7. For the 1874 memorandum, see Simon Cameron Papers, LC. The three men were probably inspired to write their statement by the recent failure of a bill promoting black civil rights. In the final tally, only 45 of 79 senators voted; neither Chandler nor Cameron voted, because their constituents wanted them to vote against it. William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1982), 193–94, 204–207; Journal of the Senate of the USA, 43rd Cong., 1st Sess., May 22, 1874, vol. 69, 605–609.
8. The three men each put a copy of the statement in their confidential papers for future eyes to read. For passing references to the statement, see Albert T. Vollweiler, “The Nature of Life in Congress (1850–1861),” Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota 6, no. 1 (October 1915), 145–58; Wilmer C. Harris, The Public Life of Zachariah Chandler, 1851–1875 (Lansing: Michigan Historical Publications, 1917), 48; Lately Thomas, The First President Johnson: The Three Lives of the Seventeenth President of the United States of America (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 126; William Parker, The Life and Public Services of Justin Smith Morrill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 92; Albert Gallatin Riddle, Life of Benjamin Franklin Wade (Cleveland: Williams, 1888), 250–51; Arthur Tappan Pierson, Zachariah Chandler: An Outline Sketch of His Life and Public Services (Detroit: Post and Tribune, 1880), 146; Hans L. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York: Knopf, 1969), 116–17; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 146.
9. See esp. Norman Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann, The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), which argues that the spurning of norms and a lack of respect for the institution of Congress from congressmen themselves, dating back to the 1990s—including the disappearance of oversight, indifference to reform, the weakening of institutional identity, tolerance of executive secrecy, and the so-called nuclear option—have contributed to Congress’s decline. See also Juliet Eilperin, Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Burdett A. Loomis, ed., Esteemed Colleagues: Civility and Deliberation in the U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000); Sunil Ahuja, Congress Behaving Badly: The Rise of Partisanship and Incivility and the Death of Public Trust (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008); Uslaner, Decline of Comity in Congress.
INTRODUCTIONS
1. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 1: 272.
2. 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).
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, May 28, 1850, DOP.
7. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 20, 1848, DOP.
8. 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.
9. David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. New York Daily Times, January 13, 1857.
13. 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.”
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.”)
17. 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.
18. French, diary entry, November 27, 1836, Witness, 65.
19. Ibid., September 13, 1841, 124–25.
20. Ibid., May 1, 1829, 18.
21. Ibid., December 21, 1833, 35.
22. Ibid., September 10, 1835, 45.
23. Ibid., October 18, 1835, 52.
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. 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).
29. 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.
30. See for example Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010).
31. 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).
32. Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), passim.
33. 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.”
34. 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.
35. See for example Charleston Mercury, February 11, 1858; NYT, February 8, 1858.
36. 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.
37. French to Bess French, April 25, 1838, BBFFP.
38. French, diary entry, June 21, 1831, Witness, 23.
39. French lived in Chester, Sutton, Newport, and Concord. French to Henry Flagg French, September 28, 1829, and March 3, 1833, BBFFP.
40. French, diary entry, June 5, 1833, Witness, 26–27.
41. Martha Derthick, ed., Dilemmas of Scale in America’s Federal Democracy (New York: Cam
bridge 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).
42. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New-England and New-York, 4 vols. (New Haven: Published by author, S. Converse, Printer), 2:247.
43. 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.
44. For an obituary, see United States Oracle (Portsmouth, N.H.), March 20, 1802.
45. 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.
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