Savage Sessions: The Lost History of Congressional Violence in Antebellum America

In 1856, on the eve of the Civil War, a South Carolina congressman named Preston Brooks viciously attacked Senator Charles Sumner, an outspoken Massachusetts abolitionist, as he sat at his desk in the U.S. Senate chamber. Sumner’s caning is unquestionably the most famous violent incident in Congress, but it was far from the only one.

After more than fifteen years of research and writing, historian Joanne Freeman—a leading authority on early American political culture—has uncovered roughly 70 incidents of physical violence in the House and Senate chambers in the decades leading up to the Civil War, most of them long forgotten. Fistfights, guns and knives, canings, duels, and all-out brawls were essentially censored out of the period’s equivalent of the Congressional Record. These incidents show how violence—both the threat of it and the actual fact of it—was a tool of debate in the antebellum Congress, particularly on the part of Southerners who threatened Northerners into compliance or silence on the contentious issue of slavery.

Presenter: Joanne B. Freeman

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

Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University

American Library Association Annual Conference

Washington, D.C.

June 23, 2019