us with action. The spirit of a people (i.e., how they acted in community) was directly related to the character of their government. A democratic republic like the United States requires a place in which its people, or their representatives, can act. The physical place in which people act is where they participate in politics.
Channeling our inner Montesquieu while reading Freeman helps to illuminate the real sources of popular frustration in both sections of the American Union prior to the Civil War. The space in which the people acted was collapsing around them.
With the help of Benjamin Brown French, a long-time House clerk, Democratic Party official and, most importantly, prodigious diarist, Freeman describes how that space changed amidst an increase in incidents of congressional violence, the boorish details of which she documents with startling clarity. She goes beyond the standard account of the 1856 caning of Charles Sumner, R-Mass., to reveal incidents that have long remained hidden. Freeman’s account of the duel between Jonathan Cilley, D-Maine, and William J. Graves, W-Ky., in 1838 is especially compelling. (Incidentally, the Cilley-Graves duel was the only incident in the history of congressional violence that proved fatal to one of the combatants.)
That Freeman gives violence a starring role in Field of Blood is unsurprising given that it is a book about violence in Congress. That is was an ever-present feature of congressional life, Freeman leaves us with no doubt. Still, Freeman overstates its role when she contends that it hardened sectional antagonisms, foreclosed the possibility of compromise, and made the Civil War all but inevitable. Violence was not responsible for fraying the bonds of Union, much less triggering the Civil War. It was instead a reaction to Congress’s—and the Constitution’s—inability to deal with the issue of slavery via politics. The democratic republic born in 1788 could not reconcile the increasingly homogeneous sectional views on slavery. Lacking a space in which to resolve their disagreements over the issue, Americans in both North and South would literally destroy the Union in their quest to prevail in the debate. That is why even abolitionists turned to violence as a means to achieve their ends toward the end of the period analyzed by Freeman. Their doing so constituted an acknowledgement that politics had failed. This is important because violence prevails in spaces where politics has already failed.
Yet implicit in Freeman’s account is her belief that violence caused politics to fail in this instance. This is the central flaw in her otherwise remarkable narrative. Moreover, the fact that Congress continued to debate and legislate on major issues throughout this period cannot be reconciled with Freeman’s assertion that an average of three non-violent incidents a year were sufficient to plunge the nation into Civil War.
Blood Flows When Politics Ends
The violence documented so thoroughly by Freeman was merely symptomatic of a more significant problem that had long plagued the American Republic—the inability of the political system to resolve sectional differences over slavery. This was not unique to the 1830s, 1840s, or 1850s. However, Freeman wrongly attributes inaction on slavery to “a domineering block of slaveholders at the heart of the national government who strategically deployed violence to get their way.” Considering that “get their way” meant stopping efforts to restrict the spread of slavery and abolition of the slaves, equal representation of the states in the Senate and the commitment of the Democratic and Whig parties to presidential tickets that were regionally balanced was far more important to the South than its pugnacious reputation and ability to bully individual congressmen from the North into not forcing abolition before the Civil War. It also overstates the commitment to abolition in the North prior to the 1850s. When taken together, these arrangements ensured that the majority of Americans, not just southerners, worked hard to keep slavery off the agenda