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96. French, diary entry, November 18, 1841, Witness, 128–29. He described himself as “portly” when he was in his sixties; ibid., June 11, 1861, 360; and Caroline Dall called him “large and fat.” Dall, diary entry, December 26, 1842, Deese, Daughter of Boston, 67–68.
97. George R. McFarlane [?] to Robert Barnwell Rhett, June 6, 1841, Robert Barnwell Rhett Papers, UNC.
98. Particularly useful studies of the Washington press and the antebellum Congress include Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Culver H. Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage: The American Government’s Use of Newspapers, 1789–1875 (Athens: University of Georgia, 1977); William E. Ames, A History of the National Intelligencer (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1972); Elizabeth G. McPherson, “Major Publications of Gales and Seaton,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 31 (December 1945): 430–39; idem., “Reporting the Debates of Congress,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 28 (April 1942): 141–48; F. B. Marbut, News from the Capital: The Story of Washington Reporting (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1971); J. Frederick Essary, Covering Washington: Government Reflected to the Public in the Press, 1822–1926 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927); Leonard, Power of the Press, esp. chapter 3; and for a slightly later period, Mark W. Summers, The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865–1878 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1994). On the press and Congress generally, see chapter 6.
99. Globe, 26th Cong., 1st Sess., March 14, 1840, 268.
100. Ibid., 23rd Cong., 1st Sess., April 18, 1834, 328. The Senate had been discussing President Jackson’s protest against the Senate’s motion to censure him; people were cheering and booing at mentions of Jackson and Henry Clay.
101. A Traveller [Henry Cook Todd], Notes upon Canada and the United States from 1832 to 1840 (Toronto: Rogers and Thompson, 1840), 33, 471. See also Edward T. Coke, A Subaltern’s Furlough, descriptive of Scenes in various parts of the United States, Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, during the Summer and Autumn of 1832 (London: Saunders and Otley, 1833), 89.
102. See generally, McDonough, Growing Up on Capitol Hill.
103. See United States Senate Commission on Art and Antiquities, “Manners in the Senate Chamber: 19th Century Women’s Views” (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1985); Ritchie, Press Gallery, 146.
104. Francis Lieber, Letters to a Gentleman in Germany: Written After a Trip from Philadelphia to Niagara (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1834), 75. On the political influence of women in Washington through Jackson’s presidency, see Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: UVA Press, 2000).
105. Randolph was attacking Daniel Webster (W-MA), who was then in the House. He next attacked Speaker John W. Taylor; when he finished, he sarcastically asked if Taylor’s wife was also in the gallery. Benjamin Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1886), 1:69.
106. Women influenced Washington politics in countless ways, but their influence was less immediate in the realm of congressional violence. They sometimes witnessed it, occasionally discouraged it, and, by the late 1850s, routinely recorded it for the press as reporters. But congressional bullying and violence was largely a man-to-man affair, imposed by murmured insults and backroom threats as well as by grand displays on the House and Senate floor, and negotiated by groups of men out of the public eye or on the field of honor. Even so, the influence of women appears throughout this volume. Not only were they active observers, confidants, influencers, lobbyists, and petitioners, but letters exchanged between congressmen and their wives offer by far the most emotionally expressive views of congressional mayhem and its impact. It would be impossible to fully grasp the emotional impact of bullying without those letters—and its emotional impact was its power. On women and party politics in this period, see Melanie Susan Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924 (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2001); Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1998); Jean Harvey Baker, “Public Women and Partisan Politics, 1840–1860,” A Political Nation, 64–81; Allgor, Parlor Politics. Allgor posits that women became more removed from the doings of politics with the rise of Jacksonian democracy.
107. Senate Journal, December 7, 1835, 5. The Senate gained a ladies’ gallery in 1835, the House in 1833.
108. French to Henry Flagg French, September 12, 1841, BBFFP. Emphasis in original. See also French, diary entry, September 13, 1841, Witness, 124–25; House Journal, September 9, 1841, 488.
109. Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 287–306. See also Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968); Albrecht Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (Philadelphia: University Press of Virginia, 2007), esp. 90–152; and more generally, Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Silbey, The American Political Nation, esp. 90–108; Mary Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California, 1997), 94–131; Mark W. Brewin, Celebrating Democracy: The Mass-Mediated Ritual of Election Day (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2005); Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 56–57; Grimsted, American Mobbing, 181–217; Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 1987), passim.
110. Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 24–25; Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic, 63.
111. French to Harriette French, December 10, 1839, BBFFP.
112. Ibid.
2. THE MIX OF MEN IN CONGRESS
1. On the local lives of most Americans, see Franklin, Southern Odyssey, 1–44, 58–75; Richard H. Gassan, The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790–1830 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).
2. On the nexus of party and Union, see Jeffrey J. Selinger, Embracing Dissent: Political Violence and Party Development in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
3. See note 7 for sources of demographic information on the antebellum Congress. On turnover, see also Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Family Factor: Congressmen, Turnover, and the Burden of Public Service in the Early American Republic,” JER 2 (Summer 2013): 283–316; Morris P. Fiorina, David W. Rohde, and Peter Wissel, “Historical Change in House Turnover,” Congress in Change: Evolution and Reform, ed. Norman J. Ornstein (New York: Praeger, 1975), 24–46; Stephen Erickson, “The Entrenching of Incumbency: Reflections in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1790–1994,” Cato Journal 3 (Winter 1995): 397–420 (see esp. 404–407); Robert Struble, Jr., “House Turnover and the Principle of Rotation,” Political Science Quarterly 4 (Winter 1979–80): 649–67; Ronald P. Formissano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 41–54; H. Douglas Price, “Careers and Committees in the American Congress: The Problem of Structural Change,” in The History of Parliamentary Behavior, ed. William O. Ayedelotte (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Legacy Library, 2015:
orig. pub. 1977), 3–27.
4. Samuel Kernell, “Toward Understanding 19th Century Congressional Careers: Ambition, Competition, and Rotation,” American Journal of Political Science 21 (November 1977): 673.
5. French, diary entry, December 29, 1842, February 11, 1848, Witness, 198–99. French’s musings in 1848 were inspired by an address by Representative George P. Marsh (W-VT) arguing that historians should go beyond “the great, prominent public actions of a nation.” Marsh, “The American Historical School: A Discourse Delivered Before the Literary Societies of Union College” (Troy, N.Y.: Steam Press, 1847). On the impact of daguerreotypes in antebellum America, see Alan Trachtenberg, Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Stephen John Hartnett, Democratic Dissent & the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 132–72.
6. Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States from 1690 to 1872 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), 252.
7. For House statistics, see Allan G. Bogue, Jerome M. Clubb, Carroll R. McKibbin, and Santa A. Traugott, “Members of the House of Representatives and the Process of Modernization, 1789–1960,” Journal of American History 63 (September 1976): 275–302; Kernell, “Toward Understanding 19th Century Congressional Careers: 669–93; Nelson W. Polsby, “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 62 (March 1968): 144–68. For the Senate, see Allan G. Bogue, The Congressman’s Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1–28; Susan Radomsky, “The Social Life of Politics: Washington’s Official Society and the Emergence of a National Political Elite, 1800–1876,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2005), esp. vol. 2; Elaine K. Swift, The Making of an American Senate: Reconstitutive Change in Congress, 1787–1841 (University of Michigan Press, 2002). See also Matthew Eric Glassman, Erin Hemlin, and Amber Hope Wilhelm, “Congressional Careers: Service Tenure and Patterns of Member Service, 1789–2011,” CRS Report R41545, Congressional Research Service, January 7, 2011; H. Douglas Price, “Congress and the Evolution of Legislative ‘Professionalism,’” Congress in Change, 14–27; Silbey, American Political Nation, 185; Congressional Biographical Directory (H. Doc. 108–222); Roster of Congressional Officeholders and Biographical Characteristics (ICPSR 7803). Some of this data is slippery because the Congressional Biographical Directory doesn’t consistently list the same kinds of information for every congressman, and ICPSR 7803 contained some errors.
8. Haskell M. Monroe, Jr., and James T. McIntosh, eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis: Volume 1, 1808–1840 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1991 rev. ed.), 1:327 footnote.
9. Between 1789 and 1810, most college-educated congressmen had attended Ivy League schools because there were few other options. Between 1811 and 1860, the number of congressmen who attended other private colleges increased dramatically, partly because of the democratization of Congress and partly because of the founding of more private colleges. During that same period, the number of congressmen attending state schools increased from 3.8 percent to 7.1 percent. Bogue et al., “Members of the House,” 282. In the House in the 1830s, 61.1 percent hadn’t attended college; in the 1840s, 55.9 percent; and in the 1850s, 48.5 percent. Fifteen percent of the House had Ivy League educations, a number that remained relatively constant for several decades. In the late 1830s and early 1840s roughly 65 percent of the Senate had college educations. Bogue et al., “Members of the House,” 282; Daniel Wirls, “The ‘Golden Age’ Senate and Floor Debate in the Antebellum Congress,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 2 (May 2007): 193–222, cited at 207. On common schools generally, see Donald H. Parkerson and Jo Ann Parkerson, The Emergence of the Common School in the U.S. Countryside (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998); Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); and more generally, Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, “Schools,” in An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, vol. 2 in A History of the Book in America (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010), 286–303.
10. French, diary entry, February 17, 1867, Witness, 530–31.
11. In the pre–Civil War South, only North Carolina and Kentucky had reasonably well established statewide systems of public education. John Hope Franklin, A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1976; 1991 printing), 53.
12. Categories are taken from Bogue et al., “Members of the House,” 284. The study’s other options for professions include “Education,” “Other,” and “Unknown.”
13. See Jeffrey Pasley’s “Printers, Editors, and Publishers in Congress, 1789–1861,” pasleybrothers.com/newspols/congress.htm. Recruiting young men to edit party papers was relatively common. For example, in 1835, at the request of Alabama Democrats who desperately wanted a party paper, the Tennessee editor Samuel Laughlin put out a search for “a young man to take charge of a press … which will be bought for him.” Laughlin to James K. Polk, December 16, 1835, Correspondence of James K. Polk, ed. Herbert Weaver and Kermit L. Hall (Kingsport, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University, 1975), 3:397.
14. Alfred Zantzinger Reed, Training for the Public Profession of the Law: Historical Development and Principal Contemporary Problems of Legal Education in the United States with Some Account of Conditions in England and Canada (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1921), 87. By 1860, only nine out of thirty-nine states required a definite period of legal study. Ibid., 86. See also Gary B. Nash, “The Philadelphia Bench and Bar, 1800–1861,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 7, no. 2 (January 1965): 203–220; Charles Warren, A History of the American Bar (Boston: Little, Brown, 1911); Maxwell Bloomfield, American Lawyers in a Changing Society, 1776–1876 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Gerald W. Gawalt, The Promise of Power: The Emergence of the Legal Profession in Massachusetts, 1760–1840 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); Anton-Hermann Chroust, The Rise of the Legal Profession in America: The Revolution and the Post-Revolutionary Era (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965); Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins, eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America: The Long Nineteenth Century (1789–1920) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Steve Sheppard, ed., The History of Legal Education in the United States: Commentaries and Primary Sources, 2 vols. (Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 1999).
15. In the 1830s, 63.5 percent of the House were lawyers; in the 1840s, 66.9 percent; in the 1850s, 66.1 percent. During the Twenty-third Congress, 176 of the 263 House members were lawyers; 43 of the 52 senators were lawyers. These numbers include replacements for men who left office midterm or died in office. On lawyers as political leaders, see also Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic, 97–105; Bogue et al., “Members of the House,” 284–85.
16. French, diary entry, February 17, 1833, Witness, 38.
17. In addition to the Congressional Biographical Directory, see Benjamin Franklin Morris, ed., The Life of Thomas Morris: Pioneer and Long a Legislator of Ohio, and U.S. Senator from 1833 to 1839 (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, Keys & Overend, 1856), 15; Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 37–44.
18. Lynch, “Washington City Forty Years Ago,” Memoirs of Anne C. L. Botta Written by Her Friends (New York: J. Selwin Tait & Sons, 1894), 438.
19. George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language (New York: Charles Scribner, 1863), 671. Marsh delivered the lectures at Columbia College in 1858–59.
20. After devising this term, I discovered Roy F. Nichols’s argument that cultural federalism—a Union of people with fundamentally different cultural outlooks—was the fundamental cause of the Civil War, though his cultural clusters are not necessarily sectional; “southernism,” “New Englandism,” and “antislaveryism” are among te
n different “attitudes” that composed cultural federalism. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: Collier Books Edition, 1962; orig. pub. 1948), 34–53. See also James C. Malin, The Nebraska Question, 1852–54 (Michigan: Edwards Brothers, 1953), 426. On the city’s licentiousness, see for example Daniel Dickinson to Lydia Dickinson, February 12, 1858, in Speeches, Correspondence, Etc., of the Late Daniel S. Dickinson of New York, John R. Dickinson, ed., 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867), 509; Dickinson to Mary Dickinson, February 12, 1858, ibid.; John Parker Hale to Lucy Hale, 1837, in Sewell, John P. Hale, 36; Duncan McArthur (NR-OH) to Mrs. McArthur, February 6, 1824, in Cynthia D. Earman, “Boardinghouses,” 105; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 30, 1848, DOP.
21. On drunkenness and politics, see also Rachel A. Shelden, Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013), 125–30.
22. An American Temperance Society report notes that in 1830 alone, the city of Washington granted 60 tavern licenses, 34 grog-shop licenses, 4 confectionary licenses, and 126 licenses to sell “spirits in quantities not less than a pint.” Permanent Documents of the American Temperance Society, 2 vols. (Boston: Seth Bliss, 1835), 1:76.