The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  But Benjamin had no liking for lawyering. Within two years, the Frenches had moved to Newport, New Hampshire, where he had been appointed Clerk of the Courts in newly created Sullivan County. Two years later, in 1829, he became one of three owners of the Jacksonian New Hampshire Spectator as well as its editor, a position that he held during his tenure as clerk until he left for Washington.52

  The Spectator was a launching point for French. Not only did it capitalize on his scribbling impulse, but it plunged him into New Hampshire politics at a key moment of change. French joined the paper just as one of the state’s foremost politicos, Isaac Hill, was becoming a powerhouse organizer for what would eventually become the Democratic Party. Editor of the Concord New Hampshire Patriot, Hill was at the center of the drive to promote the presidential candidate Andrew Jackson and his supporters in New Hampshire.

  In many ways, Hill was a perfect spokesman for Jackson’s common-man message.53 Born in poverty, largely self-taught, lamed by a childhood injury, and afflicted with what French called a “splutter” (Hill’s thoughts seemed to outpace his mouth), Hill was a lifelong scrapper.54 He was “emphatically a political man” whose “whole soul” was devoted to politics, French thought.55

  Hill wasn’t new to politics in the 1820s. But his organizing efforts gained steam and power with the rise of Jackson. In New Hampshire, Hill coordinated the efforts of the state’s Democratic newspapers, helped establish new papers where needed, and allied himself with editors in other states. He created committees of correspondence to organize local efforts before elections.56 He helped stage elaborate celebrations of Jackson’s War of 1812 victory at the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, which grew to become a local holiday second only to the Fourth of July—and not by much. He stumped all over the state giving speeches (always reading them; he didn’t splutter when he read aloud), preaching Jackson’s common-man message in his all-too-appropriate black printer’s coat.57 In the process, Hill revolutionized New Hampshire politics, helping to set the stage for what would eventually become structured national political parties.58

  Newspapers were central to that change.59 As Thomas Jefferson had put it during his own campaign for president, they were the “engine” of a democratic politics.60 Editors were the engineers. They were also politicians, in fact if not in name. Smack in the middle of the political fray, tied in with politicos and the man on the street, their energies aimed at scoring points and winning elections, editors gained political office by the score during the so-called Age of Jackson.61

  French’s rise was typical of many. His pro-Jackson Spectator electioneering made him a local politico in his own right. His clerking duties gained him further influence, as did his membership in the Masons, which placed him amid powerful public men—though he was drawn to the order not by its clout but by its spirit of brotherhood as witnessed at a Masonic funeral.62 By 1831, two years after joining the Spectator, French had won a seat representing Newport in the New Hampshire House of Representatives.

  There, in Concord, the state capital, French got his first taste of legislative politics. Some of it he relished, particularly the camaraderie—the Madeira-drinking, cigar-smoking, storytelling evenings spent with fellow legislators. Five or six of them, he felt sure, would be friends for life.63 One such “good fellow” was Franklin Pierce. Elected to the New Hampshire House in 1829, Pierce became Speaker two years later at the age of twenty-six. The governor’s son, Pierce had something of the “golden boy” about him. French saw it the first time he spotted Pierce in a crowd. Pierce was “full of fun and frolic,” French thought, and he exuded charm.64 Strikingly handsome—athletic and slender in an age of stocky, stodgy men—he had an appealing speaking voice that he used to full effect, and a warm, graceful manner; he was famed for swaying juries as well as partisans. A college friend perhaps best summed him up: Pierce had “no very remarkable talents” but a lot of personal appeal.65

  The two men got to know each other when French joined the New Hampshire House, and they became fast friends. Renting rooms across the hall from each other at Gass’s Eagle Hotel, they spent many an evening talking politics and occasionally arm wrestling; French lost every time.66 Judging from French’s diary, he and Pierce spent a lot of time together. Pierce appears all over its pages, singing at the piano at parties with French, sitting by his side at dinners, riding around the countryside for pleasure, even visiting Chester with French—meeting French’s old friends and walking out to the town’s “great rock.” In decades to come, in ways that French could not even begin to fathom, Pierce would dramatically shape French’s life.

  French generally liked the business of politics; he was one of the most frequent speakers in the House. The New Hampshire Sentinel dubbed him the House’s “leading man” based on the sheer number of times that he rose to his feet.67 But his job didn’t suit him and he knew it.68 He was too impulsive, a realization that hit home when Speaker Pierce called him to order; “a desire to do everything that I happen to think should be done at the moment the thought occurs” had led him into many “embarrassing situations,” he admitted in his diary that night.69 And as ardent a Jacksonian as French was, as fervent an organizer, coordinator, and party drum-banger as he would become, he couldn’t stomach partisan dirty business. He didn’t have the temperament for it. He had a hard time holding grudges (“I do really believe I could not retain malice against the worst scoundrel that ever existed over half an hour,” he thought), and he agonized when asked to fire Whigs as a party hatchet man.70 The mere idea of such “indiscriminate political slaughter” kept him up nights, so what would “the performance of the odious duty cost me in wear & tear of heart & feelings?”71 French simply wasn’t in his element as a party combatant.

  But he was a superb party operative, an organizer and coordinator par excellence. He was perfectly suited to it: responsible, thorough, diligent, detail-minded, and almost preternaturally good with people in a sincere, straightforward kind of way. His genial personality made him an ideal person for drumming up enthusiasm; joined with his other skills, it virtually guaranteed that he was made an officer (often the secretary) of almost every organization that he joined, and he joined dozens over the course of his life. This was the great age of associations and organizations; charities, reform movements, and social clubs as well as political parties were multiplying, expanding, and trying for national or even international reach. With skilled secretaries in constant demand, French’s skill set was perfectly attuned to the times.72

  French found politics exciting, even fun. But its intensity sometimes scared him. It seemed as though the nation was involved in an “all-engrossing” war that could tear it in two; his fears about the state of the Union run through his diary like a whisper of doom.73 Past political excitement had seemed grounded on an “honest difference of opinion,” French thought. Current politics seemed fueled by “aspiring office seekers & political demagogues.”74 Upset by men who seemed intent on winning power with orchestrated public appeals, French was unsettled by the rise of structured party politics.

  But he was also swept up in it, entertained and even amused by it, and nowhere was it more amusing than in Washington. There was something undeniably funny in watching the leaders of the land throw punches. “Don’t you think the members of Congress are carrying on quite a little business in the way of pounding & shooting & being pounded & shot?” French asked his half brother Henry in 1832. “I expect some of them will get a hole made in their bread baskets yet.”75 French was referring to a series of violent clashes involving former (and future) congressman Sam Houston, who had assaulted a congressman for slandering his name, battering him with a cane on Pennsylvania Avenue; not long after, there was an assassination attempt on the steps of the Capitol against another congressman who had insulted Houston, followed by a near-duel involving yet another congressional Houston detractor.76

  In future years, when the implications of congressional violence became clear, French wouldn’t be laughin
g. But for the present, like thousands of other men with ambitions and a sense of adventure, French tied his life and livelihood to a leader whose violent outbursts were legend. Andrew Jackson swept French into the national political world.77

  In June 1833, Jackson was on a New England victory lap at the start of his second presidential term. Hoping that he would stop in Concord, the New Hampshire House sent French and two colleagues to Boston to invite him in person. Recalling the events of that June a few weeks later, French thought that more had been “crowded into one little month than has often passed before me in a year.”78

  Arriving in Boston on a Friday morning, the three legislators did first things first: they conferred with the editor of the Jacksonian Boston Statesman & Morning Post. Then they took in some sights, two of the men visiting Bunker Hill while French went art-gazing at the Athenaeum.

  Then came Jackson.

  French was watching from his hotel window when a flag raised on the statehouse signaled Jackson’s arrival and the city went wild. Cannon fired. Bells were ringing. Fire engines paraded. Harvard students in full regalia stood in formation. And the crowd! It was unlike anything that French had ever seen. It was immense, a “solid mass of heads” as far as he could see, with soldiers, coaches, horsemen, children and adults, white and black so densely packed that “a person could have walked upon the heads and shoulders of the multitude.” When the president’s open carriage entered the heart of the city and his shock of white hair came into view, the crowd burst into the heartiest cheering that French had ever heard.

  Later that day, French and his cohort met the president, who accepted their invitation. Then the next day, more festivities: a formal address by the governor at the statehouse, followed by a never-ending crowd of people surging toward Jackson, who bowed to each and every one until the doors were closed so he could catch his breath. “Heaven only knows how long they would have kept him there bowing,” French thought. A lavish feast in the Senate chamber followed, and then a formal review of Massachusetts infantry on Boston Common, attended—French guessed—by a hundred thousand people. “How small one man was among all that multitude,” he marveled, and yet “one man had caused its assemblage and on one alone every eye rested.” A few days later, Concord feted Jackson on a somewhat smaller scale, with yet another endless bout of bowing; Bess came to town to join in the fun. Moved by the power of it all, French became teary; thrilled with the implications of such power, Isaac Hill, now a U.S. senator and a member of Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet, took a pinch of snuff and laughed.79

  Andrew Jackson. The man was a phenomenon. A war hero. A tough-guy fighter; a duelist who killed his man. A self-made symbol of the American frontier. For French, Jackson’s coolness under fire during an 1835 assassination attempt would only add to his legend; as French wrote admiringly to his father after the would-be assassin fired off two pistols—which miraculously both misfired—the sixty-eight-year-old president had shoved people aside so he could “get at” the man himself.80 Jackson’s passions got the better of him time and again, and in this violent and passionate age, many Americans loved him the better for it.81

  Friend and champion of the common man, Jackson could be trusted with power—or so the party line went, a one-two political punch that won him a lot of political muscle. The fact that Jackson championed the white common man often went unvoiced but was no less central to his broad appeal. French couldn’t praise him enough. “Only second in our annals to the Father of His Country … the bravest of her brave,” Jackson was “the venerated[,] the admired, the beloved Chieftain, whom any true democrat delights to honor.”82

  To French, Jackson’s party was no less remarkable. Grounded on the seductive combination of Jackson’s war-hero popularity, an ambiguous common-man message, and the assurance that a national party would combat sectionalism and strengthen the Union, the Jacksonian Democrats electrified popular politics; in the presidential election of 1828, there was a massive increase in voter turnout wherever the party took hold, and it took hold with a vengeance in New Hampshire, with “Dictator” Isaac Hill, leader of the so-called Concord Regency, at its head.83 It was the first organized national political party of its kind.

  French came of age when this political machine was first gunning its engines. A small-town boy with no sense of direction, he lurched from one vocation to another—a soldier, a lawyer, a ne’er-do-well knockabout, a clerk—until he stumbled, or rather plunged into the world of party politics, gaining a network of allies and influence in the process; for French and countless others, their life paths and the rise of the “Second Party System” were intertwined. A little over five months after feting Jackson, French was offered a House clerkship, and a week later he was headed for Washington.

  1

  THE UNION INCARNATE FOR BETTER AND WORSE

  THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS

  In the middle of December 1833, the thirty-three-year-old French set off for the nation’s capital and a new life as a clerk for the U.S. House of Representatives. Duty drove him more than anything else; as he explained in his diary, he needed to earn money to pay his debts. He was too extravagant with his earnings, he knew, and now he was paying the price. His wife—“all I love on this earth”—was back in New Hampshire. And he was trundling in a stagecoach, then three steamboats, then another stagecoach to Washington.1

  During his trip, French bumped up against concrete evidence of just how localized the nation and he himself were. State banks printed their own currency, so interstate travel required preparation, and French wasn’t prepared. In Pennsylvania, he discovered that his New Hampshire bills weren’t much good. When his wife followed him to Washington a few months later, he had sage advice: “Use New Hampshire or Massachusetts money until you get to New Haven, and then begin upon your Southern money. I had some trouble in Philadelphia to get rid of my New Hampshire money.”2

  Southern money in hand, French arrived in Washington on December 21, 1833—at 1:30 a.m. on a cold morning, to be precise—and he spent the day doing what any visitor would do; he toured the capital with fresh eyes.3 What he saw was a raw young city with pretensions of becoming something more.

  A view of Washington from Capitol Hill in 1834, one year after French arrived. Pennsylvania Avenue is to the left. (By J. R. Smith and J. B. Neagle. Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Planned in the 1790s and first serving as the seat of government in 1800, Washington was a new capital for a new nation. Boosters called it the City of Magnificent Distances; critics called it the City of Magnificent Intentions. Either way, it embodied big hopes and an uncertain future.

  You could see the city’s rawness everywhere: in its sprawling dimensions and empty expanses; in its clusters of low wood houses and straggling rows of buildings pocked by vacant lots; in the odd isolated splendor of its scattered handful of large government buildings (as if “the British Museum … suddenly migrated to the centre of an exhausted brickfield”); in its broad unpaved avenues and its seemingly permanent blanket of dust from ongoing construction.4 As late as 1850, houses weren’t numbered, street signs weren’t mandatory, there were no streetlights, “and the visitor who wanted to find a residence had to depend upon the hack-drivers, whose method of memory seemed to be that each person lived ‘just a little way from’ somewhere else.”5 Thanks to poor planning, sewage pooled in low-lying areas; there was a “miasmatic swamp” near the White House, and in 1857 a sewage-induced dysentery outbreak in the National Hotel killed three and sickened dozens, including the president-elect.6 Cows, geese, and pigs roamed the streets. Over the years, French had countless livestock run-ins; on one evening in 1838, he was convinced that “nearly all the dogs in Washington” were behind his boardinghouse barking at cows. A few years later, a cow wearing a bell woke him night after night for months; even as he was complaining in his diary, the cow seemed to “gingle” her bell “as if she knew that I was writing about her.… D—n that cow.”7

  In a city networked by more road
s and alleys than New York or Philadelphia, the streets themselves seemed to rise up in rebellion.8 Crossing one of the broad avenues could be an adventure. When it rained, they were mired in mud. When it didn’t, the wind stirred up dust clouds so dense that people were choked and blinded. The wise Washingtonian carried a handkerchief to cover nose and mouth when crossing the street.9 (“You have no idea of the dust,” noted a clerk searching for a place to board that wasn’t enveloped in a thick cloud of it.)10 In the summer of 1856, Congress spent nearly $2,000 watering down Pennsylvania Avenue, roughly equivalent to $56,000 in 2017; French, commissioner of public buildings at the time, supervised the watering.

  Of course, Washington changed during its first five decades, transforming from a town of roughly 8,000 people in 1800 to a city of more than 50,000 in the 1850s.11 But one thing didn’t change: Washington revolved around the openings and closings of Congress. Just before the start of every session, a migrant group of politicians and their families trouped to the capital, joined by a throng of hangers-on: “distinguished foreigners, gentlemen who are traveling for amusement, political demagogues, claimants, patentees, letter writers, army and navy officers, office hunters, and a host of gamblers and blacklegs”—not to mention socialites eager for fun.12 (One congressman included “lunatics” in this group, noting that Washington had more than its share because some government claimants literally went insane waiting for Congress to act.)13 To French, it was a “cloud … equalled only by the locusts in Egypt.”14