Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War

Joshua Giddings, Antislavery Violence, and the Politics of Congressional Honor

113  Joshua Giddings, Antislavery Violence, and the Politics of Congressional Honor 8 To historians of the American conflict over slavery, the censure and re-election of Congressman Joshua Giddings is a familiar but important story. In 1842 Giddings defied the House of Representatives’ “gag rule” by presenting resolutions that defended the right of slaves on ships in international waters to rise in bloody insurrection. After the U.S. House had voted his censure for this action, Giddings resigned his seat and appealed to his constituents in northeastern Ohio’s Western Reserve. They re-elected him by a crushing majority, arming him with an explicit mandate to offer his resolutions again. This Giddings did in defiance of House rules and slaveholders’ wishes, thereby opening a new phase in the politics of the sectional conflict. The days of the “gag rule” were now numbered, but the animosity created fears in the North of a “great slavepower conspiracy,” which helped to hasten the sectional crisis.1 This well-known account, however, can also be shown to document a Originally published as “Joshua R. Giddings, Antislavery Violence, and the Congressional Politics of Honor,” in John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, eds., Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 167–92. Reprinted with permission. 1. Much of the information in this essay is drawn from James Brewer Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings and the Tactics of Radical Politics (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1970). For standard treatments of the “gag rule” controversy and for Giddings’s role in it, see Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings; Leonard R. Richards, The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986); George R. Rable, “Slavery, Politics and the South: The Gag Rule as a Case Study,” Capitol Studies 3 (Fall 1975): 69–87; James M. McPherson, “The Fight against the Gag Rule: Joshua Leavitt and Antislavery Insurgency in the Whig Party, 1839–1842,” Journal of Negro History 48 (July 1963): 177–95; William Lee Miller, Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Knopf, 1996); and Michael Kent Curtis, “The Curious History of Attempts to Suppress Antislavery Speech, Press and Petition in 1835–37,” Northwestern University Law Review 89 (1995): 785–869.
114  CONSEQUENCES more complex dynamic of sectional estrangement stimulated by debates in Congress over black Americans’ right to resist and use violence. Congressman Joshua R. Giddings and his impact on the political process still take center stage, but a reconsideration of his career suggests that the “gag-rule” controversy and his censure and re-election were only parts (albeit crucial) of a much more volatile drama played out over two decades in the House of Representatives between Giddings and his slaveholding counterparts, men who embodied codes of ethical behavior deeply antagonistic to his, and who loathed beyond measure Giddings’s challenging assertions not only that black people held rights to liberate and defend themselves but that white people had obligations to assist them. Much has been written about the contrast in values between Yankees inspired by evangelical “conscience” and Southern “men of honor” driven by the need for personal dominion. Little is known, however, about the impact of these conflicting ethical systems on the nation’s legislative processes , or about the responses they evoked from elected representatives concerning the relationship of violence to the political problem of slavery .2 This essay speaks to these questions through a close examination of Giddings’s political values and an assessment of his impact on the politics of Congress. From the late 1830s on, Giddings’s repeated conflicts with angry Southern congressmen compromised the House’s capacity to debate slavery in a spirit of civility. Long before Charles Sumner was beaten by Preston Brooks, rituals that flirted with violence had been deeply infused by Giddings and his Southern antagonists within the culture of the Congress. 2. See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982); Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of Planters (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987); Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1979); Drew G. Faust, James Henry Hammond: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1982); Edward L. Ayres, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the...