#henry foote

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congressional troubles: the david outlaw snippets

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wiliam seward's friendships make me delirious. what do you mean he was bffs with henry foote and john c calhoun was mad about it. what do you mean he was besties with jefferson davis in 1850 and that seward visited him every day when he was sick. what do you mean that seward asked davis for help when a duel almost occurred between two other senators and that the two of them (with crittenden) resolved the duel by making the disputers have dinner at seward's house. what do you mean that seward's house was on F Street, the one the F Street Mess was on. that jefferson davis felt that a cross-sectional settlement was possible "because of his relationship with seward". What do you mean people hoped to be placed next to seward whenever senate seats were reassigned.

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the virgin phlegmatic sen. rmt hunter v the chad choleric gov. henry wise of virginia

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Senator John Parker Hale received similar praise from friends, constituents, and the press for his defense of Northern rights. When Andrew Butler (D-SC) called him a “mad man” during discussion of an antislavery petition, the normally genial Hale lost his temper, shooting back that Butler would have to “talk louder, and threaten more, and denounce more before he can shut my mouth here.” Northerners weren’t to be “frightened, sir, out of our rights … we are not to be frightened even by threats of danger personally to ourselves.” New Hampshire men would proudly defend their rights in Congress or in battle, let the enemy “come when they will, and where they will, and how they will.” Given Hale’s typically jovial style, this combative defense of Northern rights received ample press coverage. So did his skillful skewering of ranting Southerners, as on May 20, 1848, when he responded to one of Foote’s taunts by asking for a dictionary so he could find the insult’s meaning, playing up the comedy of the moment and bringing down the house. In the Thirty-first Congress, the ongoing contest between Foote and Hale was much like the gag rule battle between Henry Wise and John Quincy Adams; the two men were partners in taunt and torment. Like Adams and Giddings, Hale was an antislavery toreador, but whereas Giddings fought with physical bravado and Adams fought with sarcasm and parliamentary savvy, Hale’s chosen weapon was humor. He was a master at deflating Southern bravado by reducing the Senate to laughter. Such energized Northern resistance was striking. More striking still were the energized fears of congressmen about their safety on the floor. With hundreds of people milling about the Capitol, Joseph Woodward (D-SC) thought that if the Duer-Meade scuffle at the start of the session had been more serious, “in less than three minutes three hundred strangers would have rushed into this Hall” and produced a bloody melee, a scenario that was strikingly close to Foote’s doomsday threat. David Outlaw agreed. “In times of great excitement, as upon the slavery question[,] armed men might be admitted into this Hall, and in case of a personal collision this place might become a scene of bloodshed and confusion.” The press came to the same conclusion; a “bloody row” fueled by “outsiders” could happen at any time, and “civil war would thus commence in the Capitol.” The South’s “new game of frustration, or parliamentary hindrances,” could end no other way.  Southern threats of civil war didn’t seem so outrageous after all, but the American public—not congressmen—would bring them to fruition.

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

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Time out. What.

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Ultimately, Foote’s large-scale sectional bullying campaign failed. As was ever his way, he went too far, making a threat too extreme to be believed—except by the people who came to Washington to witness the congressional apocalypse. But in the end, stalwart Northerners held firm, the day of reckoning passed without incident, and the torturous Compromise debate continued, as did Foote’ ongoing assault on Benton’s power and influence. Opposed to the extension of slavery, disapproving of Foote’s backroom mode of compromise, and detesting Foote personally, Benton was a hulking roadblock of a problem. He was also a formidable opponent. Never a graceful speaker, his power was in the reach and recall of his knowledge. A master at amassing facts and figures, he wielded them like weapons during debates. But Benton was a vulnerable target. His ambivalence toward slavery had long made him suspect among Southerners, who were more on guard than ever with its future at stake; Benton’s fight with Foote was one of many tussles between Southerners during that session.   Much like French’s, Benton’s views on slavery were a web of contradictions; he disliked the institution, didn’t want to agitate the issue, disapproved of its extension, yet was willing to protect enslaved people as property. Neither a full Free Soiler nor a loyal Democrat, Benton embodied the mixed views of his home state of Missouri, which was grappling with the problem of slavery on the border of North and South. Many Southerners considered him downright traitorous; he was one of only two Southern senators not invited to Calhoun’s Southern caucus. His habit of dismissing Southern threats as empty bluster only made matters worse. Thus Benton’s nickname during the Compromise struggle: “Tommy the Traitor.”

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

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French was part of that partnership for most of his adult life; newspapers were the making and breaking of his political career. His work as a Jacksonian editor in New Hampshire raised him to the national stage, where his yeoman’s efforts for the Democratic press promoted both his party and his reputation. By the 1840s, for at least some of the newspaper-reading public, French had a modest national presence. But that presence hurt him during the tumultuous years just before and after the Civil War. In the mid-1850s, newspapers exposed French’s wavering Democratic loyalties and drove him to make some hard choices; after the war, they exposed his wavering loyalties once again and lost him a job. It was hard to be moderate in immoderate times. The shaming capabilities of the press made it harder. Even as a member of what he called the “Press gang,” French was constantly surprised by the power of the press. That didn’t stop him from trying to corral its influence; it would be hard to exaggerate the time and effort that French devoted to the press. In the service of his party, he was tireless; when he wasn’t writing for newspapers, he was reading them. During elections, he combed through countless papers from all over the country searching for useful tidbits and a broad national view. During Pierce’s presidential campaign, French also kept watch for fires to extinguish, and there were plenty. (Who was Franklin Pierce?) He countered such slurs in the Union, which in turn was quoted in other papers. But the press was more than a political weapon for French. It was his public voice; it gave him a public presence. He needed little if any reason to plunge into print, and his political and editorial connections provided ready outlets. French eulogized men of note in the press. Unusual snowstorm? French would be chirping about snowstorms past in the next day’s paper. Inaccurate weather report? French corrected it with ready readings from his own thermometers. He refuted any and every slash at his reputation, often the next day. (His half brother Henry called it “pouncing.”) His Masonic writings alone fill hundreds of pages. And of course there were his poems, scores of them. Patriotic, Masonic, commemorative, or melancholy, they were French’s way of sharing his feelings with the world and proving himself the man of letters that he yearned to be. French was doing what many public figures did just as rigorously if not more so: crafting and protecting his image in the press. Congressmen, however, faced special challenges. Not only were their reputations at the mercy of the press, but their jobs depended on it. As representatives, they were accountable to their constituents for their words and actions as they appeared on the pages of newspapers. Thus their compulsive concern with press reports of their speeches. Only in print were a congressman’s words substantiated; only then were they real. Many a man verified harsh words in newspapers before throwing a punch or issuing a challenge. What mattered was what the public saw and heard. Unreported, a speech was “as if it had never been made,” complained John Quincy Adams when one of his speeches—a “random shot”—wasn’t recorded. Congress revolved around the spoken word; committing those words to paper brought the process of representation to life. It’s no wonder that congressmen devoted long, hard hours to their press coverage. Even such renowned speechifiers as Daniel Webster routinely primed the press, outlining speeches in advance for reporters, testing different wordings while delivering his speeches, then whittling away the excess during editing. Occasionally that excess found its way into print, as it did in the Globe in 1850: Webster begins a sentence by stating, “I demur—I hesitate—I doubt —I repel.” Typical are the efforts of John Quincy Adams. On March 6, 1835, he went to the Intelligencer office to read notes of a speech he had made four days past, but they weren’t available. (While he was there, two other congressmen came to review notes of their speeches.) Three days later Adams got the notes and found them “very imperfect,” so he spent the day revising them. He submitted his revisions the next day, then reappeared at the office two days later to review the proof sheets. His speech appeared in print on March 17, two weeks after he delivered it. Adams hated the “double waste of time” so much that he vowed to give fewer speeches. (He failed.) No wonder congressmen often revised one reporter’s notes and then referred other papers to the corrected copy, as did Henry Foote in 1850 when he sharpened an anti-Benton screed for the Union and then referred the Intelligencer to his revised text.

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