The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

    45.  Joshua Giddings heard Marshall say this to John Campbell (D-SC) sitting nearby. Giddings, History of the Rebellion: Its Authors and Cases (New York: Follet, Foster, 1864), 167; Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (November 1885), 970.

    46.  Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (November 1885), 970. A few days after the incident, Marshall swore never to go up against “the damned old bull” again. Hugh McCulloch, “Memories of Some Contemporaries,” Scribner’s Magazine 3 (September 1888): 280.

    47.  Globe, 27th Cong., 2nd Sess., January 26, 1842, 176; Henry Wise to William Graves, January 31, 1842, Henry A. Wise Papers, UNC. Wise said there was never a proposal to try him for murder, but rather for breach of privilege. He sent Graves a draft of a lengthy defense against Adams’s charges that was published in several newspapers, including the National Intelligencer. Wise’s papers include numerous letters and essay drafts refuting Adams’s charges in later years.

    48.  Globe, 29th Cong., 1st Sess., January 7, 1846, 157.

    49.  Adams, diary entry, January 1, 1844; Memoirs, 11:467; Wentworth, Congressional Reminiscences, 12.

    50.  “Impious Scene in Congress,” Zion’s Herald, April 6, 1836. Wise’s quote isn’t in the Globe, but the Herald’s account follows the Globe’s version closely. Globe, 24th Cong., 1st Sess., March 26, 1836, 298.

    51.  Adams, Memoirs, June 11, 1841, 10:478; Leverett Saltonstall to Mary Elizabeth Sanders Saltonstall, June 11, 1841, The Papers of Leverett Saltonstall, 1816–1845, ed. Robert E. Moody, 5 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1984), 3:108; see also www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php/doc?id=jqad41_366&year=1841&month=06&day=11&entry=entrycont&start=0.

    52.  Globe, 26th Cong., 1st Sess., July 15, 1840, 528.

    53.  Ibid., 27th Cong., 2nd Sess., January 27, 1842, 183. See also ibid., 27th Cong., 1st Sess., June 16, 1841, 62.

    54.  B. B. French, “Application of Parliamentary Law to the Government of Masonic Bodies,” American Quarterly Review of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences 3 (January 5858 [i.e., 1857]): 320–25.

    55.  John W. Simons, A Familiar Treatise on the Principles and Practice of Masonic Jurisprudence (New York: Masonic Publishing and Manufacturing Co., 1869), 158–65.

    56.  The Manual was written for the Senate but only the House adopted it as rules of practice, beginning in 1837. Jefferson, “Manual of Parliamentary Practice,” preface, Jefferson’s Parliamentary Writings: “Parliamentary Pocket-Book” and a Manual of Parliamentary Practice, ed. Wilbur Samuel Howell, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, 1988), 356; DeAlva Stanwood Alexander, History and Procedure of the House of Representatives (Boston: Riverside Press, 1916), 180–82. On Jefferson’s Manual, see Jefferson’s Parliamentary Writings, 3–38, 339–48.

    57.  Jefferson, “Manual,” in Jefferson’s Parliamentary Writings, 374–76. The Constitution deals with misconduct only cursorily: each house can punish members for disorderly behavior and expel members with a two-thirds majority. U.S. Constitution, Article 1, section 5. For the link with dueling, see Jefferson’s source material: Anchitell Grey, ed., Debates of the House of Commons, 10 vols. (London: D. Henry and R. Cave, 1763), 3:293, 316.

    58.  Globe, 26th Cong., 1st Sess., April 1, 1840, 301.

    59.  Jefferson, “Manual,” in Jefferson’s Parliamentary Writings, 357.

    60.  Sarah A. Binder, Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 84–85, 178–83.

    61.  This kind of obstruction emerged as a strategic weapon of debate in the 1830s and came to an end with the institution of Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed’s rules (the so-called Reed Rules) in 1889. Jeffrey A. Jenkins and Charles Stewart III, Fighting for the Speakership: The House and the Rise of Party Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, 2013), 41.

    62.  Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler, Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, 2006); Sarah A. Binder and Steven S. Smith, Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the United States Senate (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997); Sarah A. Binder and Steven S. Smith, “Political Goals and Procedural Choice in the Senate,” Journal of Politics 60, no. 2 (May 1998): 396–416. Wawro and Schickler note that many Senate privileges of debate resulted from the absence of rules to curtail them; they also point out—as do Binder and Smith—that filibustering in the modern sense began later in the nineteenth century.

    63.  This became truer over time. Initially the Senate and House shared rules regarding the previous question, but the Senate came to view itself as a body constitutionally grounded on unlimited debate. Binder, Minority Rights, 39–40.

    64.  Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., April 3, 1850, 632. Fillmore was discussing the need to strengthen the power of the vice president to call senators to order; he had avoided the discussion until it was necessary, but “that time has now arrived.” See George P. Furber, Precedents Relating to the Privileges of the Senate of the United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1893), 122.

    65.  Globe, 27th Cong., 2nd Sess., February 8, 1842, 217. Linn was discussing the proper response to a rude exchange between Nathaniel Tallmadge (W-NY) and Thomas Hart Benton (D-MO).

    66.  Adams, Memoirs, February 13, 1843, 11:318; Globe, 27th Cong., 2nd Sess., January 27, 1842, 182–83.

    67.  Globe, 27th Cong., 2nd Sess., January 28, 1842, 183–84. See also New World (N.Y.), January 29, 1842. Arnold had called Kenneth Rayner (W-NC) to order. The other Southerner who came to Arnold’s seat was William Payne (D-AL).

    68.  James F. Hopkins, ed., The Papers of Henry Clay, 8:513; Niles Weekly Register, May 19, 1832. During a House debate in 1832, Arnold had insulted Jackson’s friend and ally Sam Houston. Houston’s friend Major Morgan Heard defended him—and Jackson—by attacking Arnold, hitting him with a club and then trying to shoot him; Arnold bested him with a sword cane.

    69.  Ibid., 14; Dion, Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew, 11. For a disappearing quorum in action, see French to Harriette French, March 8, 1836, BBFFP. A demand for the previous question was the equivalent of asking “Shall the main question be not now put?” Regardless of how it was decided, a call for the previous question brought debate to a halt and usually required a full vote. See Alexander, History and Procedure of the House of Representatives, 180–81.

    70.  For example, see David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 1849, DOP; William Cabell Rives, Jr., to William Cabell Rives, May 26, 1856, William Cabell Rives Papers, LC. See also Eric M. Uslaner, “Is the Senate More Civil Than the House?,” in Burdett A. Loomis, ed., Esteemed Colleagues: Civility and Deliberation in the U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000), 32–55. According to the OED, a “bear garden” is “a place originally set apart for the baiting of bears, and used for the exhibition of other rough sports,” or more generally, “a scene of strife and tumult.”

    71.  Adams, diary entry, March 28, 1842, Memoirs, 11:101–102.

    72.  French, memoir, BBFFP.

    73.  Globe, 28th Cong., 1st Sess., December 21, 1843, 62.

    74.  Ibid., 27th Cong., 2nd Sess., January 21 and 22, 1841, 158, 162.

    75.  Ibid., January 22, 1841, 163.

    76.  Ibid., 27th Cong., 1st Sess., June 15 and 16, 1841, 54, 58. The previous question was often described as a “gag.” See for example Portland Weekly Advertiser, February 16 and 23, and October 24, 1837; New Hampshire Patriot (Concord), May 2, 1836.

    77.  Binder, Minority Rights, 43–67, 92–99. The Senate abandoned the practice in 1806, partly because it was rarely if ever used. Richard R. Beeman, “Unlimited Debate in the Senate: The First Phase,” Political Science Quarterly 83, no. 3 (September 1968): 419–34.


    78.  Globe, 26th Cong., 1st Sess., April 2, 1840, 301.

    79.  Ibid., 27th Cong., 1st Sess., June 14, 1841, 51.

    80.  Theodore Weld to Angelina Grimke Weld and Sarah Grimke, January 22, 1842, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld and Sarah Grimke, 1822–1844, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934), 999.

    81.  Globe, 27th Cong., 2nd Sess., January 22, 1842, 163.

    82.  French to Henry Flagg French, January 25, 1842, BBFFP.

    83.  Register of Debates, 23rd Cong., 2nd Sess., December 16, 1834, 795.

    84.  On the mace, see Silvio A. Bedini, “The Mace and the Gavel: Symbols of Government in America,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 87, no. 4 (1997): 1–84.

    85.  French, diary entry, September 13, 1841, Witness, 124.

    86.  Particularly helpful on the speakership in the nineteenth century is Jenkins and Stewart, Fighting for the Speakership, which shows the evolution of the post as a party office.

    87.  Globe, 26 Cong., 2nd sess., January 25, 1841, 126.

    88.  On the antislavery implications of speakership elections, see Brooks, Liberty Power.

    89.  Horace Mann to E. W. Clap, December 23, 1849, January 7, 1850, Mann, ed., Life of Horace Mann, 284. See also Mann to E. W. Clap, February 7, 1850, ibid., 286.

    90.  Globe, 27th Cong., 1st Sess., June 16, 1841, 58. On the link between violence and a lax Speaker, see ibid., 26th Cong., 1st Sess., May 14, 1840, 396; ibid., 28th Cong., 1st Sess., January 26, 1844, 196.

    91.  Jefferson, “Manual of Parliamentary Practice,” section 34, in Jefferson’s Parliamentary Writings, 395.

    92.  “Nominis in Umbra” [French], dateline January 1, 1838, Chicago Democrat, January 24, 1838, BBFFP.

    93.  S. Rpt. 170, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., July 30, 1850, on the investigation of the clash between Henry Foote (D-MI) and Thomas Hart Benton (D-MO) on April 17, 1850.

    94.  Globe, 24th Cong., 2nd Sess., February 17, 1837, 222.

    95.  Adams, diary entry, April 9, 1840, Memoirs, 5:258.

    96.  Niles’ National Register, July 10, 1824, vol. 26, 298. In the Committee on Public Lands, Barton had presented documents reflecting badly on the Arkansas delegate Henry W. Conway, who challenged Barton. For “bully” as “political champion,” see Adams, diary entry, January 3, 1840, Memoirs, 10:183.

    97.  Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 358. The OED defines a “bully” as “a ‘blustering gallant’; a bravo, hector, or ‘swash-buckler’; now, esp. a tyrannical coward who makes himself a terror to the weak.”

    98.  Other House bullies included Edward Stanly (W-NC), Daniel Jenifer (W-MD), John Dawson (D-LA), James Belser (D-AL), John B. Weller (D-OH), Balie Peyton (W-TN), John Bell (J/W-TN), Hopkins L. Turney (D-TN), Charles Downing (D-FL delegate), William B. Campbell (W-TN), George McDuffie (D-SC), Felix Grundy McConnell (D-AL), William Cost Johnson (W-MD), Samuel Gholson (D-MS), Roger Pryor (D-VA), Laurence Keitt (D-SC), and Alexander Duncan (D-OH). On Stanly: Norman D. Brown, Edward Stanly: Whiggery’s Tarheel “Conquerer” (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974), 45 and passim; John H. Wheeler, Reminiscences and Memoirs of North Carolina and Eminent North Carolinians (Columbus, N.C.: Columbus Printing Works, 1884), 17; “The Campaigns of a ‘Conqueror’; or, The Man ‘Who Bragged High for a Fight,’” undated, UNC. On Bell and Turney: Balie Peyton to Henry Wise, June 17, 1838, in The Collector: A Magazine for Autograph and Historical Collectors 3 (January 1907): 26–27. Turney—“a wolfish, Snakey looking ruffian”—electioneered on the idea that he would cause “all sorts of Hell in the House, & out of it too,” and craved “the eclat, & distinction of a quarrel” with Wise. Peyton to Wise, August 15, 1837, Henry A. Wise Papers, UNC. On McDuffie: Louis McLane to unknown recipient, December 23, 1821, Louis McLane Papers, LC; William Greenhow to Henry Wise, February 5, 1844, Henry A. Wise Papers, UNC. On Pryor and Keitt: Samuel S. Cox, Eight Years in Congress, from 1857–1865: Memoir and Speeches (New York: Appleton, 1865), 23–25. On Duncan: Adams, diary entry, June 29, 1840, Memoirs, 10:323.

  Senate bullies included Henry Clay (W-KY), Thomas Hart Benton (D-MO), Henry Foote (D-MS), Lewis Wigfall (D-TX), and Robert Augustus Toombs (W-GA), among others. Wise dated Clay’s worst bullying to his loss of the presidential nomination in 1839, when he became “excessively intemperate in his habits, and more intemperate in exacerbation of temper and in his political conduct.” Wise, Seven Decades, 172. On Slidell: Cox, Eight Years, 20. On Toombs: John Bell to W. B. Campbell, August 10, 1854, Tennessee Historical Magazine 3 (September 1917): 223–24. Toombs was a notorious “college bully” in the 1820s. James H. Justus, Fetching the Old Southwest: Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain, 439. All of these House and Senate bullies were noted as such in the press.

    99.  Globe, 24th Cong., 1st Sess., 298; “Riots in Congress,” Niles’ Weekly Register, April 2, 1836; French, diary entry, April 10, 1836, Witness, 64; “A Night in the House of Representatives,” New-Yorker, April 2, 1836.

  100.  See for example how James Belser (D-AL) responsed to being called a bully in 1844; had his accuser been present, Belser “would have made an example of him which he would long have remembered.” Globe, 28th Cong., 1st Sess., February 3, 1844, 224. I classify men as bullies based on patterns of bullying behavior joined with charges of being a bully. Shields’s division of congressmen between 1836 and 1860 into “mavericks” and “conformists” is provocative, but largely based on voting patterns and eulogies, so some of my bullies weren’t mavericks, and many of her mavericks weren’t bullies. Johanna Nicol Shields, The Line of Duty: Maverick Congressmen and the Development of American Political Culture, 1836–1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985).

  101.  Adams, diary entry, January 16, 1845, Memoirs, 12:148. The debate concerned appointing a committee to investigate a congressional duel.

  102.  Scholars generally downplay Whig bullyism. See for example Howe’s seminal Political Culture of the American Whigs, esp. 128–29.

  103.  Adams, diary entry, July 22, 1841, Memoirs, 10:512.

  104.  On Peyton’s efforts, see Powell Moore, “James K. Polk: Tennessee Politician,” Journal of Southern History 17 (November 1951): 497; Walter T. Durham, Balie Peyton of Tennessee: Nineteenth Century Politics and Thoroughbreds (Franklin, Tenn.: Hillsboro Press, 2004). Polk thought that his attackers were aiming at “the Tennessee market.” Polk to William R. Rucker, February 22, 1836, Correspondence of James K. Polk, 513. On Polk in the context of Tennessee politics, see also Jonathan M. Atkins, Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee, 1832–1861 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1997). Wise later said that he attacked Polk the Speaker—not the man—for impinging on his representative rights. Wise to unknown, December 2, 1846, Henry A. Wise Papers, UNC. See also Henry A. Wise, “Opinions of Hon. Henry A. Wise, Upon the Conduct and Character of James K. Polk, Speaker of the House of Representatives, with Other ‘Democratic’ Illustrations” (Washington, D.C., 1844).

  105.  Jenkins and Stewart, Fighting for the Speakership, 41, note 12. For an example of one such challenge, see Globe, 24th Cong., 1st Sess., February 29, 1836, 214.

  106.  Charles G. Sellers, James K. Polk: Jacksonian, 1795–1843 (Norwalk, Conn.: Easton Press, 1987), 307–10, from an 1836 letter from Balie Peyton. See also Polk, diary entry, October 14, 1847, in The Diary of James K. Polk During His Presidency, 1845–1849, ed. Milo Milton Quaife, 4 vols. (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 3:191. Polk noted that during his presidency, a “somewhat embarrassed” Wise called on him but made “[n]o allusion … to his former hostility to me, and his unprovoked and unjustifiable assaults upon me when I was speaker of the Ho. Repts. in 1836 & 37.”

  107.  See for example “A Coward” in Louisville Daily Journal, June 5, 1844; ibid., September 11, 1844. See also Kirb
y, “Limits of Honor,” 121–22, 130.

  108.  “True-Hearted Statesman,” in Early Songs of Uncle Sam, George S. Jackson, (Boston: Bruce Humphries, Publishers, 1962), 115.

  109.  Globe, 24th Cong., 2nd Sess., February 20, 1837, 239; ibid., 25th Cong., 1st Sess., October 13, 1837, 326 app. See also Thornton, An American Glossary, 456. Jackson coined the word in 1832, the year of the caning. See Jackson to Francis Preston Blair, May 26, 1832, Jackson Papers, 10:487–88. My thanks to Dan Feller for pointing this out and sharing his materials on it.

  110.  Globe, 26th Cong., 2nd Sess., February 4, 1841, 321 app.

  111.  Adams, “Address of John Quincy Adams to Constituents” (Boston: J. H. Eastburn, 1842), 55. Zaeske offers a fascinating study of the gendered aspects of the congressional petition furor but concludes that oratorical duels were replacements for duels with gunplay, which—she mistakenly claims—were no longer possible. Susan Zaeske, “‘The South Arose as One Man’: Gender and Sectionalism in Antislavery Petition Debates, 1835–1845,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 12 (2009): 341–68.