Shootout on Capitol Hill.

AuthorBordewich, Jean P.

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

by Joanne B. Freeman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 462 pp.

Today's heated rhetoric in Congress echoes antebellum days when arguments led to gunfights. The violence ended only when the South lost.

The House Intelligence Committee's impeachment hearings displayed starkly how different Democrats and Republicans have become. Throughout the hearings, Democratic committee chairman Adam Schiff maintained a measured tone that eschewed personal attacks, trying instead to confirm events and their relationship to the constitutional definition of impeachable offenses. By contrast, Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, a former champion wrestler, pugnaciously defended the president by questioning witnesses' credibility and character. The president added his own combative rhetoric, warning of "big consequences" for the whistleblower and retweeting a Texas pastor's prediction that impeachment "will cause a Civil War like fracture."

It may seem like political rhetoric has never before been this dangerous, but in the years before the Civil War, verbal fireworks among politicians led to real violence--even in the halls of Congress. In The Field of Blood, Joanne Freeman, a professor of history at Yale, delivers a riveting, often surprising, and occasionally humorous expedition into the world of bullying, baiting, bowie knives, and murderous conflict that roiled Capitol Hill during the antebellum period. Her lively narrative describes how emotions intensified political disagreements, eroded mutual trust, and made it steadily more difficult for the constitutional machinery of Congress to handle explosive sectional divisions, especially over slavery.

"Different men from different regions had different ideas about manhood, violence, lawfulness, and their larger implications," writes Freeman. Southerners had a personal comfort with combat. Their upper classes, in particular, respected the code duello, a defined set of rites and rituals that governed dueling in the nineteenth century. Northerners, meanwhile, considered it unmanly to come to blows. Instead, they preferred "posting" personal insults in printed circulars and using provocative language in congressional debates.

The book doesn't discuss Donald Trump or contemporary politics, but the parallels are hard to miss. Partisanship is at near-record highs. Republicans and Democrats angrily clash in everything from committee rooms to restaurants. A 2019 survey...

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