eview in the Wall Street Journal, H. W. Brands writes, “Ms. Freeman’s book goes far toward explaining why there was a Civil War. She doesn’t put it so directly, but her evidence makes clear that by the time the war came, its causes transcended slavery.” Most direct of all, Brian Matthew Jordan writes of the value of Freeman’s book in the New York Journal of Books. “Empowered by the knowledge that distrust and dysfunction in Congress have been far worse, may we find justice for our own times—and well before we reach the steep banks of Bull Run.”
The parallels to today are clear. In an introductory author’s note, Freeman describes writing a book about “extreme congressional discord and national divisiveness at a time of extreme congressional discord and national divisiveness.” She notes worrisome similarities between the present day and antebellum America’s “extreme polarization and the breakdown of debate,” the “scorning of parliamentary rules and political norms to the point of abandonment,” and the erosion of “structures of government and the bonds of Union.” The future appears ominous when viewed from this perspective. In Freeman’s words, “The nation didn’t slip into disunion; it fought its way into it, even in Congress.”
Yet while some people see in America’s present dysfunction the seeds of its future disunion, the reality is that Americans are not on the brink of another civil war. Freeman’s excellent case studies detailing incidents of violence in Congress prior to the only civil war that we have had in this country inadvertently help us understand why. The insight is inadvertent because Freeman ultimately extrapolates the wrong meaning from the violent trend she tracks. And in doing so, she misses the significance of what her excellent case studies reveal about America’s march to war.
It turns out that a collapse of political space, not violence, caused the Civil War.
The Spirit of Politics
The key to understanding why can be found in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. For the Frenchman, spirit was synonymous 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 resol