Civil War History

The notion that physical violence between Northern and Southern congressmen before 1861 augured a shooting Civil War is not new. In This Hallowed Ground (1956), for example, Bruce Catton called the 1856 caning of Republican senator Charles Sumner the Civil War’s initial battle. In this terrific new book, Joanne Freeman agrees that “the first battles of the Civil War were waged in Congress itself ” (11). Yet she extends the list of inflammatory sectional brawls far beyond Sumner’s caning. By her count, between 1830 and 1861 at least seventy incidents of physical conflict—elbowing, spitting, punching, grappling, threatening with knives or guns, and dueling—occurred in, or were precipitated by angry clashes in, the House and Senate chambers. Set-tos in the 1830s primarily featured partisan strife between insulted Whigs and Democrats. From 1840 on, however, clashes almost always pitted a bullying Southerner against a Northern critic of slavery or slavery expansion.

Freeman’s count of these episodes was exceedingly hard won. Both the Congressional Globe and local Washington newspapers concealed violent incidents with silence or euphemism. Thus, she relies on diaries, letters congressmen sent home, and reports about congressional affairs by correspondents for non-Washington papers. Her primary source was the eleven unpublished diary volumes of Benjamin Brown French, who served as a clerk of the House from 1833 to 1847 and then remained in Washington until his death in 1870. Brown was an insider’s insider who personally knew every president from Jackson through Gant as well as many senators and representatives with whom he regularly dined. [End Page 90]

Brown’s diaries were not Freeman’s only source. She also consulted fifty-six manuscript collections and numerous congressional documents. Her encyclopedic mining of secondary works is especially striking. She apparently read almost every relevant work by other historians as well those by political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists. She cites unpublished PhD dissertations and MA theses from universities other than her own. Fully 100 pages of densely documented endnotes follow her 285 pages of text. All in all, this book is simply a stunning piece of research.

Freeman devotes separate chapters to the 1838 Graves-Cilley duel, the angry Gag Rule debates between 1835 and 1844, the Senate tiff between Henry Foote and Thomas Hart Benton in 1850, the sectionally fractious debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its aftermath, and the clash between Republicans and the Slave Power punctuated by the Sumner caning and later episodes of violence up through the secession crisis. She develops several themes in these and other chapters. One is to humanize nineteenth-century congressmen by portraying them as “an assemblage of sleepy, grouchy, disheveled men,” often drunk and often expectorating tobacco-stained spittle onto rugs of the House (29). More important, she stresses the difference between Southern congressmen and their Northern peers. Southerners, she argues, constituted “a domineering block of slaveholders at the heart of the national government who strategically deployed violence to get their way” because their constituents expected them to act aggressively (10). Most Northerners, in turn, refused to stand up to the bullying, at least until the mid-1850s, because they believed their constituents frowned on violent behavior. “By discouraging Northern violence and encouraging Southern violence,” she summarizes, “the American people fostered the [sectional] imbalance of power in Congress” (137). “Sectionalism,” shaped “the balance of power on the floor,” and Southerners, through insults, threats, and actual physical violence, thus dominated Congress until the mid-1850s, when Northerners finally met threat with threat and punch with punch (73). At that point, Northern Republicans and Southerners engaged “in a fight for control of Congress and thereby for the fate of the nation” (211).

These statements illustrate some of the questionable assertions in this otherwise estimable book. Her generalizations about public opinion outside Washington go beyond her own evidence and remain unproven. She also...