The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman (review)

Joanne B. Freeman’s richly contextualized portrait of violence in Congress in the decades leading up to the Civil War is a book for the times in which we live. Polarized politics; clashing cultural values; a Congress defined as much by human failings as by lofty idealism; the workings of emotion; the complicated relationships among politicians, the press, and popular opinion; new technologies for spreading information; and the debates over free speech that helped launch a crisis of union in the nineteenth century—all resonate powerfully in the public sphere that present-day Americans inhabit. Weaving together these threads of public discourse and technological development into a deadly brew in the antebellum United States was violence: slights and slurs, brawls and riots, mobbing, caning, dueling, and killing. Violent encounters extended from the murderous landscapes of Indian removal and the lynch mobs that targeted abolitionists, black people, and immigrants, through bowie-knife-happy state-houses, all the way to Congress.

As the author notes at the outset, her subject poses a methodological quandary. The Washington, D.C., press, beholden to the government for printing contracts, was inclined to suppress news that cast lawmakers in a negative light. At the same time, newspapers outside the nation’s capital tended sometimes to sensationalize and bend the truth. How then to unveil the hidden true histories of violence in Congress? Freeman skillfully deploys the art of historical detection to expose the full scale of the unsavory underbelly of governance during an age of mounting sectionalism. Scattered references to conflicts with colleagues in congressmen’s letters and diaries offer personal, intimate, and emotional glimpses of incidents that Freeman fleshes out and corroborates by cross-referencing the Congressional Globe and a range of newspapers representing different times, places, interests, and politics. Most of all, she relies on the testimony of a reliable eyewitness to the episodes that she describes: Benjamin Brown French, who was elected House Clerk in 1845 and kept a prolific diary, totaling eleven volumes and over 3,700 pages, from 1828 to 1870.

Freeman’s choice of French as informant is astute. The political evolution of this “congressional insider” who was nevertheless “not too far inside,” from a New Hampshire Jacksonian Democrat to a Republican indignant about southern violation of the North’s constitutional freedoms, made him a bellwether for the growing alienation of the sections in the 1850s (p. 7). Significantly, this House Clerk’s Jacksonian perspectives did not translate into the sort of radical politics of producers’ rights and free soil of which the historian Jonathan H. Earle has written. In the beginning, far from proceeding from the traditional Democratic suspicion of a grasping “Money Power” to avowed opposition to an imperial “Slave Power” bent on colonizing the West, French denounced abolitionism as a threat to the stability of the Union. Freeman carefully tracks the trajectory of French’s observations and emotions set forth in his diaries through successive confrontations—from the Gag Rule debate through the Compromise of 1850 to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act—to illustrate how concern for southern abuses of northern rights turned him gradually into a moderate Republican.

Early chapters establish the physical setting—from the inchoate city of Washington to the tobacco-stained floors of the Capitol—where the action unfolded. Freeman offers a graphic portrayal on a granular level of the sights, the sounds, the smells, the emotions, and the length and cadences of the speeches that filled the halls of Congress. Readers meet a cavalcade of men who passed through its revolving doors, the first generation to be memorialized in photographs. And readers learn that congressmen resorted to violence not only because it vindicated their manhood, but also because it paid political dividends with the constituents in their districts.

In this context, one of Freeman’s most original insights consists in her argument that...