The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

  A few weeks later, Foote took Clingman’s threats one step further. On February 18, free-state congressmen in the House had used the previous question to try to force through a resolution admitting California as a free state. In response, Southerners did what Clingman said they would do: they used parliamentary weapons to halt the debate until midnight, at which point the resolution would have to wait until March 4.75 Three days later, Foote rose to his feet in the Senate and proposed his solution to the California standstill: a select committee to hammer out a bundled “scheme of compromise.” To get his way, he issued an ultimatum: if a committee didn’t devise a compromise by Saturday, March 2—the last workday before the postponed California resolution would return to the House—then “so help me Heaven … during the next week occurrences are likely to take place of a nature to which I dare not do more than allude.” He knew what he was talking about, he insisted. “I have looked into the matter. I have conversed with members of both Houses of Congress; and I state, upon my honor, that unless we do something during the present week, I entertain not the least doubt that this subject will leave our jurisdiction, and leave it forever.”76

  What did Foote mean? Newspapers were quick to tell the tale.77 According to unnamed congressional insiders, if no plan was forged by March 2, a pack of armed Southern congressmen would “break up the House.” Rumor had it that they would pick a fight and spark a melee as their opening gambit. Once open warfare broke out in the House, there would be no turning back. The Compromise debate would move to broader fields of battle than the floor of Congress. Foote was bringing Clingman’s threat to life.

  Armed warfare in the House: the threat is so extreme that it’s hard to take seriously, particularly given its author, who was all too fond of what one newspaper called “gassing.”78 Thus the Globe’s nonresponse to Foote’s dire warning; it barely mentioned his ultimatum, even on the dreaded date of March 4. Within the context of the Globe, Foote’s threat doesn’t seem different from the rest of the session’s flame-throwing rhetoric.

  But dig deeper and the threat’s full impact becomes clear: some people seriously considered its implications and some few believed it. Even dubious congressmen couldn’t rule out such an onslaught. In private, there was talk. North Carolina Whigs Willie Mangum and David Outlaw calculated how many of their colleagues were armed. Mangum thought seventy or eighty men—a third of the House. Outlaw thought fewer, though he was struck that some Northerners were armed.79 However unlikely bloodshed seemed at present, there were some “acts of aggression which will call for resistance, at any and every hazard,” he thought. “Death itself is preferable to degradation and dishonor.”80 To even the most moderate of men, some insults required violent resistance. However much Foote was gassing, there could come a time when his words would bear true.

  Much of the press reached similar conclusions. Although a few Northern newspapers bought Foote’s threat wholesale, most considered gunplay possible but not probable. Armed Southerners probably wouldn’t break up the House, they advised, but hadn’t Southern congressmen proven time and again that they were capable of it?81 Here was the power of bullying firsthand. Although most threats were bluster, some of them weren’t, and it was hard to predict which ultimatums would be backed up with force. As Horace Mann (W-MA) put it when discussing three fights that broke out at the close of the previous session, “the spirit of fighting” was a hard thing to predict; it all “depends upon the men.” (In that case, the spirit of fighting had been clear; all three fights had featured a Southerner assaulting a Northerner.)82

  A full-fledged battle within the walls of the Capitol was unlikely: so judged congressional insiders and the press. But what of the public? They showed what they thought in the days leading up to March 4. In anticipation of the congressional day of reckoning, people began streaming into Washington, fully prepared to see armed warfare between North and South in the House. Only after the day passed without bloodshed did the “great crowds which assembled here to see the Union dissolved by a general battle in the House of Reps” drift home, Outlaw told his wife.83

  To these people, congressional ultimatums weren’t bluster; they seemed real enough to justify a visit to the Capitol—or to require some reassurance, as stray letters from congressmen comforting their friends and family make clear.84 Dangerous words were having an impact. And congressmen couldn’t help but notice. Some fretted about the damage that their extreme language could cause throughout the Union by fostering extremists. Others—particularly Southerners—thought that such language might do some good; as much as he regretted the repeated threats of disunion, Outlaw hoped that they would “cause the North to pause in their career before it is too late.”85

  This was bullying writ large—very large. It was bullying as statecraft, and it had an impact, though not as planned. Like Outlaw, many Southerners were counting on its power to quell Northern aggression and resistance. It had worked one year past. After the passage of a resolution to end the slave trade in the District of Columbia, Southerners had threatened to dissolve the Union and then met in private to discuss “what they are pleased to denominate Southern Rights,” John Parker Hale told his wife. Frightened Northerners had responded by voting to reconsider the resolution. The end result, Hale had felt sure, would be “some insipid unmeaning motion for an inquiry into the expediency of doing something instead of the bold and manly resolution” that had already passed.86 In these cases, as in others, Southerners didn’t punch and shoot their way to victory. They used intimidation; they played on the fact that disunion seemed possible, if not probable. And in 1850, with Southerners mouthing plans of disunion instead of mere threats, it seemed more possible than ever before.87

  But although a politics of ultimatums sometimes worked magic, during the high-stakes debate of 1850 it backfired, compelling Northern congressmen to dig in their heels and meet strut with strut. They boasted of their bravery in facing Southern threats. They bellowed about their right of free speech. And most of all, they presented themselves as champions of Northern rights. By standing up to slave-state men, they were defending the interests and honor of the North, just as bullying Southerners championed the South. In confronting their sectional antagonists, congressmen were literally and figuratively fighting for sectional rights.

  To a certain degree, this had always been true in Congress. Both Jonathan Cilley and William Graves felt that they were fighting for “their people” and their section, Cilley—the taunted New Englander—perhaps most of all. Both men likewise felt that their honor and the honor of all that they represented were intertwined. But in 1850, sectional honor was the debate. This was performative representation of a powerful kind; congressmen were performing sectional rights on the floor, and their actions would shape sectional rights in the Union, though only if sustained by their home audience.

  French counted on that fact, telling his brother that once Northerners knew “the game that is playing” in Congress, they would elect men who would fight for their rights.88 He himself reached new heights of respect for Northern fighting men during the 1850 debate, particularly for Joshua Giddings. Although French had long questioned Giddings’s aggressive abolitionism, he had always liked the Ohioan’s down-to-earth honesty; for French, “down-to-earth” was the highest praise that he could give. But during the Compromise crisis, he couldn’t praise Giddings’s manliness enough. Giddings was “one of the great men of this Nation,” French effused, “a high-minded fearless man, who is ready, I know, to become a martyr in a righteous cause.” French felt sure that Giddings, aided by “the God of battles,” would defeat “the oppressors” and save the Union.89

  Giddings had pitted himself against Southern “oppressors” in 1849 during debate over slavery in California at the close of the previous session. When Southerners had threatened to rip out the hearts of antislavery men, Giddings scoffed. Richard Kidder Meade (D-VA) responded by bragging that the best way to manage antislavery congressmen was to keep them afraid for th
eir lives. Unwilling to be bullied, Giddings condemned Meade’s words to his face, prompting Meade to grab Giddings’s collar and raise his fist, at which Southerners pulled the Virginian away. One reporter saw “a couple of gray heads bobbing about, and directly saw one of them hustled down the aisle … his arms seeming to be held in constraint by several friends.”90 At a time when French was raging against Southern dictation, this sort of display did his heart proud. Giddings was his beau ideal of a champion, a man who would stand up to bullying Southerners and right the balance of Union.

  Senator John Parker Hale received similar praise from friends, constituents, and the press for his defense of Northern rights. When Andrew Butler (D-SC) called him a “mad man” during discussion of an antislavery petition, the normally genial Hale lost his temper, shooting back that Butler would have to “talk louder, and threaten more, and denounce more before he can shut my mouth here.” Northerners weren’t to be “frightened, sir, out of our rights … we are not to be frightened even by threats of danger personally to ourselves.” New Hampshire men would proudly defend their rights in Congress or in battle, let the enemy “come when they will, and where they will, and how they will.”91 Given Hale’s typically jovial style, this combative defense of Northern rights received ample press coverage.

  So did his skillful skewering of ranting Southerners, as on May 20, 1848, when he responded to one of Foote’s taunts by asking for a dictionary so he could find the insult’s meaning, playing up the comedy of the moment and bringing down the house.92 In the Thirty-first Congress, the ongoing contest between Foote and Hale was much like the gag rule battle between Henry Wise and John Quincy Adams; the two men were partners in taunt and torment. Like Adams and Giddings, Hale was an antislavery toreador, but whereas Giddings fought with physical bravado and Adams fought with sarcasm and parliamentary savvy, Hale’s chosen weapon was humor. He was a master at deflating Southern bravado by reducing the Senate to laughter.

  Such energized Northern resistance was striking. More striking still were the energized fears of congressmen about their safety on the floor. With hundreds of people milling about the Capitol, Joseph Woodward (D-SC) thought that if the Duer-Meade scuffle at the start of the session had been more serious, “in less than three minutes three hundred strangers would have rushed into this Hall” and produced a bloody melee, a scenario that was strikingly close to Foote’s doomsday threat.93 David Outlaw agreed. “In times of great excitement, as upon the slavery question[,] armed men might be admitted into this Hall, and in case of a personal collision this place might become a scene of bloodshed and confusion.”94 The press came to the same conclusion; a “bloody row” fueled by “outsiders” could happen at any time, and “civil war would thus commence in the Capitol.”95 The South’s “new game of frustration, or parliamentary hindrances,” could end no other way.96 Southern threats of civil war didn’t seem so outrageous after all, but the American public—not congressmen—would bring them to fruition.97

  The session’s intense focus on bloodshed and sectional degradation is a reminder that sectional rights weren’t ethereal abstractions. They were close at hand and deeply personal, which gave them a special kind of power. As Volney Howard (D-TX) put it in 1850, if the Union was ever dissolved, it would be done not by calculation but as “a matter of feeling.”98 Fellow feeling might hold the Union together, but feelings of degradation could tear it apart. The gag rule debate had shown the importance of such feelings all too well. Northerners with little to say about the rule’s impact on slavery had plenty to say about its violation of their rights of free speech and representation, and the rule’s opponents played on that fact to bring it down.

  Fairness, honor, rights, and feelings: the Union was built on these dangerously subjective constructs, as were the workings of its legislative branch. The constitutional pact was just that—a pact—and violating that founding compromise was dishonest and dishonorable. On this all sides could agree. But the precise boundaries and implications of that pact were still up for debate in 1850, so violations were often in the eye of the beholder.99 French’s ode to the Union confronted that challenge by asking each state to be true to the others. To French, fellow feeling and good faith were the Union’s only hope.

  But fellow feeling was in short supply in 1850, even for French, who hoped that Northerners would remember “the spirit of ’76” and do all that they could to ensure that “the North is no longer cheated of its rights.”100 Cross-sectional trust was failing and fears of the consequences of that collapse were mounting. “At the very moment when forbearance and conciliation are of the first importance,” said David Outlaw, “these cardinal virtues, so essential to the peace of the country and the preservation of the Union, seem to have departed from our Legislative Halls.”101 Concern for the terms of Union was driving men apart.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF FIGHTING FAIR

  Ultimately, Foote’s large-scale sectional bullying campaign failed. As was ever his way, he went too far, making a threat too extreme to be believed—except by the people who came to Washington to witness the congressional apocalypse. But in the end, stalwart Northerners held firm, the day of reckoning passed without incident, and the torturous Compromise debate continued, as did Foote’s ongoing assault on Benton’s power and influence.

  Opposed to the extension of slavery, disapproving of Foote’s backroom mode of compromise, and detesting Foote personally, Benton was a hulking roadblock of a problem. He was also a formidable opponent. Never a graceful speaker, his power was in the reach and recall of his knowledge. A master at amassing facts and figures, he wielded them like weapons during debates.

  But Benton was a vulnerable target. His ambivalence toward slavery had long made him suspect among Southerners, who were more on guard than ever with its future at stake; Benton’s fight with Foote was one of many tussles between Southerners during that session.102 Much like French’s, Benton’s views on slavery were a web of contradictions; he disliked the institution, didn’t want to agitate the issue, disapproved of its extension, yet was willing to protect enslaved people as property. Neither a full Free Soiler nor a loyal Democrat, Benton embodied the mixed views of his home state of Missouri, which was grappling with the problem of slavery on the border of North and South. Many Southerners considered him downright traitorous; he was one of only two Southern senators not invited to Calhoun’s Southern caucus. His habit of dismissing Southern threats as empty bluster only made matters worse. Thus Benton’s nickname during the Compromise struggle: “Tommy the Traitor.”103

  Foote seized on this logic in combatting Benton, trying repeatedly to prove that the Missourian was no Southerner and thus couldn’t be trusted with Southern rights. If Foote managed things deftly, he might even hurt Benton’s chance for reelection.104 With such clear benefits in mind, he held nothing back. As the committee report phrased it, Foote “indulged in personalities towards Mr. Benton of the most offensive and insulting character, which were calculated to arouse the fiercest resentment of the human bosom.”105

  For Foote, such displays came naturally; he enjoyed Benton-baiting. Benton’s “overbearing demeanor,” his “boisterous denunciation,” his “sneerful innuendo”: Foote hated it all.106 On March 26, two weeks before his most renowned confrontation with Benton, Foote upped the ante. Eager to cut Benton off, Foote unleashed a string of insults, stating that Benton’s refusal to duel Butler had dishonored him, hinting at the possibility of a Foote-Benton duel, and accusing Benton of cowardice for tossing off insults while hiding behind privilege of debate and his refusal to obey “the obligatory force of the laws of honor.”107

  Foote’s strategy was ingenious. By insulting Benton personally and to his face, he was daring Benton to challenge him to a duel. For Benton, this was a lose-lose situation. He didn’t want to fight a duel. But refusing to do so could destroy his reputation. So thought David Outlaw (W-NC). Although he detested the practice of dueling, he believed that some situations demanded it, and Benton was “in
my judgement in that predicament.” To avoid “degradation,” the Missourian needed to “fight the first man who gives him occasion.”108 But given Benton’s foot-dragging in his near-duel with Andrew Butler two years past, Foote didn’t expect a challenge. And therein lay the power of his punch. He was trying to prove that Benton wasn’t a full-fledged Southern man and thus wasn’t loyal to the South. He drove that point home after each barrage of insults, asking Benton repeatedly: Do you abide by the code of honor?109 If the answer was yes, then a duel challenge was almost mandatory. If the answer was no, then Benton wasn’t a true Southerner. Clearly, Southerners could be bullied as effectively as Northerners.

  For a long time, Benton didn’t rise to the challenge. Perhaps he held back for the sake of the Senate; patriarch that he was, maybe he was upholding its status. Perhaps at the age of sixty-eight, he wasn’t eager to fight. A devoted family man, maybe his violent days were past. Perhaps he was preserving his congressional gravitas. Or perhaps he was simply doing his best to advance the Compromise debate.