The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

    23.  French to Henry Flagg French, December 1, 1855, BBFFP, LC. “Villainous smells” is a reference to a quote by Falstaff in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, act 3, scene 5.

    24.  “Temperance,” The Independent, January 7, 1869, 21; Robert McClelland to John Parker Hale, January 20, 1844, John Parker Hale Papers, NHHS. (My thanks to Bill Copeley of the NHHS for helping me track down the writer.) Jenkins’s grocery on Pennsylvania Avenue between Third and Four-and-a-half Streets, just a few blocks from the Capitol, saw a lot of politicking. Lucius Elmer (D-NJ) was taken there when he seemed likely to deny John Parker Hale (D-NH) his House seat. Boyd’s Directory for 1850 lists eight “porter houses” at 253, 369, 391, 420, 460, 490, 528, and 538 Pennsylvania Avenue, but doesn’t include listings for other types of drinking establishments. According to the OED, porter houses sold porter and other malt liquors; saloons served liquors of all kinds; and dram shops and groceries served liquor in small quantities.

    25.  French, diary entry, December 15, 1835, Witness, 64.

    26.  Daniel French to French, December 31, 1833, BBFFP.

    27.  See for example Buckingham, America, 1:358.

    28.  Robert McClelland to John Parker Hale, January 20, 1844, John Parker Hale Papers, NHHS.

    29.  Ibid.; Henry Watterson, Marse Henry: An Autobiography, 2 vols. (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1919), 1:40; French, diary entry, February 15, 1846, Witness, 184–85. See also McConnell’s behavior in 1846 when he was called a “drunken blackguard” by Garrett Davis (W-KY). Adams, diary entry, Memoirs, January 10, 1846, 12:234–35. The following (very bad) pun is attributed to a McConnell contemporary, the journalist George Prentice: “A Washington letter-writer says that Mr. McConnell was once a schoolmaster. If he taught his pupils to imitate his own drunken habits, it must have been a high school.” (Emphasis in original). G. W. Griffin, ed., Prenticeana: or, Wit and Humor in Paragraphs (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1871), 133.

    30.  Robert McClelland to John Parker Hale, January 20, 1844, John Parker Hale Papers, NHHS.

    31.  Peter A. Wallner, Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire’s Favorite Son (Concord, N.H.: Plaidswede, 2004), 62–63; Nichols, Franklin Pierce, 86–87.

    32.  David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 20, 1848, DOP. See also Edwin Morgan to his brothers, January 10, 1856, “A Congressman’s Letters on the Speaker Election in the Thirty-fourth Congress,” Temple R. Hollcroft, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43, no. 3 (December 1956): 444–58, quote on 454.

    33.  Adams, diary entry, December 26, 1843, Memoirs, 11:461. For more on drunken congressmen, see diary entry, March 1849, Joshua R. Giddings: A Sketch, ed. Walter Buell (Cleveland: William W. Williams, 1882), 190; “Temperance in High Places,” Saturday Evening Post, March 23, 1850.

    34.  “Proceedings of the Congressional Total Abstinence Society” (New York: Office of the American Temperance Union, 1842), 28.

    35.  French, diary entry, August 29, 1841, Witness, 121–22; Adams, diary entry, August 23 and 25, 1841, Memoirs, 10:539, 542. On Marshall’s sad state of drunkenness in later years and his “curious half-abandoned mode of life,” see John Wilson Townsend, Kentucky in American Letters, 1784–1912, 2 vols. (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1913), 1:339–41.

    36.  Globe, 27th Cong., 1st Sess., August 25, 1841, 387.

    37.  Adams, diary entry, July 17, 1840, and September 13, 1841, Memoirs, 10:337, 11:17–18.

    38.  Samuel Cox, Eight Years in Congress, 19–20. On Wigfall’s allegedly drunken (but certainly wandering) speech of March 1860, see Beman Brockway, Fifty Years in Journalism: Embracing Recollections and Personal Experiences with an Autobiography (Watertown, N.Y.: Daily Times Printing and Publishing House, 1891), 223–24; NYT, March 28, 1860.

    39.  Adams, diary entry, September 13, 1841, Memoirs, 11:17–18. See also French, diary entry, August 19 and 29, 1841, Witness, 86, 122.

    40.  Oscar Fitzgerald, California Sketches (California: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1882), 106–107. See also “Manhood Suffrage and the Ballot in America,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 101 (April 1867): 461–78, quote at 470; George Rothwell Brown, ed., Reminiscences of Senator William M. Stewart, of Nevada (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1908), 207–12; Russell Buchanan, “James A. McDougall: A Forgotten Senator,” California Historical Society Quarterly 15 (September 1936): 199–212.

    41.  Quoted in John B. Gough, Sunlight and Shadow or, Gleanings from My Life Work (London: R. D. Dickinson, 1881), 272. See also History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1880), 314–15; Federal Writers Project, Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 353–54; John Wesley Whicker, “Edward A. Hannegan,” Indiana Magazine of History 14 (December 1918): 368–75. Hannegan allegedly killed his brother-in-law while drunk and died of a morphine overdose. Two problem drinkers were evicted from their boardinghouses: Vice President Daniel Tompkins and Attorney Luther Martin. Earman, “Boardinghouses,” 55.

    42.  Adams, Memoirs, April 2, 1834, 9:118–19. See also J. Marion Sims, The Story of My Life, ed. H. Marion Sims (New York: D. Appleton, 1894), 95–96.

    43.  Diary entries, September 8 and 10, 1846, in The Diary of James K. Polk During His Presidency, 1845 to 1849, ed. Milo Milton Quaife, 4 vols. (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 2:123, 130–33. See also Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences, 1:300.

    44.  Merchant’s Magazine (1848), 373.

    45.  Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution states that senators and representatives “shall in all cases, except treason, felony, and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.” See also Thomas Jefferson, A Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States (Georgetown: Joseph Milligan, 1812), in Jefferson’s Parliamentary Writings: “Parliamentary Pocket-Book” and A Manual of Parliamentary Practice,” ed. Wilbur Samuel Howell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 358–63.

    46.  French, diary entry, April 27, 1838, Witness, 79–80.

    47.  See Radomsky, “The Social Life of Politics”; Shelden, Washington Brotherhood; Earman, “Boardinghouses”; and for an earlier period, Allgor, Parlor Politics.

    48.  Robert McClelland to John Parker Hale, January 20, 1844, John Parker Hale Papers, NHHS.

    49.  Anne C. Lynch, “Washington City Forty Years Ago,” 437–38; Annie C. Lynch to Lydia and Daniel Dickinson, January 7, 1853, Speeches, Correspondence, Etc., of the Late Daniel S. Dickinson of New York, ed. John R. Dickinson, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867), 2:473. On Lynch, see also Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds., Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Radcliffe College, 1971), 212–14; NYT, December 31, 1893.

    50.  French, diary entry, December 15, 1835, Witness, 64. For more talk of dissipation, see Daniel Dickinson to Mary Dickinson, February 12, 1858, in Speeches, Correspondence, Etc., of the Late Daniel S. Dickinson, 2:509; John Parker Hale to Lucy Hale, March 6, 1837, in Sewell, John P. Hale, 36; Duncan McArthur (NR-OH) in Earman, “Boardinghouses,” 105.

    51.  Francis J. Grund, “Society in the American Metropolis,” Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art (Philadelphia), vol. 6 (January–June 1850), 17–18.

    52.  French to Harriette French, May 12, 1834, BBFFP.

    53.  French, diary entry, December 15, 1836, ibid.

    54.  French, diary entry, May 7, 1838, Witness, 81.

    55.  Albert Gallatin Riddle, Recollections of War Times (New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1895), 9. Ri
ddle (R-OH) was in the House from 1861 to 1862. On Washington’s Southern social spirit, see also [Address at dedication of a monument to Joshua Giddings], July 25, 1870, The Works of James Abram Garfield, ed. Burke A. Hinsdale (Boston: James Osgood, 1882), 1:606.

    56.  Roughly 17 percent of the city’s population was free black and 12 percent were enslaved. William Darby and Theodore Dwight, Jr., A New Gazetteer of the United States of America (Hartford: Edward Hopkins, 1833), 112; 22nd Cong. 1st Sess., H. Doc. No. 269, Abstract of the Returns of the Fifth Census (Washington: Duff Green, 1832); Goldfield, “Antebellum Washington in Context,” 9. On Washington as a border city, see Robert Harrison, Washington During the Civil War and Reconstruction: Race and Radicalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6–12; Carl Abbott, Political Terrain, 57–92; Stanley Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828–1865 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2003), 1–12; Goldfield, “Antebellum Washington in Context,” 1–20.

    57.  Bernard L. Herman, “Southern City, National Ambition: Washington’s Early Town Houses,” Southern City, National Ambition, 21–46. Herman calls them “urban plantations.”

    58.  See for example Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 44; Seward, Reminiscences, 69. Abraham Lincoln (R-IL) and Joshua Giddings (FS-OH) both noticed the slave pen during their time in the House. Lincoln, Speech on Kansas-Nebraska Act at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854, Speeches and Writings: Abraham Lincoln, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1989), 313; Giddings, Speech on Relation of the Federal Government to Slavery, in Giddings, Speeches in Congress (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), 348. See also Paul Finkelman and Kennon, In the Shadow of Freedom; Walter C. Clephane, “The Local Aspect of Slavery in the District of Columbia,” March 6, 1899, in Records of the Columbia Historical Society 3 (1900): 224–25; Letitia W. Brown, Free Negroes in the District of Columbia, 1790–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Constance M. Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967); Harrold, Subversives; Harrison, Washington During the Civil War, 6–12; Goldfield, “Antebellum Washington in Context”; Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 49–88.

    59.  Horace Mann to Reverend A. Craig [?], December 5, 1852, Life of Horace Mann by His Wife, ed. Mary T. P. Mann (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1904), 389.

    60.  James Brewer Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings and the Tactics of Radical Politics (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), 41.

    61.  “Abstract of the Returns of the Fifth Census,” 4. Slavery lingered in New Hampshire as it did in several New England states; New Hampshire didn’t pass a final abolition bill until 1857. Joanne P. Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 76. Melish notes that New Hampshirites were divided over whether the state constitution’s “Declaration of Rights” declaring all men free and equal ended slavery. Ibid., 66. See also Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 91–92; Sewell, John P. Hale, 28–31; Cole, Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 178–80; Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 82–83.

    62.  French to Bess French, in Gauker, History of the Scottish Rite Bodies in the District of Columbia, 5. Emphasis in the original. The quote is probably from a letter of December 26, 1833. See also Hale to Lucy Hale, December 24, 1843, in Sewell, John P. Hale, 38.

    63.  Melish, Disowning Slavery, 22–23.

    64.  On slavery in New England and its erasure, see esp. Melish, Disowning Slavery. On New Hampshire, see Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 78–102. On the foundations of slavery in colonial New England, see Wendy Warren, New England Bound (New York: Liveright, 2016).

    65.  Globe, 34th Cong., 1st Sess., June 12, 1856, 34:1, 626 app. See also James L. Huston, “The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse,” Journal of Southern History 4 (November 1990): 609–40; Horace Mann to E. W. Clap, January 28, 1850, Mann, ed., Life of Horace Mann, 287–88.

    66.  Maria Weston Chapman, ed., Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1877), 1:342–43.

    67.  Hale to Lucy Hale, January 8, December 6 and 12, 1844, John Parker Hale Papers, NHHS. Hale spoke with Richard Simpson (D-SC) and David Levy (D-FL), the first Jewish senator, who changed his name to Yulee in 1846.

    68.  Sewell, John P. Hale, 120.

    69.  See for example the comments of Henry Hubbard (D-NH) about his frequent visits to nearby plantations, or William Seward’s (R-NY) visit in 1857. Globe, 24th Cong., 1st Sess., March 7, 1836, 168 app.; Frederick William Seward, Autobiography: Seward at Washington, as Senator and Secretary of State (New York: Derby and Miller, 1891), 331.

    70.  On Carroll’s Masonic ties, see Edward T. Schultz, History of Freemasonry in Maryland of All the Rites Introduced into Maryland from the Earliest Time to the Present, 2 vols. (Baltimore: J. H. Medairy, 1885), 528.

    71.  French, diary entry, July 27, 1851, Witness, 220–21.

    72.  Ibid., September 4, 1851, 221; National Intelligencer, September 5, 1851.

    73.  Chicago Democrat, dateline January 12, 1838, BBFFP. (French clipped his “letters” and pasted them in a scrapbook without listing the date of the Democrat that contained them.)

    74.  French, diary entry, January 21, 1849, Witness, 207–208.

    75.  French, “To the Hon. J. R. Giddings, upon reading his great speech in the H of Reps U.S. on Presidential nominations,” July 11, 1852, BBFFP. Giddings gave his speech on June 23, 1852; see Stewart, Joshua Giddings, 211–13.

    76.  For an example of the coaching efforts of the Washington Democratic Association, see “Circular from the Executive Committee of the Democratic Association of Washington City,” September 1844, memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/rbpebib:@field%28NUMBER+@band%28rbpe+1970400a%29%29, accessed July 29, 2013. On the localized nature of party politics, see Daniel Klinghard, The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 25–32; John H. Aldrich, Why Parties: A Second Look (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 119–29; William E. Gienapp, “‘Politics Seem to Enter into Everything’: Political Culture in the North, 1840–1860,” in Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840–1860, ed. Stephen E. Maizlish and John J. Kushma (College Station: University of Texas at Arlington, 1982), 15–69, cited at 48–50; Formisano, Transformation of Political Culture; Silbey, American Political Nation.

    77.  Silbey, American Political Nation, 59–70; Formisano, Transformation of Political Culture, 258–60; James S. Chase, Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention, 1789–1832 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973). On party politics displacing violence, see Selinger, Embracing Dissent.

    78.  On slang-whanging, see John Russell Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 602.

    79.  French seems to have begun writing for the Chicago Democrat in 1834; the first newspaper in Chicago, it began publication in 1833. Horatio Hill co-owned the Democrat with John “Long John” Wentworth, also from New Hampshire. French knew them both. Wentworth later represented Illinois in the House.

    80.  Holt, Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, xiii; Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, passim. Scholarship on the persistence of antiparty sentiment is vast and deep. Particularly useful in a congressional context are Edward L. Mayo, “Republicanism, Antipartyism, and Jacksonian Party Politics: A View from the Nation’s Capital” American Quarterly 31 (Spring 1979): 3–20; Silbey, American Political Nation; Formisano, Transformation of Political Culture; idem., “Political Character, Antipartyism and the Second Par
ty System,” American Quarterly 21 (Winter 1969): 683–709; William Shade, “Political Pluralism and Party Development: The Creation of a Modern Party System, 1815–1852,” in The Evolution of American Electoral Systems, ed. Paul Kleppner, Walter Dean Burnham, Ronald P. Formisano, Samuel P. Hays, Richard Jensen, and William G. Shade (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 77–111; Richard McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1966); Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55–69. On Whigs and antipartyism, see esp. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 51–54; Gerald Leonard, The Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002).

    81.  Chicago Democrat, dateline December 11, 1834, BBFFP; French, diary entry, September 15, 1828; November 16, 1840; August 15, 1841, Witness, 16, 105, 121. In the later entries, French was peeved about the presidential election of 1840. Michael Holt notes that although the Whigs were a diverse group brought together by their hatred of Jackson and what he represented, they shared broader ideological bonds: their hatred of “executive tyranny was based on principle.” Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 28–29. The first appearance of “Whig” to describe anti-Jacksonians seems to date to 1834. Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, 88, 332, note 73; Steven P. McGiffen, “Ideology and the Failure of the Whig Party in New Hampshire, 1834–1841,” New England Quarterly 3 (September 1986): 387–401, cited at 390. See also Holt, Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, 20.