The Great Congressional Brawl of 1858

Antebellum Active Clubbing

There has naturally been a great deal of commentary on the escalating political violence America is currently experiencing, with multiple attempted assassinations against President Trump, a successful one against Charlie Kirk, and scores of attacks directed against law enforcement, normal Americans, and schoolchildren, all in the service of progressive political goals. Whereas once such acts would have brought down universal condemnation, now the denunciations are perfunctory at best, and no one seems interested in toning down the accusations of Nazism and fascism, which are intended to paint targets on those so labeled. The qualified, generalized rejections of violence on the part of progressive politicians fool no one, least of all the scores of true believers in the ranks who want many more dead rightists. The violence has fandoms.

There is a reactive militancy among MAGAdom as well, with enthusiasts sharing viral videos of Antifa terrorists being maced and tackled by ICE agents, as well as a general satisfaction at the spectacle of state violence being directed at their enemies, for once. While ostensibly the Executive Branch is simply fulfilling its constitutional duty to enforce the laws written by the legislature, everyone understands that law enforcement itself is now politically coded. Eight years of Bush saw the construction of a vast security system in the name of “freedom,” and twelve years of Obama and Biden gave the government a taste for selective punishment of its ideological enemies, and the administrative apparatus to do it. Now that that system has been commandeered by its former targets, all the Deep State can do is cry out against '“authoritarianism” and plot revenge. Everyone also understands, of course, that any return to power on the part of progressives will result not in a resumption of neutrality but a further settling of scores. Like a Third-World country, the US now has a system where the state is the weapon of whichever faction can gain control of it, which makes sense given that the US now has a Third-World population base for its own politicians.

It’s actually not that hard to form a coalition that includes Islamic terrorists and tr00ns when your only actual goal is the destruction of white Christians.

Things have been bad like this before. Many people have compared current events to those that led up to the US Civil War, and while of course the US is a vastly different country in every sense than it was then, there are some parallels. The best source for understanding the great unraveling that took place in the period between the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and the December, 1860 secession of South Carolina is Thomas Fleming’s A Disease in the Public Mind, which lays out in painful detail the way that the media of the day and the violent political culture it was bound up with helped fan the flames of sectionalism and outright paranoia. Richard Kreitner’s Break it Up shows that secession, far from being an outlier peculiar to the South, actually had deep roots throughout the country, a legacy of the many ways in which the Constitution- for all of its wisdom- was actually a bit of a slapdash compromise that John Lukacs argued was simply undone and replaced in all but name during Reconstruction. But perhaps the most interesting book, exploring an area that has not gotten enough attention, is Joanne B. Freeman’s The Field of Blood, which explores the culture of physical violence endemic to politics of the period, in particular the periodic fights and assaults that would take place in Congress, escalating especially in the 1850s.

This is perhaps the main way contemporary political violence differs from that of the past. No one fistfights in Congress these days.* In my previous essay I explored the ways in which liberal democracy tends to instantiate matriarchal power dynamics, and the world of honor culture-fueled masculine violence that characterized the Antebellum period has little to compare with the bloodshed of today- anonymous, distant, stochastic internet terrorism turning weak-minded social-media addicts into egregores of murderous hate. But the media still has a role to play in egging it on, for business and ideological reasons. Looking at current events, it’s easy to predict the same general outcome as that resulting from the tumult of the pre-Civil War period, though the shape it will take will necessarily be quite different.

*The last actual fight in either the House or Senate floor was in 1902, when Sen. John McLaurin got into a brawl with Sen. Ben Tillman, both from South Carolina. In 2023, in the House, Richard Hudson of NC and Mike Rogers of AL got heated with Congresstroll Matt Gaetz of Florida. Attacking fellow conservatives is the modern Republican Party’s most sacred tradition, though they usually stick to doing it online.

By 1850, the United States was on the brink of dissolution. Ironically, this all stemmed from the most successful military campaign the US had ever fought, the Mexican War (1846-1848). The first conflict in which US soldiers were led by professionally-trained officers, many of whom would be fighting each other not even a generation later, the war resulted in massive territorial acquisitions that Jacksonian nationalists had sought since the days of the War Hawks. But the new lands had to be divided and governed, and this in turn forced an issue into public debate that those in power had long sought to suppress- slavery. The great victory over Mexico was the inception of a period of a bloody internal conflict that flowed right into the Civil War.

The main political issue was that immediately after the war ended in 1848, gold was discovered in California, and by 1850 enough people had moved into the territory for it to petition for statehood. No one there wanted slavery; unlike in Texas, there was no tradition of plantation agriculture. This would prove a problem because California extended past the southern border of Missouri, which had, since 1820, marked the carefully-bargained-for dividing line between which states would be free and which slave. A new compromise would be needed.

At first, it looked manageable. The best deal-maker of the older generation, Henry Clay of the Whig Party, who’d crafted bargain after bargain that kept the US together in the past, joined forces with up-and-coming young Democrat Stephen A. Douglas to pass the Compromise of 1850. It was Clay’s last great act of statesmanship and it is a testament to how vital a role he personally played in keeping the US united that when he died two years later, it took less than a decade for the country to collapse in his absence. The Compromise was actually a package of five separate bills that Clay and Douglas skillfully navigated through the legislature, the most important of which were the admission of California as a free state and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The latter imposed a positive duty on law enforcement in free states to apprehended runaway slaves until they could be retrieved by their masters or their agents.

Not until Lyndon Johnson would America have a wheeler-dealer, good-ol’-boy, crooked, philandering, but monumentally effective legislator of Henry Clay’s caliber.

Twenty years earlier it probably would have bought decades of peace. But by 1850, the political situation had changed, brought about by new economic and social realities. In particular, there has been an enormous proliferation in media outlets, and their reach and scope, facilitated by advances in printing, transportation, and communications technology. Like modern media it held the promise of unity, but in many more insidious ways it allowed for the creation of feedback loops that fed on drama and misinformation. Southerners were becoming convinced that the north was in the grip of wild-eyed abolitionist fanatics; northerners for their part came to believe that something called Slave Power was conspiring to reduce even white men to thralls.

Things came to a violent head in 1854, when Kansas and Nebraska both petitioned to become states. Douglas, Clay’s unhappy heir as the leading voice for compromise, came up with a plan that would replace the old geographic formula of the Missouri Compromise with an ideological one. The matter would be settled democratically, a theory Douglas called “popular sovereignty.” The people of the respective territories would take a vote and decide whether they wanted slavery or not. What could go wrong?

Stephen Douglas joins James Madison as one of America’s greatest short king politicians. Fun fact, he wanted to marry Mary Todd, who chose Lincoln over him despite Douglas’ much higher status at the time. This did not work out well for Lincoln.

Nebraska, the westernmost end of the Midwestern Corn Belt, was not suited for plantation agriculture and thus was spared the horrors to come. But Kansas could go either way, and this meant that both pro- and anti-slavery settlers poured into Kansas from neighboring areas to influence the vote. They set up two rival capitals, wrote two conflicting constitutions, and when the federal government proved unable to sort things out, gangs of partisans began to pillage and murder their foes. These political bandits, southern-oriented Bushwackers and northern Jayhawkers, committed something between 50-200 political killings between them, (and probably many more besides) featuring such celebrities as “Pottawatomie” John Brown, so called because of the location where he and his band hacked five pro-slavery settlers to death with swords. This violent unrest- Bleeding Kansas- would fold into the Civil War in 1861 and continue beyond it, with Bushwacker terrorists like Jesse James putting their wartime experiences to good use.

Seriously, watch this movie.

The violence in Kansas enthralled the whole country, and only fed the increasingly stark sectional tensions. The government itself was not immune. The presidents after Jackson were generally chosen by their respective parties for their overall inoffensive mediocrity, especially in regard to slavery, so the passionate intensity of the era tended to manifest most fully in the legislature. The high-minded deliberative body envisioned by the Founding Fathers was, by the mid-1800s, a forum for peacocking for constituents by way of newspapers, and then as now the more extreme personalities made for the best copy. The generation that had been born during or around the Revolution- Clay, Calhoun, Webster, John Quincy Adams, and others- could be aggressively ideological and partisan regarding their sections of the country, but they still saw themselves as dignified statesmen and would sacrifice and compromise to achieve their political goals. Many of their successors were far more committed to all-or-nothing positions that played well in the news, but increasingly forestalled the ability to walk things back for the sake of the good of the country.

Congress had always been a violent place. The floors of the House and Senate were cramped and crowded, the Capitol in a city famous for an unpleasant climate, and the overall miserable feel of the place lent itself to heated emotions that could result in duels or (more frequent) fistfights. It was also an age when people as a whole were more comfortable with physical aggression than we are today, even- or perhaps especially- among their leaders. There were important regional differences, however. Northerners, largely descending from Englishmen from the more prosperous and orderly parts of the kingdom, tended to be more peaceable and amenable to solving problems with words. Southerners were largely Scots-Irish, coming from a people with an honor culture enforced by a code of personal retribution. The northern system of emergent capitalism and contractual relationships backed by state enforcement was quite different from the Southern economy based on plantation agriculture and the need to menace the field hands (and social inferiors) as needed. One can’t, after all, sue a slave for not working. Cultural differences also manifested in the not-unrelated phenomenon of alcohol consumption, and while everyone drank more then than they do today, Southern politicians had a reputation for over-indulgence.

All of this together meant that Southern politicians tended to- for lack of a better word- bully their northern counterparts. Men accustomed to suing others for slander balked at dealing with enemies who tended to solve such problems with horsewhips while blitzed on applejack. And they tended to regard a lot of things as suitable occasions for violence that northerners thought entirely inoffensive, like even the most anodyne discussion of the peculiar institution. But whatever the social norms, as sectional tensions increased, this led to some consternation in the north. However reasonable and practical it was to take the high road and not resort to violence, deep down, the public chafed at the unseemly spectacle of a gang of slave-drivers treating their elected officials like so many, well, slaves.

Now it’s just for hipsters, and presumably Bronies.

Sooner or later, political demand will find its supply (see “Trump, Donald”), and in this case the northern public’s desire for some group to stand up to the Southerners was met by the Republican Party, founded in 1854 amid the fallout from the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This new faction was birthed from the collapsing Whig Party, along with some smaller groups united by a commitment to anti-slavery. This is not to say that they were abolitionists; that was the province of a small number of committed ideologues who punched above their weight in the popular consciousness due to their being disproportionately wealthy and connected. The Republicans were committed to “Free Soil,” the idea that the expanding west belonged to free white settlers with neither slaves nor free blacks being part of the picture. But much like the now-increasingly Southern oriented Democrats were a party of small farmers in the sense that they were controlled by an oligarchy of plantation-owning aristocrats, the Republicans were especially for those free white men who happened to control the emerging capitalist-industrial economy (and the immigrants that sustained it). Abraham Lincoln, who would soon become their standard-bearer and first successful presidential candidate, divided his time between being a folksy rail-splitting frontiersman and one of Illinois’ highest paid corporate lawyers.

Lincoln hatched a plan during the Civil War to send all black people in America to Panama, his previous idea to send them all to Africa having fallen through. Abolitionists objected on the actual grounds that the Panamanians would corrupt the black people and make them indolent.

At first, the Republican commitment to fighting back was very intense but largely rhetorical, and this led to a particularly unfortunate outcome. In 1856, Republican Charles Sumner, senator from Massachusetts, decided to COMPLETELY OWN!!!! the South through a carefully-crafted stream of invective, which he delivered as a speech on the Senate floor beginning on May 20th, “The Crime Against Kansas.” Taking advantage of the fact that the Senate placed no limits on the time one could speak, Sumner spent two days straight roasting the South and Democrats more generally, in the most offensively personal terms he could muster, using not only insults but sexual innuendo whereby he more or less accused his targets of raping America. He’d written the speech with the media in mind and had prepared copies ahead of time for subsequent distribution, so collegiality was the least of his concerns. But he was seemingly completely unaware that he wasn’t posting on X.com, and his obliviousness to the likely outcome of his IRL trolling could only be called astonishing. Douglas, one of his objects of derision, could only marvel at the spectacle, remarking that “this damn fool is going to get himself shot by some other damn fool.”

There would be no shooting, but the damn fool would shortly make himself known. One of the people observing the speech from the galleys was Preston Brooks, congressman from South Carolina. He grew steadily more angry as the hours of abuse wore on, particularly as one of the objects of Sumner’s ire was Andrew Butler, a senator and Brooks’ elderly cousin. Brooks was not the thoughtful or peaceable type; he walked with a limp from a previous duel and had himself been threatening various forms of violence against Republicans for a while now. His close friend and fellow SC congressman Lawrence Keitt, who described himself as a hothead, agreed to back whatever play Brooks decided upon. As it turned out, his genius plan would be to approach Sumner on the afternoon of May 22 while he sat at his Senate desk, announce himself, and savagely beat the helpless older man nearly to death with his heavy walking stick, an assault he did not stop until the cane actually broke over Sumner’s prone, unconscious form, all while Keitt held off any interference with drawn pistols.

Nowadays, an attentive Discord mod could have prevented this.

The attack alternately outraged or elated the populace, depending on where you happened to be. Northerners were horrified by an unjustified near-murder, while Southerners largely wondered what had taken Brooks so long. Brooks resigned his seat after an attempted censure by the House, whereupon his constituents returned him immediately and overwhelmingly to his old job, complete with a number of gifted replacement walking sticks inscribed with encouragement like “Hit Him Again.” Sumner would take years to recover. Brooks would die from sudden illness the next year, but Keitt would live on, his days of legislative violence not even close to behind him.

Republican voters got the hint and began electing people qualified to throw hands- or worse- as needed. Massachusetts Republican Chauncey Knapp was sent off to Congress in June of 1856 with a pistol with “Free Speech” inscribed on the grip. But it would be the westerners among the Republicans who would prove most amenable to the evolving circumstances, men who’d grown up on the frontier and were naturally tough and willing to scrap it out. These were the same sorts of men who would ultimately win the war for the Union not ten years hence. Those who remembered the period in Congress remarked that the years between 1857 and 1861 stood out for the escalation in violence.

And so it was on the evening of February 6th, 1858. Tensions were higher than ever, with the recent (March of 1857) Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that stipulated that black people were never intended to be citizens by the Constitution and thus lacked all standing to sue, and that slaves are property, which cannot be seized without due process, essentially negating all anti-slavery legislation. The media of the day naturally hyped up all the possible ramifications for Slave Power (some people actually were trying to create an empire for slavery) and the machinations of abolitionists (some of whom, it turns out, actually were conspiring to launch a slave revolt, with six wealthy donors backing a harebrained scheme on the part of John Brown in 1859). Things got pretty crazy, and they didn’t get any less crazy during the all-night session held to debate, once again, the unsolvable problem of Kansas.

Conspiracy groups don’t have cool names like this anymore.

Late in the evening, Republicans moved for a vote on some minor issue, but Democrats blocked it, as they lacked their full complement. It turned out that some of their congressmen, bored and tired, had decided to fight off the winter chill the best way they knew how, by getting drunk at nearby bars. Roused off their stools by their more professionally-minded colleagues, they returned to the chamber soused and surly- none more so than Lawrence Keitt. Preoccupied with bearing down with his head on his desk in order to keep the room steady, he at first didn’t notice that Republican Congressman Galusha Grow- whose evocative name suggests he originally represented Oz before moving to western Pennsylvania- had crossed over to the Democrat side of the House to confer with a colleague from that party from his state. At about 2:00 AM, the speaker again called for a vote, and Grow answered from where he stood, next to Keitt, which stirred him and annoyed him all at once, whereupon he rudely told Grow to go back to Republican territory. Grow, not intimidated, replied that it was a free chamber and he would speak where he felt like it. Apparently incensed by the word “free,” Keitt sprang up in 80-proof fury and grabbed Grow around the neck while calling him a “black Republican puppy”- labeling someone a baby dog was the Antebellum equivalent of calling someone a female dog today. Grow shoved Keitt away and told him that “no negro-driver shall crack his whip over me.” Hilariously, Freeman’s book records this as “he refused to be bullied by a slave-driver,” editing out the unfortunate microaggression. Keitt grabbed for Grow again, and this time, Grow gave him the Emerald City hook and laid him out.

He looks just like you were imagining.

The fracas naturally attracted attention, but this time, rather than attempting as a whole to break it up, others from both parties swarmed in to join the violence. This was not a handful of people- something between 30-50 congressmen waded into what became known as the Great Congressional Brawl of 1858. Naturally, accounts vary widely concerning the specifics, (Keitt, for example, would insist that he’d drunkenly tripped rather than having been knocked out by Grow) but some facts were generally stipulated to by all parties. The fighting involved no purposeful weapons, though chairs and (hopefully, but doubtfully, empty) spittoons were hurled about liberally. The standout combatants were, for once, the western Republicans, in particular John “Bowie Knife” Potter of Wisconsin, his colleague Cadwallader Washburn (you have to love these old-timey names), and Cadwallader’s brothers, Israel Washburn of Maine (the Republican love for Our Greatest Ally runs deep) and Elihu Washburne of Illinois (he insisted on the ‘e’). Not that the Southerners didn’t give it their best, though it’s not wholly clear which of them did what, apart from William Barksdale of Mississippi. Potter caught Barksdale with a solid shot, apparently from an odd angle, and the latter mistakenly punched Elihu Washburne in response. Washburne, apparently attempting some avant la lettre Randy Couture-style dirty boxing, grabbed Barksdale by the hair to set up a shot, only for it to be revealed that Barksdale was wearing a toupee, which fell to the floor. Unlike with urban female combatants at Waffle Houses, Spirit Air flights, and Carnival Cruises, for whom losing artificial hair is an expected hazard of routine brawling, Barksdale resorted to instinct, grabbed his wig off the floor, and returned it to his head- backwards- while presumably once again taking up an old-school flex-armed boxing pose. This was too much for everyone, and the crowd erupted in laughter, which, happily, brought the fight to a close, with no one worse off than some black eyes and tobacco-spit-soaked waistcoats.

You can watch the Netflix adaptation of the brawl at the link above.

So what did this accomplish? Nothing, but that really is the lesson. Things could have been done at that point to stave off the great catastrophe, but no one was willing or able to do them at that point. This was the last time the violence could be laughed off, and the last time things would be settled with fists. The country further descended into armed camps, fueled by a media that only sought to amplify the tensions and politicians who learned that they could gain more votes with swagger and swinging than they could with patience and amiability. Perhaps, though, there are just some problems that don’t admit of solution through debate. Perhaps people reach a point where they can no longer reconcile themselves with words. Let’s hope we’re not there.