The Bludgeoning Generation

Joanne Freeman's book takes its title from a contemporary comment on what remains by far the most famous episode of violence in the history of Congress: South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks's brutal cane assault on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. But Freeman's rich account of antebellum congressional violence makes the familiar strange by highlighting its very familiarity, pointing out that when Brooks attacked Sumner in May 1856, Washington D.C. was already filled with news of even bloodier deeds. A few months before, Arkansas congressman Albert Rust had battered the prominent editor Horace Greeley on a public thoroughfare; just weeks earlier, California's Philemon Herbert shot an Irish immigrant waiter to death in a Washington restaurant. Later that summer, in an incident so obscure that it does not appear even in Freeman's exhaustive chronicle of fisticuffs, Virginia's Fayette McMullin put sixty-five-year old Amos Granger of New York in a headlock on their omnibus ride to the Capitol, pummeling him in the face until he bled.¹

Why have these incidents—and scores of other congressional fights, brawls, and challenges—largely been forgotten, while the attack on Sumner is still regarded as a crucial event on the road to the Civil War, and the subject of a large and sophisticated literature on its own?² Yes, as Freeman carefully points out, some distinctive elements of the assault heightened its dramatic significance, both for contemporaries and for historians: Sumner was attacked at his desk in the Senate chamber; Brooks approached him out of the blue, without delivering any advance warning.

And yet, what made the incident politically meaningful was not the congressional violence itself—commonplace across the antebellum years, and usefully indexed in an appendix to Freeman's book—but the way it crystallized the ideological struggle between proslavery and antislavery forces in Washington. Or, to be more precise, the assault revealed how the emergence of a new and determined antislavery party—Sumner's Republicans—shattered the antebellum congressional system of slavery, union, and compromise. Eighteen years before, after all, a southern representative (William Graves of Kentucky) had actually killed a sitting northern congressman (Jonathan Cilley of Maine) in a duel, with almost no larger repercussions. "[N]ational parties," as Freeman writes, "cushioned the blow": Graves was a Whig and Cilley a Democrat; their duel and its aftermath was an occasion for further partisan wrangling, not a new conflict over slavery, which remained on the margins of mainstream politics (p. 229).

But in 1856, Sumner was not just any senator from Massachusetts: a leading Republican, he was the personification of militant northern opposition to slavery. When Sumner was struck down, his new party made certain that neither the assault nor its symbolism would be soon forgotten. Rather than cushioning the blow of Brooks's cane, Republicans turned it into a rallying cry against the Slave Power. This particular political transformation, perhaps more than any other event of the eventful 1850s, produced the conditions that led to civil war.

Freeman's book itself does not deliver this argument in thunderous tones. In many ways, The Field of Blood is less a sharply framed reinterpretation of the road to disunion than a juicy, narrative history of the antebellum Congress, considered as both as deliberative body and a kind of fighting club. Her co-narrator here is Benjamin Brown French, the New Hampshire Democrat, sometime House Clerk, and ubiquitous antebellum politico, whose elevenvolume diary remains an essential source on the world of mid-nineteenth-century Washington D.C.

Though in some ways French himself embodied the political transformation that the book underlines—evolving from a Jacksonian critic of abolitionism to a militant opponent of the Slave Power by 1860—Freeman handles his ideological makeover with a light touch. Mostly French serves as a well-placed witness both on the floor of Congress and in the nearby boardinghouses and saloons. His proximity to power offers the reader a...