The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War

Why was the Civil War so brutal? Why, after decades of patriotic parades, congratulatory speeches, fulsome toasts, and paeans to liberty and union, did Americans spring at each other's throats in 1861, soon to kill one another by the hundreds of thousands? Joanne B. Freeman has tackled these old questions with new insight and energy through a set of smaller, prior questions: Why were American congressmen so violent in the decades before the war itself, and what difference did that make? Historians have long used highlights from congressional tussling to document the intensity of sectionalism and other broad patterns in American culture. Outlines of the tragic 1838 Jonathan Cilley–William Graves duel, the savage caning of Charles Sumner in 1856, and the mass brawl in 1858 ignited by the Lecompton Constitution are therefore widely familiar. Now Freeman has made a sweeping survey of the entire phenomenon, counting dozens of obscure fistfights and bitter duels (both averted and consummated), amid the steady erosion of political comity. One minor effect is to make such recent peccadillos as “giving the lie direct” to President Barack Obama or Vice President Dick Cheney's famously pungent suggestion to Senator Patrick Leahy look nearly genteel by comparison.