spoofed brawling congressmen, making the journal a kind of Congressional Fights Quarterly. An article called “A Day in the House” was typical of the genre. Mimicking the style of conventional congressional press coverage, it reported a day’s proceedings, consisting largely of an extended exchange of insults, Congress-style (“Without calling in question the integrity of Mr. Sherman, he would say that gentleman was not fit, politically, to iron shirts in a third class laundry”), and climaxed with a fight:

Some evil-disposed person here cried “Order.” This was the signal for instantaneous uproar.… Then ensued rare pegging and stepping, unexceptionable clinching, feinting, and planting of one twos on pimple and in wind. The Sergeant-at-Arms, having at length detected a foul blow on the part of an inexperienced new member, interposed, and said that if the disturbance continued he should be compelled to exclude the reporters.

The following week an article depicted Congress as “The Great National Circus,” complete with knife-throwers, fire-eaters, and an equestrian who rides two horses going in different directions. A later issue included an advertisement for “The Congressman’s Guide to Fame; or, The True Vocabulary of Vituperation,” an alphabetical catalog of insults, including an example of the book in use: “Do we not know him for a Babbler,—for a Blasted Blattering, Blustering, Brawling, Blower?” Still another issue offered a skit in which a Democrat and a Republican, insulting each other in front of that perennial favorite of congressional combatants, Willard’s Hotel, agree to postpone their duel until after the organization of Congress—meaning, forever. One issue even featured a fight on the cover, complete with a bowie knife and a revolver flying through the air.151

Of course, there was plenty to ridicule in Congress aside from violence. A mock letter from a Washington correspondent made fun of the perpetual struggle to avoid talk of slavery:

Mr. SNOOKS (Dem.) of Coney Island, rose to introduce some resolution—concerning the state of the Union.

Mr. GRIMES (Rep.) of Kennebec, said he hoped no member would discuss such exciting matters in these times.

Mr. JONES (Opp.) of South Amboy, wished to present a bill for the better preservation of the Confederacy.

Mr. ROBINSON (Rep.) of Sconsett, expressed great sorrow that gentlemen should introduce such disturbing subjects now.

Precisely mimicking such excuses as they appeared in the press, the article implied that in their efforts to avoid controversy (and thereby the fights that studded Vanity Fair’s pages), congressmen were doing nothing at all.152

Vanity Fair specialized in congressional violence, but images of brawling congressmen appeared everywhere: in poetry, in literature, in cartoons, even in plays.153 In 1857, the government clerk Henry Clay Preuss published Fashions and Follies of Washington Life, a play that centers on a Northern congressman in love with a boardinghouse owner’s daughter, and a government clerk and newspaper correspondent who loves the same woman and uses his column in a New York City newspaper to provoke a Southern congressman into challenging the Northerner to a duel and killing him. (“Sent off a slashing letter to New-York yesterday—fell like a bomb-shell in the House to-day!”) The clerk’s evil plot—to mention a recent congressional spat between the two congressmen and hint at “Southern chivalry and Southern aggression—and lament, most pathetically, a want of Northern pluck”—is remarkably true to life, as is his concern that the Northerner might not bite because he is “a Yankee—and these Yankees are hard to get in the ring.” The Northern congressman’s fear that he’ll be ostracized back home for dueling is just as searingly true, as are his friend’s urgings that the peculiarities of being a member of Congress leave him no choice but to fight. All in all, Fashions and Follies does a fine job of portraying the Northern congressman’s dilemma as well as the boomerang-like nature of congressional threats and violence, which influenced the public through the vehicle of the press and rebounded back to influence Congress.154

Popular culture offered the public an image of Congress as a bullpen of bravado, full of hot air and signifying nothing, and in so doing, made Washington a laughingstock as well, as in this quip from The New York Times:

Judge Kellogg, a venerable citizen of Michigan, arrived in this city on Saturday evening. It was his first visit to the Federal Capital, and when the cars stopped, he was a little uncertain where he was.… As he entered the main hall of the depot, he saw a man engaged in caning another ferociously, all over the room. “When I saw this,” says the Judge, “I knew I was in Washington.”155

Willard’s Hotel didn’t fare much better. A much-mentioned Punch cartoon showed an alarmed diner seated at a table in an “American hotel” with a gun pointed at his head. The caption? “Pass the mustard!”156

The rise of Congress-bashing and the rise of violence were in sync for good reason. First of all, there was a lot to bash. The image of staid congressmen throwing sidewinders and tossing spittoons was a near irresistible target of ridicule. But more than that, the humor served a purpose. For one thing, it defused tension, and there was plenty of tension to defuse. If Congress’s seemingly self-destructive chaos could be ridiculed, maybe it wasn’t so threatening after all.

Humor was also a prod—a kinder, gentler way of urging congressmen to do better.157 No one wanted to be laughed at, particularly self-important congressmen. Nor did they want to feel that they deserved ridicule; congressmen were all too familiar with the crushing weight of public opinion. (Keitt must have suffered agonies in 1858, though given that he started the fight, he deserved it.)

But perhaps most of all, humor was a way to vent public frustration. A fistfight between a Northerner and a Southerner was the ultimate demonstration of an overwhelmed Congress succumbing to the temper of the times at the precise moment when congressional intervention was urgently needed. Even worse, clusters of brawling Northerners and Southerners were playacting the very thing that they were supposed to prevent: civil warfare. It was more than irresponsible. It was disgraceful, as many tsk-tsking newspaper commentators said.

This cartoon from British Punch magazine, published not long after California’s Representative Philemon Herbert shot a waiter at Willard’s Hotel, mocks America’s routine violence. (“Life in an American Hotel?” by John Leech, 1856. Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd., www.punch.co.uk)

This isn’t to say that congressmen were blunderers. They were fighting for good reasons: to win political power, to impress constituents, to support a cause, to defend sectional interests, to shape the nation. When literal push came to literal shove, the voting public wanted their congressmen to fight for their rights at this moment of crisis. In fighting one another with fists, knives, and guns, congressmen were doing their job. Of course, not all congressmen turned to violence. Behind the scenes, out of the public eye, peace-loving congressmen were struggling to bind sectional ties. The ultimate example of such negotiations was the “Peace Conference” held at Willard’s Hotel in 1861 as a last-ditch effort to avoid disaster.

But regardless of the counterforce, the fighting’s impact was severe. The image of Congress as filtered through the press and popular culture was hardly reassuring. In mocking violence so enthusiastically, humorists suggested that it was pervasive, even unstoppable. The sensationalistic penny press sent a similar message: Congress was a brawling den of thieves, a “bear garden,” to use a favorite phrase of the time. It was a place where people of contending politics clashed but didn’t compromise. A place where underhanded plots to seize control of the Union were effected, step by step. A place of argument, not conversation. A place corroded by mutual distrust.

By the late 1850s, much of this was true; Congress wasn’t doing much to earn the public’s trust. And the violence reflected a very real problem: the inability of Congress to legislate, or for that matter, even to discuss, the issue of slavery. But in ironing out subtleties and highlighting the tempers and tempests of the floor, the press and popular culture filtered the public view of Congress so effectively that even today it’s hard to tell truth from lie.158

The end result was pervasive distrust of Congress, and not just for the public. The hotheads who plunged into collisions at a moment’s notice; the Buncombe speeches and banner-waving that provoked those fights; the waves of anger and violence that those fights produced; and the very real presence of a sectional foe that was desperate to have its way, perhaps at the expense of the Union: together these things taught congressmen to distrust one another. However moderate some congressmen were, however disposed they were to compromise, however much they got along in private, in the political climate of the late 1850s they would not—could not—compromise their section’s honor, interests, and rights, and they knew all too well that their opponents felt the same. There couldn’t be much give and take in a battle for the soul of the republic. Desperate measures were always on the table, breeding mutual distrust. The ultimate sign of this distrust was the decision of many congressmen to arm themselves in the late 1850s, not because they wanted to fight, but because they were afraid that they might have to.

DISTRUST AND DISUNION

In June 1860, French bought a gun.159 Not for hunting, which he loved to do on weekends. Not for his sons, whom he taught to hunt as boys. Not to guard his home, where he kept a loaded gun in case of burglary.160 Not even to shoot the irritatingly loud rooster next door, which French accidentally killed with a warning shot from his window.161 French bought a gun to defend himself from Southerners. He didn’t want to shoot them. But he feared that he might have to.

The chain of events that led to this decision and the circumstances that surround it reveal a lot about the congressional community in 1859–60. French wasn’t the only person who decided to wear a gun. Many congressmen strapped on knives and guns each morning as they headed off to Congress, and their number was growing; Northerners had been urging their representatives to arm since Sumner’s caning.162 At times, the distrust and simmering resentment on the floor was palpable.

Momentum had been building to this point for years, but in the Thirty-sixth Congress, violence intensified. What had first been parliamentary power plays, and then declarations of sectional rights and honor, had now become something different. For at least some congressmen, fighting had become a matter of life and death.

The change in the air was partly a product of circumstance and timing; several game-changing events happened just before Congress opened in December 1859. Conspiracy theories did their worst as well. A confluence of events and evidence increasingly convinced people on all sides that their darkest fears about their sectional foe were true. Considered in the light of an evil plot, simply wearing a gun seemed threatening. Why were Republicans armed?, asked The New York Herald in January 1860. “Is the republican party prepared to resort to violence and bloodshed on the floor of Congress as well as on the soil of the South?”163 Even self-defense could seem aggressive in a climate of extremes.

Even without game-changing events, the Thirty-sixth Congress was destined to be plagued with problems, particularly in the House, where no party had a controlling majority; there were 109 Republicans, 101 Democrats (some of them Anti-Lecompton Democrats), and 27 Americans. As in 1856, the possibility of a Republican Speaker enraged Southerners. As in 1856, the high stakes of a pending presidential contest heightened tensions—though in this case, with the very real possibility that a tied presidential election would be resolved by the House. As in 1850, Southerners threatened to raze the Capitol and destroy the Union. But in 1859, for the first time they took action.164

Two recent episodes had especially stoked their fury. One month before the opening of Congress, the abolitionist John Brown had made his infamous raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, setting the nation on edge and terrifying Southerners. Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. Congress opened three days later. Even as the House struggled to organize, the Senate was debating and investigating Brown’s actions.

Even more productive of turmoil in the House was Hinton Rowan Helper’s controversial antislavery tract, The Impending Crisis—How to Meet It, published in 1857, and then in a compendium edition in 1859 at the encouragement of Republicans with fall elections in mind. A North Carolina abolitionist, Helper was a rare and special thing for Republicans: a Southerner attacking slavery for the sake of the South. His argument was straightforward: slavery was harmful to the economic and cultural prosperity of the South, and detrimental to poor whites who didn’t own slaves. Among Helper’s many inflammatory suggestions was his plea for those whites to join with slaves in fighting domineering slaveholders and abolishing slavery; Helper’s attack on tyrannical slaveholders was particularly severe. Essentially propounding class warfare and slave rebellion, the book was banned throughout the South.165 In 1858, Southern congressmen disparaged the first edition so caustically that Helper went to the House to assault his attackers in defense of his honor (thereby proving himself a Southerner at heart).166

When Congress opened in December 1859, Helper’s book dropped on the House like a bombshell because of a revelation only a few weeks before. As reported in the Herald, sixty-eight Republicans had signed a circular letter endorsing the compendium edition of Helper’s book, including sixty House members and the two leading Republican candidates for Speaker, Galusha Grow (R-PA) and John Sherman (R-OH). So on December 5, when John Clark (D-MO) proposed a resolution stating that anyone who endorsed the “insurrectionary” book would be banned from being Speaker, and then had the circular listing its endorsers read aloud, the House exploded.167

Southerners were outraged. Harpers Ferry threatened the security of the South. Helper’s book put such threats in print and promoted them. The endorsement of such a work by leading Republicans seemed to validate the South’s nightmare vision of the Republican Party’s true intentions. How could anyone who endorsed this book deny that he wanted to infiltrate and subjugate the South? To Southerners, the proof was on the printed page. To put a supporter of such a book in charge of the House—to submit to being governed by a declared enemy of the South: for many if not most Southerners, the dishonor not to mention the danger of such an outcome was too much to bear.

Thus the extreme Southern actions and reactions during the speakership contest.168 Of course, for many Republicans, the threats and bluster were all too familiar. Virginian Roger Pryor’s complaints about Southern degradation; Laurence Keitt’s vow to “shatter this Republic from turret to foundation stone” in defense of Southern rights and honor: Northerners had heard it all before.169 The Southern disunion song had been sung for so long that it had become meaningless. It was a kind of “tragic strut,” said Henry Wilson in the Senate in January 1860, a Slave Power ploy “intended to startle and appall the timid, make the servility of the servile still more abject … and so retain their grasp on power.”170 Thaddeus Stevens spoke for many when he dismissed Southern threats as “barren thunders.”171

But in truth, the Southern fulminations weren’t more of the same. Southerners felt threatened and insulted as never before.172 During the first eight weeks of the first session alone there were nine fights and numerous “scenes” (nonviolent confrontations); six of the fights pitted a Republican against a Southern Democrat.173 Notable among that number was the assault of John Hickman (R-PA) by Henry Edmundson (D-VA), clearly a frequent fighter. During the speakership kerfuffle, Hickman belittled Southern fears and threats, scoffing that John Brown had terrified the entire state of Virginia with a handful of men. This was Republican bravado with a vengeance, and not surprisingly, Edmundson defended Virginia’s honor by striking Hickman during a chance encounter on the street. Laurence Keitt, of all people, grabbed Edmundson’s arm and pulled him away. The Richmond Whig half-joked that Keitt had been trying to avoid the talk of murderous Slave Power plots that were sure to appear in the Tribune the next day.174

The Senate wasn’t immune to uproars. During a closed session on January 17, Republican objections against a Southern diplomatic nominee launched a heated argument and almost caused a duel. Republicans complained that the nominee had vowed to destroy the Union in defense of the South, outraging Southerners who insisted that all loyal Southerners felt that way, and in the angry exchange that followed, Robert Toombs (D-GA) and James Doolittle (R-WI) each threw the lie at the other. Started and settled behind closed doors, this spat wasn’t mere theater; it was testimony to bad feelings on all sides.175

Even more alarming were the actions of Southerners off the floor. In December, Governor William Gist of South Carolina told his state’s congressional delegation that if a Republican was elected Speaker he should be ejected by force if necessary, and if it came to that, he would send armed forces to Washington. He was prepared “to wade in blood rather than submit to inequality & degradation.”176 But a governor couldn’t cross this line, Gist explained. The ultimate decision to bloody the House would have to come from congressmen.

Gist’s letter helps to explain Keitt’s actions during the speakership contest as witnessed by his wife, Susanna. In December, she wrote to her brother in a panic. Her husband, Thomas Clingman (W-NC), Roger Pryor (D-VA), and Virginian Ambrose Dudley Mann had just left her parlor—all of them armed—ranting about a Black Republican Speaker and swearing to “fight to the knife there on the floor of Congress. And either take possession of the Capitol or fall.” And they weren’t alone. “Bowie knives and revolvers are the companions of every Southern Member,” Susanna Keitt fretted, and Governor Wise was said to have 10,000 men armed and ready to march on Washington at the first sign of trouble. The tension was unbearable. “I am nervous and excited so I can hardly keep my seat,” she confessed. “Heaven help us all.”177

Republicans weren’t sitting silent during the crisis.178 They swore up and down that they had no desire to invade or harm the South; a few even withdrew their endorsement of Helper’s book. They had endorsed it only after being told that he would cut the most objectionable passages, which—clearly—he hadn’t done.179 But Southerners didn’t believe them, just as Northerners refused to believe Southern threats of disunion. By 1859, there was little faith between North and South, and for some men of extreme feelings on both sides, little liking.

Even so, in the end nothing happened, even when freshman William Pennington (R-NJ) won the speakership on February 1. A conservative Whig who had only recently become a Republican, Pennington became Speaker during his first term because he was moderate on slavery, opposing the Lecompton constitution and slavery extension but upholding the Fugitive Slave Act as the law of the land, much like French.180 The immediate crisis of the moment had passed, though the Speakership vote set the tone for the session: every Northerner in the House voted for Pennington, and every Southerner but one—Henry Winter Davis (A-MD)—voted against him. A few weeks later, when the American flag in the House chamber was accidentally hoisted upside down—or “Union down,” as French put it—he took it as an omen.181

For the next few months, Congress rumbled along, erupting into violent outbreaks every few weeks, sometimes more often. All told, there were more than a dozen fights in the Thirty-sixth Congress as well as many near misses. Prominent among these was a near duel between Roger Pryor (D-VA) and John “Bowie Knife” Potter (R-WI), the clash that earned Potter his nickname.182 Pryor was a bully of the first order, involving himself in at least five confrontations that session.183 The Maine native Potter was likewise “a most uncomfortable antagonist to run against in a conflict,” noted a friend.184 The two came head-to-head in the wake of a near melee sparked by Owen Lovejoy (R-IL), brother of the antislavery newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy, who had been murdered by proslavery forces in 1837. When Lovejoy, warming to his subject (“The Barbarism of Slavery”), strayed too close to the Democratic side of the House, waving his fists, Democrats leaped to their feet, hurling insults, and streamed toward Lovejoy, bringing a wave of Republicans in their wake. When Pryor threatened to silence Lovejoy, Potter insisted that Republicans would be heard, “let the consequences be what they may.” This was a virtual invitation to fight, and so Pryor took it, initiating formal duel negotiations.

Potter immediately consulted the fighting Republicans Cadwallader and Israel Washburn, Galusha Grow, Zachariah Chandler, and Ben Wade. Determined to show the South that they “were not to be bullied any longer,” Potter then accepted Pryor’s challenge and chose bowie knives as weapons. When Pryor refused to fight with such “vulgar” weapons, Republicans rejoiced, celebrating Potter’s fighting-man gumption. At the Republican national convention one month later, Potter was awarded a seven-foot-long “monster Bowie knife” inscribed with the words “Will Always Meet a Pryor Engagement.”185 Potter’s second, Frederick Lander, who offered to duel Pryor with pistols in Potter’s place, was likewise celebrated. When the surprised Lander asked a gathered crowd why they were honoring him, someone yelled back, “Because you’ve got pluck!”186 Democrats who claimed that Potter’s posturing was aimed at upcoming elections weren’t far from the truth; he was easily reelected that fall, with his fighting-man status front and center.187

Fighting man Galusha Grow (R-PA) was also challenged to a duel during this Congress—and reelected. During an argument in the House, Grow accused Lawrence O’Bryan Branch (D-NC) of violating the “gentlemanly courtesies” of deliberative bodies. Branch took offense and sent Grow a letter of inquiry regarding a duel. Refusing to accept a challenge, Grow made himself available for a street fight, vowing to prove to Southern men that Northern men would fight. But for once, the anti-dueling law worked. Branch was arrested, and closed the matter by publishing their correspondence in the press.188 (Vanity Fair, resorting to the tried-and-true cliché about the fighting Irish, summed up the incident as a fight between Galellshy A. Grow and O’Blarney J. Branch.)189

North and South, fighting men were in the limelight. Although the vast majority of congressmen hoped to avoid conflict, in the charged atmosphere, it didn’t take much to spark it. French experienced the temper of the times firsthand in May 1860 when the Washington Republican Association celebrated the nomination of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin for the 1860 Republican presidential ticket. As president of the association, French was the master of ceremonies. Lincoln wasn’t in Washington, but Hamlin was, so on the evening of May 19, a crowd of about two hundred Republicans marched to Hamlin’s lodgings as the Marine Band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hail to the Chief.” After an introduction by French, Hamlin thanked the party and praised Lincoln in a brief speech. By this time, the crowd had at least doubled; French thought that there were thousands of people present “of all sorts of politics.” The procession next moved to the lodgings of Senator Lyman Trumbull (R-IL). But during Trumbull’s speech, “uneasy spirits,” as French called them, began to heckle, cheering for Stephen Douglas and asking where John Brown was. Elihu Washburne (R-IL) had just begun to speak when a swarm of people (“drunken rowdies,” French thought) descended on the crowd throwing rocks, starting a general stampede with the band leading the way. Enough people stood their ground for Washburne to finish his speech, and after a rousing three cheers, everyone went home.190 But a point had been made; the Republican Party’s ratification meeting nine days later had police protection.191 Washington was a Southern city, and Republicans had to take care.

This was particularly true of the most aggressive Republicans, men such as Charles Sumner, who returned to the Senate in December 1859, a little more than three years after his caning. On June 4, 1860, he showed just how aggressive he was by delivering a savage four-hour antislavery speech. Titled “The Barbarism of Slavery”—like Owen Lovejoy’s speech—it fulfilled the promise of its title, arguing with carefully documented statistics as well as stunningly powerful rhetoric that slavery had made the South an inferior civilization: “Barbarous in origin; barbarous in its law; barbarous in all its pretensions; barbarous in the instruments it employs; barbarous in consequences; barbarous in spirit; barbarous wherever it shows itself, Slavery must breed Barbarians.”

For Sumner’s Southern colleagues, one portion of his speech hit particularly close to home: the section on “Slave-masters in Congressional history.” Beginning with Henry Wise’s and Bailie Peyton’s near-shooting of Reuben Whitney in a committee-room in 1837, Sumner marched his listeners through a congressional chamber of horrors, quoting Southern threats from the Globe, often with volume, page, and date citations. He talked of John Dawson of throat-cutting fame; of John Quincy Adams’s years of abuse; of Joshua Giddings’s sufferings and censure; of Henry Foote’s threat to hang John Parker Hale, and Foote’s later attack on Thomas Hart Benton, complete with its dramatic denouement in the Senate. Nor did he stop there. He read some of the insults thrown at Owen Lovejoy two months past. He said nothing about his own attack, but of course, he didn’t have to. Such examples could be “multiplied indefinitely,” he concluded. Every one of them, “every appeal, whether to the Duel, the bludgeon, or the revolver—every menace of personal violence, and every outrage of language, besides disclosing a hideous Barbarism, also discloses the fevered nervousness of a cause already humbled in debate.”192 By blasting slaveholders as barbarians, Sumner put into words what antislavery toreadors had been implying for decades. When he concluded, James Chestnut (D-SC) rose to explain why Southerners had quietly submitted to such abuse: after watching Sumner whine and cringe his cowardly way through Europe, they didn’t want to send him “howling through the world” again in martyrdom. Sumner responded by promising to include Chestnut’s words in an appendix in the printed edition of his speech “as an additional illustration” of slaveholder barbarism, and he kept his word.193

Sumner’s words were explosively powerful, so powerful that French worried about how his son Frank would respond. Writing to his wife in New Hampshire, where his family was visiting, French asked her to tell Frank that the speech was a personal matter, not a matter of party. The speech was “terribly, vindictively, savagely severe,” thought French, “a mortal tongue stab at the South, for every blow Brooks gave.” The Republican Party didn’t endorse its severity, he noted, but it admitted its truth and understood its personal logic for Sumner: “Heaven avenged him first and now he has avenged himself.”194

Two days later, French met his fellow Republican Association member Lewis Clephane and some strangers on the street, clearly upset about something. One of the strangers, a visitor from Kansas, asked French if he could borrow a gun. When French asked why, Clephane took him aside and explained what had happened the night before: some Southerners had tried to assassinate Sumner, forcing their way into his room, demanding to speak to him privately, and running off when refused. Clephane had been there when it happened and had stayed by Sumner’s side until 2:00 in the morning, when Sumner finally went to bed. Because Sumner was a non-combatant on principle, he refused to wear a gun, Clephane explained. So the men who French had just encountered on the street had decided to act as bodyguards, accompanying Sumner wherever he went, sometimes staying by his side, sometimes hanging back and watching for trouble. French loaned them a revolver, hoping that if someone attacked Sumner, it would fire true.195

French’s chance encounter bothered him for hours, upsetting him, angering him, even frightening him. By the afternoon, he was so disturbed that he decided to arm himself and headed straight downtown to buy a small pistol that he could carry in his pocket every day. Explaining his decision to his wife, French said that he was arming himself in self-defense, “for if we are to be bullied for our republican principles, I think we ought to be prepared to defend ourselves.”196 French was preparing for the possibility of armed conflict with Southerners on the streets of Washington.

It was a telling decision, yet in explaining it, French didn’t act as though he’d crossed a line. In his letter, a gun was one of several purchases he made that day. He also bought two pairs of underwear. He had a pair on even as he wrote, and he declared them very comfortable. The purchase of underwear and the purchase of a gun: the routine dailiness of French’s decision is striking. Although he hadn’t worn arms for protection before, he didn’t feel like he was going to extremes. It was Southerners who had him worried. French was wearing a gun in case they crossed a line.

This was the logic of many weapon-wearing congressmen in 1860. They didn’t arm themselves every morning and head off for the Capitol hoping to gun people down. They were defending themselves against an unpredictable foe. That’s how Senator James Henry Hammond (D-SC) explained his decision to arm himself in April 1860 after the “Lovejoy explosion” had blown over. Convinced that almost every member of both houses was armed, and seeing even the oldest and most conservative senators with revolvers, Hammond “most reluctantly” got one for himself and kept it fully loaded in his Senate desk. “I can’t carry it,” he admitted to a friend. Twice in his life he had worn a pistol, and both times he’d gotten so unnerved that he’d put it aside. But now he had a loaded pistol in his desk because there was no telling what Republicans might say or do. They had the power to provoke a fight whose bloodiness would “shock the world and dissolve the government,” he thought. If that happened, as much as he hoped to avert it, he would stand by his fellow Southerners to the end. Hammond was armed “as a matter of duty to my section,” ready to fight and die with his countrymen on the Senate floor. And he wasn’t alone.197

John Haskin (R-NY) had a similar reason for wearing a gun, which became national news during the speakership debate in January 1860. During an angry exchange over John Clark’s (D-MO) anti-Helper resolution, Haskin accused his fellow New Yorker Horace Clark—an Anti-Lecompton Democrat—of both supporting and opposing slavery in Kansas, vowing to reveal to the world “in what a circus-riding aspect that colleague stands.” (This is doubtless what inspired Vanity Fair’s “Great National Circus.”) Haskin’s remark caused an uproar during which he pulled a gun on Horace Clark. In the crowding, pushing, and shoving that followed, Haskin’s gun went clattering to the floor, though not before Laurence Keitt, again playing against type, said that personal fights should be taken outside. (In its account, the Globe mentions only “confusion” and “crowding.”)

After some strategic mace-wielding by the sergeant at arms, the House went back to work—or at least, it tried to. There was some joking (Thomas Davidson [D-LA] said that “if these things are to continue in the future, I must bring a double-barreled shot-gun into the House”) and some scolding, with no one citing names or details, until Sherrard Clemens (D-VA) said that he had seen Haskin pull his gun on Clark, and felt that the New Yorker owed his constituents an explanation. (Clemens’s statement that he was shocked—shocked—to see a weapon in the House didn’t get any laughter, but it should have.) The House immediately silenced Clemens with roars of order and objections; such things were not to be mentioned on the floor, and any such discussion was bound to make matters worse.

But a few minutes later, Haskin made a personal explanation. Never in his life had he been armed before coming to Washington, he said. Now he wore a gun because he feared being attacked; in this session and the session before, a number of Northern congressmen had been assaulted, and he had to protect himself. Of course, he would never use his pistol in the House, he insisted—unless he was “unjustly assaulted and had to do it in my own self-defense.”198 Like Hammond and French, Haskin was protecting himself against a desperate and unpredictable foe: his fellow congressmen. And like Hammond, he was fully prepared to use his gun in the halls of Congress, however much he hoped he wouldn’t have to. So was “Bowie Knife” Potter. As he explained to a friend as he strapped on a pistol and a knife before heading to the House, there was no telling what would happen, particularly if Southerners in the galleries took action.199

And so did the United States Congress become an armed camp, just as Thaddeus Stevens said (though Vanity Fair urged congressmen to follow Haskin’s example and drop their weapons).200 Also, as Stevens said, at least a few dwellers in that camp were prepared to gun people down. A few days after the Lovejoy scuffle, Martin Crawford (D-GA) admitted that in the midst of the melee, he had cocked his revolver in his pocket and taken a position “in the midst of the mob,” fully prepared to fight and die.201 “We have the men of sufficient nerve to bring this matter to a bloody issue” with armed combat in the House, he assured former congressman Alexander Stephens (D-GA). The only thing holding them back was fear of public opinion back home. Launching a shootout in the Capitol required a respected champion who could justify the bloodshed and “inaugurate the movement.” Too bad Henry Wise was no longer in Congress, Crawford thought. Without such a man, he feared “that the people would be disgusted and we should be disgraced.”202 Here was a grand irony. After years of intimidating Northerners with threats and duel challenges, knowing full well that Northern public opinion kept them from fighting back, Southerners now faced the same dilemma. Events in Congress were driving them beyond where their constituents might go.

Men such as Miles, Keitt, Crawford, Pryor, and Clingman were ready for open combat—in Keitt’s case, regardless of what his people thought.203 Yet even such extremists framed their violence as defensive. Governor Gist of South Carolina was fully prepared for “war to begin at Washington,” but he wanted it to “begin in sudden heat & with good provocation, rather than a deliberate determination to perform an act of violence which might prejudice us in the eyes of the world.”204

In a sense, America was backing its way into civil warfare. The fire-eating rhetoric, the threats and dares, the talk of bloodying the Capitol, the pervasive guns and knives, and now the group fights on the floor: they were clear signs of a nation being torn in two. They were also blunt reminders of a lack of faith in the institution of Congress, even on the part of congressmen; a body of armed legislators is a body of men with no confidence in the power or practices of their own institution. The implications of this loss of faith were profound. If the nation’s representative body couldn’t function, could the nation long survive? Where else but in Congress could the interests of America’s many regions and constituencies be addressed through debate and compromise? As Illinois Republican E. W. Hazard wrote shortly after Sumner’s caning, “If we can no longer look to Congress … what remains to us but a resort to the means given us by the God of nature for self-defence?”205

Self-defense: Hazard’s wording is noteworthy. In truth, most congressmen didn’t want to dissolve the Union; they were taking up arms in defense of their people, their state, their section, and themselves. Republicans urged their congressmen to fight—in self-defense. Southerners would start a war in Washington—in self-defense. Conspiracy theories encouraged this kind of magical thinking. If there really was a brewing plot to subjugate the North or South, if the security of a people and the stability of their society were under attack, then any and all extreme measures were justifiable as self-defense.206 Indeed, the situation demanded such measures. Yet even now, there wasn’t total mayhem in Congress. People weren’t itching to fight. They were afraid that they might have to.

This ethos of “aggressive defensiveness” pervaded the presidential election of 1860.207 Many Northerners campaigned on that idea, citing the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the battle over the proslavery Lecompton constitution, and the Dred Scott ruling as a holy trinity of Southern aggression that proved their intentions to swallow up the Union and had to be repulsed. Southerners, in turn, told horror stories about the Republican Party infiltrating the South and destroying it from within. Former representative William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama told such tales in a rip-roaring speech before hundreds in New Orleans. With Lincoln in power, Southern federal officers were bound to be Republicans, he argued. As a result, in the South, “there will be free speech, as they call it, everywhere for the propagation of Abolition opinions. There will be a free press, as they call it, for the circulation of Abolition documents.” And once there were more free states in the Union—which there most assuredly would be, with Republicans in power—their antislavery regime would abolish slavery throughout the Union, their unwavering goal. To Laurence Keitt, the future was clear: slave insurrections, slaveholders poisoned, and plantations put to the torch.208 His wife, Susanna, was of like mind. “Submission to Lincoln” meant “sectional disgrace, sectional subjugation, poverty, exile and ruined homesteads.”209

For North and South alike, the election of 1860 seemed like a mandate on the future of slavery, and the outcome of that mandate was clear. Not only was Lincoln elected president, but Republicans took both houses of Congress, taking 49.1 percent of the House and 55.5 percent of the Senate. At the opening of the next session of Congress in December, the election’s emotional impact was apparent. Senator Albert Gallatin Brown (D-MS) condemned the “triumph of principles, to submit to which would be the deepest degradation that a free people ever submitted to.”210 Thomas Clingman (D-NC)—who had threatened to bloody the Capitol in 1850, and was now a senator—swore that the outcome would be secession. Senator Alfred Iverson, Sr. (D-GA), saw the first signs of secession even as he spoke. Seated before him were “two hostile bodies,” he told Republicans. “You sit upon your side, silent and gloomy; and we sit upon ours with knit brows and portentous scowls. Yesterday, I observed that there was not a solitary man on that side of the Chamber came over here even to extend the civilities and courtesies of life; nor did any of us go over there.”211

Distrust, defensiveness, and degradation. Years of conflict had brought both Congress and the nation to this point. Given that long history, what came next? After decades of defending the South’s rights, honor, and interests with their words, deeds, and fists, and years of raging against Northern degradation, could Southerners succumb to being governed by the enemy? Could Southern congressmen or their constituents stomach such disgrace? For many Southerners, the answer was no.

Congressional violence didn’t cause this sectional standoff, but it intensified it. By performing sectional warfare in the halls of Congress during a crisis of the Union, congressmen exposed the emotional power of sectional degradation to a watchful national audience, giving human form to the fraying of national bonds. In the process, they stoked the flames of disunion.

That same long history of bullying and violence encouraged Northerners to downplay Southern threats of secession, even as late as 1860. French was typical of many in suspecting that they were a mere opening gambit—a ploy for Southerners to get their way. Threats had long served slaveholders well. Perhaps this was more of the same. “They will all come to their senses by & by,” he thought.212 Others agreed. “Maryland and Virginia have no idea of breaking up the Union,” wrote the New-York Tribune, “but they would both dearly like to bully the North into a compromise.”213 Here is a rich irony. Southerners themselves had taught Northerners to dismiss Southern disunion threats as crying wolf.214

But Southerners stayed true to their word. Between December 20, 1860, and June 1861, the fact of disunion was performed in human form in the House and Senate. As one Southern legislature after another resolved their state out of the Union, Southern congressmen rose to their feet one by one and bade farewell to the Union and their colleagues, some of them in tears.215 When three state delegations withdrew in one day, Senator James Mason (D-VA) stated the obvious in terms so bald that they silenced the chamber. Pointing to the now empty seats surrounding him, he declared: “The Union was now dissolved.” A reporter for The New York Herald witnessed the impact: with those five words, the “momentous events now daily occurring—the dissolution of the Union, the breaking up of the government, and the awful imminence of civil war” seemed unavoidably at hand.216

French was as stunned as any, but he remained convinced that soon enough, the seceded states would be in ruins, begging to return. If not, so much the better. The North would thrive without them. In the meantime, he wished those states well, but he wished them gone.217

Yet even as he minimized the crisis, French was preparing for disaster. On the home front, in the midst of the political chaos, his wife, Bess, took ill. After months of failing health, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy, leaving her weak and languid.218 Suddenly, French faced the terrifying possibility of losing his life’s love after thirty-five years of marriage.

Matters on the political front were also rocky. In January 1861, French heard rumors that “some misguided scoundrels” intended to prevent Lincoln’s inauguration “by force,” perhaps by assassination. Though he declared in his diary that he couldn’t believe it, he held himself ready “at a minute’s warning” to repel an attack—particularly after hearing whispers about a plot in Baltimore.219 French breathed a huge sigh of relief when Lincoln arrived in Washington on February 23 and was whisked away to safety at Willard’s Hotel.220 Three days later, when Lincoln visited the House and Senate, French was watching. Fellow Republicans crowded around the president-elect, shaking his hand with more enthusiasm than French had ever seen. Democrats were less enthusiastic, but cordial. A week later, on March 4, Lincoln’s inauguration went off without a hitch, with Marshal-in-Chief French presiding.221

The Southern violence feared by French took another month to surface. Although South Carolina had been the first state to leave the Union in December 1860, Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor was still in Union hands four months later, though in dire need of supplies. On April 12, 1861, knowing that supply ships were on their way, Confederate troops took action. At 4:30 in the morning, they launched a cannonade against the fort that continued for thirty-four hours. The sound and fury were dramatic; people in Charleston sat on their roofs and watched. Two days later, on April 14, Fort Sumter was surrendered and evacuated. Civil war had begun.

Hearing the news, French made one final, desperate attempt to stay the crisis. As a Mason, he considered it his “solemn duty” to do everything in his power to prevent civil warfare, and as Grand Master of the Knights Templar of the United States, he actually possessed some power. So on April 16, he put pen to paper in defense of the Union, as he had so many times before, addressing a circular to “all True and Patriotic Templars,” pleading with them to use their influence to fend off civil war.222 There were tens of thousands of Templars in America, he argued; if every one did his part within his circle to encourage peace, they might just have an influence. If ever there was a moment to wield the power of Masonic brotherhood, that moment was now. French wasn’t asking people to surrender their principles, he assured his readers; he was asking them to cast politics aside. With the Union in the balance, French was trying to get the Masons to do what Congress seemed unable to do: prove that national bonds of sentiment crossed sectional lines.

Less than two weeks later, French received a response from E. H. Gill, Grand Commander of Virginia. Why was French preaching peace and brotherhood to Virginians? Gill asked. Southerners had already tried every honorable means of avoiding war, casting aside politics and working for peace. And yet the North had trampled the South’s constitutional rights and was now “about to invade their soil, their homes and their fire-sides.” Northerners were the problem. Southerners were only acting in self-defense. The “God of Battles” would sustain Virginians in their fight against “this Cain-like and marauding attack of the Vandals of the North,” Gill felt sure. He and his fellow Virginians were only too happy to help Northerners into their graves. And with that, Gill declared that the Grand Encampment of Knights Templar of the State of Virginia was no longer under the jurisdiction of the Grand Encampment of the United States. Virginia had seceded from the Masonic union. As Grand Master, French was suffering a secession crisis of his own.223

A few weeks later, French got a letter from a commander in western Virginia saying that his commandery refused to secede. Deeply moved, French replied with grateful thanks. Gill’s letter had astonished him, he admitted. Gill seemed to have gone out of his way to stab at French’s feelings. If he had known when and where French wrote his circular, Gill might well have held his tongue, French thought; French had written it at midnight at Bess’s sickbed, hoping that this one last desperate effort might slow, if not stop, the nation’s march toward civil war. But Gill hadn’t heard French’s heartfelt words of brotherhood. Gill didn’t seem to have heard French at all. Unwilling to respond in anger and knowing that words of peace would fall on deaf ears, French left Gill’s letter unanswered.224

For French, this was a turning point; the nation’s crisis of communication had come to a head. Viewed through the distorting haze of conspiracy thinking, even a call for peace became a call for war. The pull of that thinking was so powerful that even French couldn’t escape it. Even as he wrote his circular, grasping at straws for the sake of the Union, he was ranting about “Southern hotspurs” and invoking the “God of Battles” in his diary. “The United States is no longer to be triumphed over as if it were a coward and dared not protect himself!,” he ranted, an eerie echo of his praise for Northern fighters in years past, now a rallying cry for the nation.225 Given a choice between fighting and submitting to a domineering South, French wanted to fight.

And so French watched Virginia secede from the Masonic union, much as he had watched Southern states leave the national Union, one by one. Beginning the eighth volume of his diary on January 1, 1861, he put pen to paper with a sense of foreboding. “I commence this Journal at what still continues to be the seat of Government of ‘The United States of America,’” he wrote, envisioning a future when that might not be true. Twenty-seven years ago as a newcomer to Washington, French had gazed at the Capitol and wondered if it would “always be the capitol of my happy country.” He had never stopped wondering. Now the fight to answer that question was at hand, and French welcomed that fight. After a lifetime of compromising, politicking, singing, rhyming, denying, dodging, and ultimately fighting to save the Union, French was ready to let the Union slide.