The Long, Brutal Tradition of American Politicians Killing Each Other

It's something of a paradox that America right now is both as safe as it's ever been and newly terrifying in its capacity for violence. Crime rates remain at or near historic lows, and yet starting around the time Donald Trump launched his scapegoating, resentment-fueled run for president three years ago, a steady stream of bloodlust has been bubbling beneath the surface of public life. The now-president's campaign rallies—which continue to this day—quickly became known as hotbeds of racial animus, sordid scenes that featured routine incitements of rage against the press (by Trump, among others), and, in some cases, actual combat. But this wasn't exactly a novel phenomenon in the broader arc of US history: During the 19th century, being a member of Congress could be hazardous to your health. Many of us have heard of the notorious, near-fatal 1856 caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner—targeted for his anti-slavery rhetoric—by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks, and, perhaps most famous, sitting Vice President Aaron Burr's slaying of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton decades earlier. But these weren't isolated incidents—in 1838, Congressman Jonathan Cilley of Maine was killed in a duel by Representative William Graves of Kentucky.

In other words, you might say physically fighting your rivals—possibly to the death—was stitched into the very fabric of American democracy.

In her forthcoming book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, Yale University historian Joanne B. Freeman explores the long arc of violence at the highest levels and how it informs the political infighting currently plaguing the country. VICE talked to Freeman to find out how the South used violence to cement its advantage in Congress before the Civil War, why the caning of Senator Sumner still stands out, and how President Trump might have fared back then.

VICE: We talk a lot today about institutional advantages or logjams or procedures like the filibuster or gerrymandering being used by one party to keep the other out of power. But it seems like in the pre-Civil War period, it was actually pretty simple: Southerners were more willing to get violent.
Joanne B. Freeman: Southerners knew that they had something of an advantage in Congress. Southern culture—any kind of a slave regime—is going to be centered on violence. To keep people enslaved, [you use] violence. Southerners came from a violent society. Congress is an interesting institution because it has people from all over the Union in one room and they have to argue with each other to get what they want. So what happens when you have Southerners, with their very sort of violent mode of leadership in a room with Northerners who have a very different idea of leadership? Certainly there's Northern violence, but it was very different from Southern violence.

You had the Democratic Party and the Whig party—they were national parties—and both had Southerners and Northerners. A lot of the bullying was more about party politics than it was about slavery, per se. But over time, as the slavery issue really heated up, Southerners really used bullying, threats, and violence to silence anyone who dared critique the institution of slavery. And for a time, it worked. Can you talk about the macho culture that dominated life in the South where fisticuffs, dueling, and gunplay were the norm, long after the quasi-aristocratic violence was denounced in the North?
It was society that was comfortable with dueling, and if you wanted to be a political leader, you needed to be the sort of person who could defend himself. The leadership qualities of Southerners lent themselves to being the sort of person who might do some bullying. Southerners knew very well that they had an advantage—that Northerners weren't comfortable with dueling, that Northerners were less likely to be armed, and that Northerners weren't as comfortable with man-to-man violence in Congress as Southerners were. They used that to their advantage in a really deliberate kind of a way. The book talks about the rules of dueling and the code of honor that leads people from one step to the next. It's not as though you could just turn your back and walk away. There were all kinds of reasons, that had to do with the rules of dueling and fighting in the Congressional community. All of these things made fighting a lot more immediate and a lot harder to pull yourself out of.

Who was the most infamous fighter in Congress during that era?
There's a Virginian named Henry Wise, and he's in Congress for a pretty extended period. He was re-elected six times and ends up becoming Governor of Virginia. It's not like being a bully damages his career at all. He's actually the person who ends up being responsible for signing the famous abolitionist John Brown's death warrant. I call him one of my most frequent fighters. He really was someone who just was a bully. I don't know if he liked the word bully, but that was basically how he operated. He was very quick to immediately threaten his opponents with violence, with threats, with dueling. He was very effective at what he did. People didn't want to come up against him. For his entire Congressional career, not only was he sort of very loudly and proudly defending the South in that way, but he even boasted about it. And more than once, when someone said to him during debate, you know, "You should be ashamed for what you're doing," he would say, "Not only am I not ashamed, I'm elected to do this. They like it when I do this, my constituents. They keep re-electing me because this is what I do, I defend the South in any way that I can.”

When Charles Dickens, in the 1840s, came to the United States to go, like, on a tour, he went to visit Congress. He asked very specifically for two people to be pointed out, and they were the two most famous bullies. Henry Wise was one of them.

Why do you think the caning of Senator Charles Sumner kind of stands out in history as opposed to a lot of this other congressional violence?
It came after a string of other attacks on Northerners that seemed to be proving that there was a deliberate Southern plot to silence Northern abolitionists. [Surprisingly] there were actually rules of a sort for engaging in Congressional combat. There were things you were supposed to do and things that you weren’t supposed to do because they seemed unfair. You were not really supposed to stage a deliberate assault in the Capitol. People lost their temper and ran at each other or smacked each other, but if you were really planning a deliberate caning of the sort that Preston Brooks planned against Sumner, you tended to do that sort of thing outside. And Brooks actually waited outside for two days hoping to spot Sumner on the Capitol grounds. In the end, he gave up and attacked Sumner in the Senate chamber, which had an enormous impact. One of the reasons why the caning of Sumner stood out was because the way that it happened seemed unusual.

How does the mentality of a Henry Wise or Preston Brooks compare to the President Trump?
Oh, wow. That's hard. Certainly when you're looking at the Southerners, these are people who are standing up for an institution that we know to be evil. In their minds, they considered it something worth fighting for. You can say that Southerners who are fighting to defend slavery are fighting to defend something that certainly they believe in, but that doesn't mean that what they're fighting for is good. It’s a reminder that people can have deep belief in what they're doing and they can be very wrong.

How do you think somebody like President Trump would've fared back then, during this prime era of congressional violence?
I will speak in a more general kind of a way and say that if you were going to be somebody with big words and big threats, you needed to be willing to back them up. That’s the thing with these bullies: They weren't just bullying with words, they were men who were known to be willing to physically fight to defend what they were saying. If you were going to be that sort of a person and you expected to have the respect of other people, you had to also be a person who was willing to physically stand behind whatever it was you said.

How does the more traditional violence of slavery and the era surrounding it compare to the somewhat more muted forms of political violence—and lingering institutional racism—we see today?
The political process couldn't salvage what was going on during the pre-Civil War era. It was going to be a matter of America allowing slavery or not allowing slavery and there wasn't going to be a compromise on that. The violence kind of percolated along and Congress continued to do whatever it needed to do because people had enough faith in the system that they believed that they should do what they needed to do to keep it going. Now we're in an interesting moment where there are aspects of that political system that are being challenged or threatened, and that's a different kind of a moment, and it raises different kinds of challenges. It’s something that we need to be aware of and think hard about. Not just that we're in ugly or polarized times. [Our founders] believed that one of the major things they were doing was setting in place a system that people could go back to and grab at to save the Nation at times of peril. Right now, it doesn't feel as though the powers that be are doing very much to salvage that system.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. Learn more about Freeman's book, out on September 11, here.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.