INTRODUCTIONS

0.       Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 1: 272.

0.       Ibid., 1:294–95. On Dickens’s seat of honor on the floor, see French, diary entry, March 13, 1842, in Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee’s Journal, 1828–1870, ed. Donald B. Cole and John J. McDonough (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989), 138 (hereafter cited as Witness).

0.       For a sampling of comments on tobacco spitting—and there were plenty, particularly among the British—see N. A. Woods, The Prince of Wales in Canada and the United States (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1861), 342; Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America: With Remarks on Its Institutions (New York: William H. Colyer, 1839), 91; Adam Hodgson, Remarks During a Journey Through North America in the Years 1819, 1820, and 1821, 91; Rubio [Thomas Horton James], Ramble in the United States and Canada During the Year 1845, With a Short Account of Oregon (London: Samuel Clarke, 1846), 117; Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 30–31; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1863), 144–45; George Combe, Notes on the United States of North America, During a Phrenological Visit in 1838–39–40, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, 1841), 2:95. See also Ella Dzelzainis, “Dickens, Democracy, and Spit,” in The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914, ed. Ella Dzelzainis and Ruth Livesey (London: Routledge, 2013), 45–60.

0.       Christian F. Eckloff, Memoirs of a Senate Page, 1855–1859 (New York: Broadway Publishing Company, 1909), 19–20. See also Grace Greenwood, Greenwood Leaves: A Collection of Sketches and Letters (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), 307.

0.       In 1871, there were 148 spittoons in the House and 43 in the Senate. “Inventory of Public Property. Letter from the Architect of the United States Capitol,” December 18, 1871 (Washington: GPO, 1871), 6, 18.

0.       David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, May 28, 1850, DOP.

0.       David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 20, 1848, DOP.

0.       Benjamin Brown French to Harriette French, January 31, 1839, BBFFP. See also William Cabell Rives to his wife, June 2, 1838, William Cabell Rives Papers, LC.

0.       David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4.

0.     For an evocative look at violence and the Second Party System, see Mark E. Neely, Jr., “Apotheosis of a Ruffian: The Murder of Bill Pool and American Political Culture,” in A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Political History, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Rachel A. Shelden (Charlottesville: UVA Press, 2012), 36–63.

0.     The Plug Uglies were a Baltimore gang that joined the Chunkers and Rip-Raps in Washington for the riot; the Marines were called in by President Buchanan at the mayor’s urging. Baltimore Sun, June 2 and 5, 1857; Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 1:216–17. See also ibid., 159–61, 215; French, diary entry, June 9, 1857, BBFFP. On 1858, see French, diary entry, June 13, 1858, Witness, 293.

0.     New York Daily Times, January 13, 1857.

0.     NYT, March 20, April 2, 1858. For a scuffle in the Maine legislature, see Charleston Mercury, March 10, 1841, which calls it “almost as bad as Congress.”

0.     Ted R. Worley, “The Control of the Real Estate Bank of the State of Arkansas, 1836–1855,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 37, no. 3 (December 1950): 403–26, 410–11; Jeannie M. Whayne, Thomas A. Deblack, George Saba III, Morris S. Arnold, Arkansas: A Narrative History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 2002), 113.

0.     Given the lack of knowledge about the scale of violence in the antebellum Congress, acknowledgments of patterns of violence are rare; most studies focus on the caning of Sumner and note in passing that violence increased in the 1850s. On congressional violence generally, see Ollinger Crenshaw, “The Speakership Contest of 1859–1860: John Sherman’s Election as a Cause of Disruption?,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 29 (December 1942): 323–38; Rachel A. Shelden, Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2013), 120–43; James B. Stewart, “Christian Statesmanship, Codes of Honor, and Congressional Violence: The Antislavery Travails and Triumphs of Joshua Giddings,” in Finkelman and Kennon, In the Shadow of Freedom, 36–57; Eric M. Uslaner, “Comity in Context: Confrontation in Historical Perspective,” British Journal of Political Science 21 (1991): 45–77; Katherine A. Pierce, “Murder and Mayhem: Violence, Press Coverage, and the Mobilization of the Republican Party in 1856,” in Words at War: The Civil War and American Journalism, ed. David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, Roy Morris Jr. (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2008): 85–100; Donald C. Bacon, “Violence in Congress,” in The Encyclopedia of the United States Congress, ed. Donald C. Bacon, Roger H. Davidson, and Morton Keller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995): 2062–66; R. Eric Petersen, Jennifer E. Manning, and Erin Hemlin, “Violence Against Members of Congress and Their Staff: Selected Examples and Congressional Responses,” CRS Report, 7–5700, R41609 (January 25, 2011); Nancy E. Marion and Willard M. Oliver, Killing Congress: Assassinations, Attempted Assassinations, and Other Violence Against Members of Congress (London: Lexington Books, 2014). Corey M. Brooks’s Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2016) is one of very few books that notes the deliberate and politically strategic provocation of violence in Congress.

0.     A word on the word fight as used in this volume: the more than seventy altercations at the heart of this book involved physical action—punching, slapping, caning, lunging, shoving, duel negotiations, dueling, wielding weapons, flipping desks, breaking windows, and the like. They took place within the walls of the Capitol and on its grounds, or out and about in Washington and its immediate environs when Congress was in session. Most fights are also referenced in more than one form of evidence. (Verifying fights is trickier than it may seem; for more on this process of evidentiary triangulation, see Appendix B, “A Note on Method.”)

0.     Caroline Healey Dall, diary entry, December 26, 1842, in Helen R. Deese, ed., Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-Century Woman: Caroline Healey Dall (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 67–68. See also The Huntress, December 7, 1839, September 18, 1847. On French and his diary, see Cole and McDonough, Witness, 1–11 and passim; “The Biography of Benjamin Brown French,” in Ralph H. Gauker, History of the Scottish Rite Bodies in the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.: Mithras Lodge of Perfection, 1970), 5. My thanks to Peter S. French for bringing the previous work to my attention.

0.     French, diary entry, November 27, 1836, Witness, 65.

0.     Ibid., September 13, 1841, 124–25.

0.     Ibid., May 1, 1829, 18.

0.     Ibid., December 21, 1833, 35.

0.     Ibid., September 10, 1835, 45.

0.     Ibid., October 18, 1835, 52.

0.     Francis O. French, diary entry, February 7, 1850, ed. John J. McDonough, Growing Up on Capitol Hill: A Young Washingtonian’s Journal, 1850–1852 (Washington, D.C.: LC, 1997), 7.

0.     French, diary entry, January 1, 1854; December 12, 1858; January 1, 1859; June 1, 1860, BBFFP. French and his wife rented a house beginning in 1838; in 1842 they built a house of their own.

0.     For example, French’s friend F.O.J. Smith (D-ME) stayed with him for a few extended visits, and at the close of Caleb Cushing’s (W-MA) congressional career, when his changing politics got him thrown out of his boardinghouse, he stayed with French for a time. French, diary entries, February 25, 1842; July 16, 19, 30, 31, 1843; Witness, 137, 151–52.

0.     French to Henry Flagg French, April 9, 1853, BBFFP. French was a clerk in the House (1833–45); the Clerk of the House (1845–47); and clerk of the House Committee of Claims (1860–61). He was a lobbyist in the 1850s and again briefly in the 1860s. On his failed lobbying career, see French, diary entry, December 21, 1850; French to Bessie French, August 1, 15, 20, 21, 1852; French to Henry Flagg French, January 17, 1853, BBFFP; Kathryn Allamong Jacob, King of the Lobby: The Life and Times of Sam Ward, Man-About-Washington in the Gilded Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2010), 19–20; and Margaret Susan Thompson, The “Spider Web”: Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant (Ithaca: Cornell, 1985). For an example of French as substitute clerk, see French to Bessie French, August 17, 1856, BBFFP.

0.     A burst of recent scholarship highlights the power and extent of the Southern grip on the national government. On the reality of a Slave Power in Congress, see Alice Elizabeth Malavasic, The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2017). On Southern control of the federal government more generally, see esp. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).

0.     I am not arguing that the Civil War was grounded on irrational behavior or suggesting that emotions are the primary reason for the coming of the war. But as a genre of evidence, emotions—grounded in very real causes with longstanding histories—are vital to understanding the actions and mentalities that fueled the crisis of the Union. For an introduction to the use of emotions as evidence in the study of honor and violence, see Carolyn Strange, Robert Cribb, and Christopher E. Forth, eds., Honour, Violence and Emotions in History, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); and the seminal William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For a model application of the study of emotion to the coming of the war, see Michael E. Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Woods’s introduction (1–20) does a superb job of explaining the historiography of the study of emotions, politics, and the Civil War. See also Anna Koivusalo, “‘He Ordered the First Gun Fired & He Resigned First’: James Chesnut, Southern Honor, and Emotion,” in The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity, ed. John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2017), 196–212; Stephen W. Berry II, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s–1880s (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001), 177–202; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2 vols.

0.     See for example Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010).

0.     On Southern nationalism, see esp. Bonner, Mastering America. On “Union” as antebellum shorthand, see Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

0.     Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), passim.

0.     On the idea that political ambitions and the stoking of popular passions—a “blundering generation” of politicos—led to the Civil War, see for example J. G. Randall, “The Blundering Generation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27, no. 1 (June 1940): 3–28; Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). For arguments on the other end of the historiographical spectrum about the war’s inevitability, see Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” in The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 191–245. For skilled discussions of this debate overall, see esp. Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York: Norton, 2005); Woods, “What Twenty-first Century Historians Have Said About the Causes of Disunion.”

0.     See for example Chicago Press and Tribune, March 31, 1860; Lowell Daily Citizen, June 6, 1856; Salem Register, June 9, 1856. A friend sent French a revolver for his safety in 1863; Samuel Strong to French, September 17, 1863, BBFFP.

0.     See for example Charleston Mercury, February 11, 1858; NYT, February 8, 1858.

0.     Edward L. Ayers, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (New York: Norton, 2017), xxi. Other noteworthy examples of this approach include David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861 (New York: Harper, 1976); Freehling, Road to Disunion.

0.     French to Bess French, April 25, 1838, BBFFP.

0.     French, diary entry, June 21, 1831, Witness, 23.

0.     French lived in Chester, Sutton, Newport, and Concord. French to Henry Flagg French, September 28, 1829, and March 3, 1833, BBFFP.

0.     French, diary entry, June 5, 1833, Witness, 26–27.

0.     Martha Derthick, ed., Dilemmas of Scale in America’s Federal Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 2–3; Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

0.     Timothy Dwight, Travels in New-England and New-York, 4 vols. (New Haven: Published by author, S. Converse, Printer), 2:247.

0.     Witness, 1; Benjamin Chase, History of Old Chester from 1719 to 1869 (Auburn, N.H.: Published by author, 1869), 247, 412, 527; The Farmer’s Monthly Visitor (Concord), November 30, 1840, 174.

0.     For an obituary, see United States Oracle (Portsmouth, N.H.), March 20, 1802.

0.     John Carroll Chase, History of Chester New Hampshire Including Auburn (Derry, N.H., 1926), 444–45; Charles H. Bell, The Bench and Bar of New Hampshire (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1894), 383. The quote comes from Charles Bell, U.S. senator and governor of New Hampshire.

0.     French, diary entry, October 9, 1866, Witness, 520–21. French was helping to move an outbuilding closer to a house, and the householder treated his helpers to “the best of gin” doled out from a copper teakettle.

0.     French, diary entry, February 17, 1867, Witness, 530. On French’s life, see ibid., 1–11.

0.     French, diary entry, October 25, 1840, ibid., 103.

0.     John Adams Vinton, The Richardson Memorial: Comprising a Full History and Genealogy of the Posterity of the Three Brothers, Ezekiel, Samuel, and Thomas Richardson (Portland, Maine: Brown, Thurston & Co., 1876), 114–17; French, diary entry, March 29, 1838, Witness, 77.

0.     Margaret French Cresson, Journey into Fame: The Life of Daniel Chester French (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), 17.

0.     Ibid., 15–17; August Harvey Worthen, The History of Sutton, New Hampshire, 2 vols. (Concord, N.H.: Republican Press Association, 1890), 1:236.

0.     The Spectator, founded in 1825, was Newport’s first and only newspaper until 1831. On the New Hampshire press in this period, see Jacob B. Moore, “History of Newspapers Published in New Hampshire, from 1756 to 1840,” American Quarterly Register 13 (1841); Simeon Ide, “History of New Hampshire Newspaper Press, Sullivan County,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the New Hampshire Press Association (January 1874), 56–64; H. G. Carleton, “The Newspaper Press in Newport,” in Edmund Wheeler, The History of Newport, New Hampshire: From 1766 to 1878 (Concord, N.H.: Republican Press Association, 1879).

0.     The best extended account of Hill’s New Hampshire political activities, as well as antebellum New Hampshire politics generally, is Donald B. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). See also Cyrus P. Bradley, Biography of Isaac Hill (Concord, N.H.: Published by John Brown, 1835). On antebellum New Hampshire politics, see also Richard H. Sewell, John P. Hale and the Politics of Abolition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965); Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery & the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2004), 78–102; Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Norton, 1966), 54–62.

0.     French, draft of memoir, BBFFP.

0.     French, diary entry, February 17, 1834, Witness, 38.

0.     Cole, Jacksonian Democracy, 60–61.

0.     Ibid., 3–6, 69.

0.     Ibid., 61. See also Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), esp. 208–13; Steven P. McGiffen, “Ideology and the Failure of the Whig Party in New Hampshire, 1834–1841,” New England Quarterly 59 (September 1986): 387–401.

0.     On politics and the press in this period, see esp. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Katherine A. Pierce, “Networks of Disunion: Politics, Print Culture, and the Coming of the Civil War” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2006); Thomas C. Leonard, The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., Fanatics and Fire-Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2003); Craig Miner, Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1854–1858 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2008); Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700–1860s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1989); or Sachsman, Rushing, and Morris Jr., eds., Words at War.

0.     Jefferson to James Madison, February 5, 1799, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-31-02-0005, accessed June 8, 2015.

0.     Jeffrey Pasley, “Printers, Editors, and Publishers of Political Journals Elected to the U.S. Congress, 1789–1861,” pasleybrothers.com/newspols/congress.htm, accessed June 8, 2015.

0.     “Biography of Benjamin Brown French,” in Gauther, History of the Scottish Rite Bodies, 35. For a listing of his Masonic activities, see ibid., 73–74.

0.     French, diary, Witness, June 10, 1831, 21.

0.     Ibid., April 24, 1853, 238–39. On Pierce, see Roy Franklin Nichols, Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931); Michael F. Holt, Franklin Pierce (New York: Henry Holt, 2010); Peter A. Wallner, Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire’s Favorite Son (Concord, N.H.: Plaidswede, 2004); idem., Franklin Pierce: Martyr for the Union (Concord, N.H.: Plaidswede, 2007); Larry Gara, The Presidency of Franklin Pierce (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991).

0.     Horatio Bridge to Nathaniel Hawthorne, December 25, 1836, in Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), 1:148.

0.     French, diary entry, June 18, 1831, Witness, 23.

0.     New Hampshire Sentinel, June 27, 1833. See also French, diary entry, June 10, 1831.

0.     French, diary entry, June 18, 1831, Witness, 23.

0.     Ibid., June 3, 1831, 20.

0.     Ibid., June 2, 1831, 19.

0.     Ibid., December 18, 1843, 157.

0.     Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1996); Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); idem., “Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Marc C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 37–52.

0.     French, diary entry, September 15, 1828, Witness, 16. For an excellent account of politics and Congress in this period, see Joel H. Silbey, “Congress in a Partisan Political Era,” in The American Congress: The Building of Democracy, ed. Julian Zelizer (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 139–51.

0.     French, diary entry, September 15, 1828, Witness, 16.

0.     French to Henry Flagg French, May 22, 1832, BBFFP. Emphasis in original.

0.     French was referring to Houston’s caning of William Stanbery (AJ-OH) on April 13; an assassination attempt by Major Morgan A. Heard against Thomas Arnold (AJ-TE); and a near duel between E. S. Davis and Eleutheros Cooke (AJ-OH).

0.     Isaac Hill probably facilitated French’s rise; he routinely drew young blood into the Jacksonian fold by dangling jobs. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy, 165.

0.     French, diary entry, July 20, 1833, Witness, 29–34. The next few paragraphs are based on ibid.

0.     Ibid.; New Hampshire Sentinel, July 18, 1833. For accounts of the Concord celebration, see chapter 35 in the unpublished Grace P. Amsden, “A Capital for New Hampshire,” NHHS, www.concordnh.gov/Library/concordhistory/concordv2.asp?siteindx=L20,08,05, accessed August 18, 2012.

0.     French to Daniel French, January 30, 1835, BBFFP.

0.     On Jackson’s image, see esp. John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Thomas Brown, “From Old Hickory to Sly Fox: The Routinization of Charisma in the Early Democratic Party,” JER 3 (Autumn 1991): 339–69; Andrew Burstein, The Passions of Andrew Jackson (New York: Random House, 2007); James C. Curtis, Andrew Jackson and the Search for Vindication (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).

0.     French, diary entries, December 13, 1836, and January 9, 1844, Witness, 69, 158.

0.     Cole, Jacksonian Democracy, 167. On increased voter participation in this election, see John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? A Second Look (Chicago University of Chicago Press), 122–26. On Van Buren’s pitch for the party, see ibid., 113–14; and more generally, Donald B. Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American Political System (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984); Robert V. Remini, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); Joel H. Silbey, Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). On the election of 1828 and the organizational origins of the Jacksonian Democrats, in addition to the above, see Ralph M. Goldman, The National Party Chairmen and Committees: Factionalism at the Top (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); Donald B. Cole, Vindicating Andrew Jackson: The 1828 Election and the Rise of the Two-Party System (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009); Robert Remini, The Election of Andrew Jackson (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1963); idem., “Election of 1828,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger and Fred L. Israel, History of American Presidential Elections (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), 1:413–92; Lynn Hudson Parsons, The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).