Technical Difficulties

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent and extremely readable history of violence in Congress in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The infamous caning of Charles Sumner was not an isolated incident, and Freeman does a fantastic job of showing how violence and the threat of violence were used as tools by Southern congressmen to bully Northern congressmen into silence (just as they were using the threat of secession for a long time before anyone actually seceded). Freeman explores the ideology of Southern violence (the "code of honor") and presents the logic by which Southern congressmen considered themselves the victims of "degradation" and sectional violence. And she shows Northern congressmen's fear and frustration (and the marvelous non-violent tactics of John Quincy Adams) and how that fear slowly turned into responsive violence. Northerners started physically fighting back, and she argues that Congress acted as a microcosm and a barometer, both a cause and an effect of the growing tension and mutual mistrust between North and South. Violence in Congress didn't CAUSE the Civil War, but it was part of the vicious, escalating circle that kept North and South at each other's throats.

This is also, as sort of a subplot, a biography of Benjamin Brown French (whose claim to fame today is probably that he was the uncle of Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the Lincoln Memorial). French was a lot of things, but one of them was a voluminous diarist and another was someone who, through his various jobs and political activity, had a front row seat to the goings-on in antebellum Washington D.C. She uses him as a primary source, but she also traces his political development from what was called a "doughface" (a Northern Democrat who sought to appease the South) to a fervent Republican and supporter of Lincoln, due in no small part to the way he witnessed Southern and Northern congressmen behaving from the late 1830s through to the outbreak of war. French is a method for her to maintain continuity of narrative even as her cast of Congressional characters come and go, and although I'm reluctant to play the Everyman card, French is a profoundly ordinary man, vain and a little gullible and not very good at self-reflection (though extraordinarily energetic), and his journey offers an intimate look at how what happened in Congress affected the people of the United States.



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