Life in the Early Congress, Part Two: "The most contemptible and degraded of beings"

In honor of the new political season, I'm reprinting an article I wrote for Smithsonian in 1995:

    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/congress-couldnt-have-been-this-bad-or-could-it-1-36911219/

The first part is here:
     http://disaster-wise.blogspot.com/2017/01/life-in-early-congress-part-one-every.html

The camaraderie of boardinghouse life mattered enormously, because for decades there were few respectable things to do in Washington at night. Social life picked up over the years--and so did the social reputation of politicians, particularly members of the House, who were initially snubbed as yokels by such few Washington hostesses as there were. (Senators, always more staid than Congressmen, got a bit more respect.) But for years, by far the biggest nighttime diversion was cards--whist, faro and brag--played at those boardinghouses whose rules permitted it. One unhappy Congressman reported losing $3,500--more than a year's salary circa 1856--in a single evening.

Whenever they really got fed up, Congressmen agitated to move the nation's capital (it had been moved twice already), claiming that anywhere would be better than Washington in summer. During an early debate on the question of moving the capital, when citizens opposing the move turned up in the gallery, Senator James Jackson of Georgia threatened to call in the military and have them all shot. Threats of violence, however, were usually directed at other Congressmen. The House, particularly, was rough and raucous. The chamber's high, elliptical ceiling echoed and amplified every stray sound, from mild chatter and rustling newspapers to shouts. With all the noise, it was said at the time, no more than one-third of the members had any idea what was going on. With little chance, compared with today, of being instantly heard, either by colleagues or constituents, some members saw no need to curb their language. According to Augustus Foster, aide to England's minister to the United States, to "judge from their Congress, one should suppose the nation to be the most blackguard society that was ever brought together."

Whether they acted well or badly, Congressmen didn't expect to stay around very long. There were no term limits, but voters, then as now, were a fickle lot. More important, before the great increase in federal power that set in after FDR and World War II, much of the political action was back in the state capitals. During the first four decades of Congress' existence, 41 percent of the House, on average, dropped out every two years.

Even so, both houses had their share of memorable and often contentious characters, some short-run, many very long-run indeed. A relative short-runner was Davy Crockett, "fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator," who served as Representative from Tennessee for three terms. This portrait by John Gadsby Chapman: 

Starting in 1827, Crockett made quite an impression, but he never managed to pass the bill he cared about, opening government land in Tennessee to poor settlers. After losing his seat in 1835 Crockett told voters they could all go to hell. For his part, he was going to Texas (where he died--at the Alamo--within a year).

South Carolina's John C. Calhoun had been in the House for five years when, in 1816, Congress voted to give itself a substantial pay increase. The public was outraged, so the next year the measure was reversed. Calhoun, who predicted that men of high caliber would no longer seek Congressional office if salaries were not raised to equal or exceed those of Presidential appointees, resigned --to take on the higher-paying job of Secretary of War. Eventually, though, he returned to Congress, becoming one of those men who spent entire careers--or significant chunks of them--on Capitol Hill. After serving as Vice President from 1825 to 1832 under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, Calhoun went to the Senate, and remained there, minus one year as Secretary of State to President John Tyler, until his death in 1850.

Daniel Webster, the renowned legal orator who could outwit the Devil himself, chose not to run in 1816. Seven years later, he was reelected to the House, went on to a seat in the Senate, where--despite being famously eloquent on the subjects of the sacredness of the Union and the need for abolition--he remained, off and on (mostly on), until 1850.

Calhoun's and Webster's careers resemble those of today's Congressional stars--rising from the House to the Senate or positions in the Cabinet--but their careers were unusual for their time. Today, most Senators voted out of office would sooner retire from politics than run for a seat in the lower house. But back then, the House of Representatives was where the real political power in Washington lay, and there were no high-paying lobbying firms, consulting groups or think tanks to absorb out-of-work politicians.


A spectacular example was John Quincy Adams, who got himself elected to the House after leaving the Presidency in 1829. Adams, a great public servant and defender of the citizen's right of petition, was appalled when, in 1836, Congress imposed a ban on the reading of abolitionist petitions--or any petition regarding slavery--in session. In protest, for nine years running, Adams opened each new session by reading aloud petitions he had received on the issue. "Nothing daunts him," said an observer at the time; "the House may ring with the cries of 'Order, order!'--unmoved, contemptuous, he stands amid the tempest, and, like an oak that knows his gnarled and knotted strength, stretches his arms forth, and defies the blast." Adams' dramatic brand of civil disobedience led to the repeal of the gag rule in 1844.

John Randolph of Virginia, another career Congressman, also took full advantage of his freedom of speech. Tall and pale, with black hair, Randolph dressed in buckskin riding clothes, carried a riding crop and often strode into the House with one or two hunting dogs at heel. But what truly distinguished him was his savage wit. He had a habit of pointing an index finger like grim Death while hurling remarks at adversaries. He once described a colleague as "the most contemptible and degraded of beings, whom no man ought to touch, unless with a pair of tongs."

First elected to Congress in 1799, Randolph was a brilliant orator, a strong defender of states' rights and a political maverick, holding seats in the House or Senate for most of the years until his death in 1833. Eventually, his language grew so sarcastic and abusive that many Senators simply left the chamber when he was speaking.

The one man in Congress who could control Randolph, it was believed, was Henry Clay of Kentucky, the "Western Star," who was elected Speaker by his colleagues on his very first day in the House in 1811. He served in that office for six terms--the longest tenure as Speaker of the House in the 19th century--his popularity due in part to his ability to squelch Randolph. 

The Clay-Randolph feud began in 1812, when Clay refused to entertain Randolph's resolution against the declaration of war. In 1820, after the House approved the Missouri Compromise--which temporarily helped maintain a balance between slave and free states--Clay again thwarted Randolph, this time refusing his motion to reconsider the bill. Not that Clay thought the action would change the vote--he simply didn't want to give Randolph the satisfaction of seeming to control the business of the House. At every turn, the two men butted heads. In 1826, they finally faced off in a duel.

Randolph--who despised Clay, but also secretly admired him--accepted Clay's challenge, declaring that he preferred "to be killed by Clay to any other death." But after two volleys, with the only injury a hole drilled through Randolph's flowing white coat, the two shook hands. ("You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay," Randolph said, to which Clay--then the Secretary of State--replied, "I am glad the debt is no greater.") It was, according to Senator Thomas Hart Benton (who had taken part in a few duels himself), "about the last high-toned duel that I have witnessed."

    http://blogs.weta.org/boundarystones/2013/09/04/guys-trying-get-themselves-killed-john-randolph-and-henry-clay

We think of duels as being fought with pistols or swords, but at least one Congressional duel was fought with rifles at a distance of 100 yards. After this particularly tragic encounter, dueling was outlawed in the capital. In 1838 Jonathan Cilley, a freshman Democratic Representative from Maine, made some comments in session that offended another first-termer, Whig William Graves of Kentucky. As was the custom, Graves challenged Cilley to a duel. The whole matter might have ended with everyone's honor and health intact, had it not been for a Tyler Democrat named Henry A. Wise, who represented the state of Virginia.

A fiery defender of slavery, Wise--who later, as governor of Virginia, would have John Brown hanged--was, by all accounts, an angry, abrasive fellow. According to Benjamin Brown French, the Clerk of the House, Wise had "shot his former friend, Coke, through the arm, in a duel. His wife and brother have died, his house has been burned, he has been either a principal, or second, in three duels, in each of which blood has been shed."

Wise was even more riled up by Cilley's comments than was Representative Graves, and offered to serve as second to Graves, encouraging him to "kill that damned Yankee." On February 24, 1838, the two contestants met on the old dueling grounds in nearby Bladensburg, Maryland. Each took two shots at a distance of 100 yards. Both missed. That would have satisfied honor had not Wise insisted the duel continue. On the next round, Graves killed Cilley.

Congress, and the public, were shocked. The newspapers made much of Wise's murderous role. The next year, Congress passed a law banning the giving, delivering or accepting of a challenge to a duel in the District of Columbia.

Over the next ten years, Congress continued to lose its insularity. In 1848 a telegraphic network called the Associated Press began flashing accounts to newspapers all over the Eastern Seaboard. A few years later, the new Pitman system of speed stenography allowed Capitol Hill reporters to capture every word of Congressional debate. Transport and accommodations improved. Wives and families came to Washington, and a whole new, somewhat more decorous, social life expanded. The boardinghouse life was fading. By 1850, less than half of the Senators still lodged in the old communal fashion.

Despite all the altercations, the early Congresses managed to cover a considerable amount of legislative ground, ranging from what paintings should hang in the Rotunda to a tariff on imported pasta to the construction of a national road (from Maryland to Illinois) to the settlement of international boundary disputes with Spain and Britain. Congress also brought increasing order to its dealings in the form of a growing body of precedents, committees and subcommittees--during a period when the country, and its Congress, more than doubled in size and complexity.

Yet the ire of the men Dickens called "desperate adventurers" did not fade, especially as the struggle over the ratio of new slave states to free states began to burn hotter still. During debates on the Compromise of 1850--through which Congress hoped to avoid civil war--Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who favored compromise, advanced in a rage on Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi. Foote pulled out a big pistol. Benton, safely restrained by his colleagues, shouted, "Let him fire!. . . I have no pistol! I disdain to carry arms! Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!" One Senator said that during the stressful 1850s the only members not carrying a knife and a revolver were those carrying two revolvers.

The Compromise--an attempt to resolve disputes over slavery in the Western territories lately gained in the Mexican War--allowed Congress to avoid the issue for several years, but in the end, it did not work. Six years after its passage, Representative Brooks brutally beat abolitionist Senator Sumner. It took three and a half years for Sumner to recover fully, and by then, the country was on the brink of civil war.

Life in the Early Congress, Part One: "Every Bad Inclination"

In honor of the new political season, I'm reprinting an article I wrote for Smithsonian in 1995:

    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/congress-couldnt-have-been-this-bad-or-could-it-1-36911219/

When Charles Dickens visited the U.S. Congress in 1842, he found "some men of high character and great abilities." But many, the noted English novelist reported, practiced "despicable trickery at elections; underhanded tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents," not to mention "aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the popular mind."

During his visit, Dickens heard one Congressman threaten to cut another's throat, and was surprised that the House did nothing to discipline the scoundrel. "There he sat among them," the stunned novelist wrote, "not crushed by the general feeling of the assembly--but as good a man as any."

Members of the House, Dickens also noted, sat at their desks with their feet propped up, lavishly spitting tobacco juice. "Both houses are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon . . . do not admit of being described." Strangers, he continued, should be wary of picking up any article from the floor "with an ungloved hand."

Anyone inclined to dismiss Dickens as a snobbish and sarcastic Briton with heightened powers of description need only consult other local sources. In 1837, according to a contemporary newspaper reporter, you could easily slip on the "disgusting compound of tobacco juice, wafers and sand" that coated the floor of the House of Representatives. Young messengers often slid down the aisles on the loose papers that accumulated there. "Not all the soap and scrubbing-brushes in Christendom," the reporter' wrote of the chamber, "would make it fit for a peasant's hut."

It was at about this time, too, that the House found itself reduced to fining members who missed roll call. To avoid the $2 fine, some Honorable Members were not above scooting in through open windows or sliding down columns from the gallery.

Indeed, voters who share the current dissatisfaction with the goings-on of the people's representatives on Capitol Hill, or deplore the current levels of partisanship in American politics, should take a measure of comfort from a look at how things used to be in the good old days.

In the first half of the 19th century, members of Congress, untroubled by the relentless gaze of C-SPAN, were not under the direct scrutiny of the public eye. Like many Americans in a rough-and-tumble new nation, they indulged in bad manners, unruly behavior and sometimes outright violence. Long before Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts into unconsciousness in a celebrated 1856 dispute over slavery, Congressmen regularly attacked one another--with words and, on occasion, weapons.

There was much to get violent about. Every time a new territory clamored for statehood, it threatened the balance of Congressional power between the various rival regions (East versus West, North versus South) and eventually between slave states and free states. Congressmen battled tooth and nail over tariffs--the federal government's main source of income--which helped the commercial Northeast at the expense of the agricultural South, and gave more power to the federal government than the states' rights followers of Thomas Jefferson thought tolerable.

Long before the Civil War, South Carolina talked hotly of nullifying the Constitution on this issue, even of outright secession from the Union. The question of whether or not to have a national bank sundered state from state and brother from brother at a time when many Americans still thought lending money at interest was not only unchristian but akin to theft. And farmers (circa 1830, about 70 percent of the population) just knew that people who didn't plant and harvest--that is, urban stock-jobbers and Northern money men--were not to be trusted.

A good deal of Congressional exacerbation had to do with conditions in the nation's new capital, a muggy, barren spot regarded for years as a provincial and unhealthy outpost by the diplomatic corps of European nations. For decades the capital city seemed raw and only half-built, with weed-choked bare lots and streets of yellow clay. To keep carriages from thundering in heavy rains, logs had to be thrown into the deepest mud holes of Washington's unpaved roads. One Representative who ventured out at night for a social visit in 1818 complained that he slipped into gutters, fell over dirt piles and tripped over bricks and barrels--because the District of Columbia, then as now, fiscally feckless, hadn't supplied the streetlamps with fuel. Hogs got to be such a nuisance that in 1828 the police issued a stern warning: any porker found running loose in the streets would be arrested--and promptly sold.

Like their modern-day counterparts, early Congressmen had to wrangle together and somehow pass the expanding nation's laws. But their lifestyles, like those of most Americans, were totally different from today's. Forget about weekend jaunts home to campaign or see friends. Until the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the arrival of rail connections in the mid-1830s, members rarely got home at all during the session,which began in December and lasted from four to six months. The journey from Washington to Boston took 11 days by coach in 1807, and sometimes coaches could not get through at all. Until the early 1850s, most of the members did not bring their wives and families to Washington.

Today, staff for 535 Senators and Representatives runs to about 18,000 people, with an annual payroll of more than $1 billion. But for the first century of Congress, our public servants had little or no personal staff to help draft legislation or answer letters. And they did receive letters; in those days citizens took their right of petition seriously. During a two-year term starting in 1817, Delegate .John Scott from the Territory of Missouri received more than 1,000 petitions on subjects ranging from widows' woes to patent applications to damage claims for property destroyed during Indian raids. At the time, the entire population of Missouri was something like 65,000.

Without staff, Congressmen had no need for the suites of offices their successors have today. In fact, most had no offices at all. They spent their days at assigned desks in the House or Senate chamber. At night, there was still no privacy from politically hostile colleagues. Until the mid-1840s, most Congressmen lived together in boardinghouses and were sometimes obliged to bunk two to a room.

Finding a boardinghouse was a Congressman's first job on arriving in Washington. Dozens of these establishments were advertised in city papers like the National Intelligencer. ("Mrs. Cottringer, in Ninth street a few doors South of E street," read an 1831 notice, "can accommodate a Mess of Members of Congress, or other strangers visiting the City.")

Congressional boardinghouses clustered in three places around town. Some of the oldest were in Georgetown, a long, bumpy carriage ride from the Capitol, but already well established by 1800, the year when the capital was moved from Philadelphia to the raw, new city of Washington. Another clutch of House and Senate hostelries sat back on Capitol Hill, where today's Supreme Court and Library of Congress now stand. A third group ranged itself along the base of the Hill, facing what are now the Mall and the Washington Monument.

In 1835, $8 -- a full day's pay for House members -- bought Representative John Fairfield of Maine a room and his meals for a week, fuel for his fireplace and two spermaceti candles to read by. Meals were substantial: Fairfield commonly sat down to a breakfast of coffee, beefsteak, mutton, sausage, hominy and buckwheat cakes, corncakes or biscuits. At meals, Congressmen sat like schoolboys at assigned places, with the proprietor at the head of the table.

Boarders slept and lived upstairs but often gathered, as at an English inn, in first-floor common rooms. Such gatherings were not always congenial. "At Capt. Coyle's . . . there are 16 of us," Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire complained to his diary in 1806. "This is too many--We have too much noise. . . . In each chamber there are two lodgers--This is very inconvenient. 'Tis difficult to obtain an hour's quiet. . . . your papers are too much exposed or you must constantly be on your guard. I believe I have kept mine secret."

Here's an illustration of Rep. Abraham Lincoln at his boardinghouse in Washington, from The Boy's Life of Lincoln (1905): 

With President Jefferson (who had lived in a boardinghouse himself when he was Washington's Vice President), poor Plumer found himself outnumbered by Federalist housemates who opposed Jefferson's attempts to limit federal power: hence his care in guarding his papers. "I dare not invite a gentleman to call upon me whose politics are different," he wrote, "lest these violent inmates should treat him with rudeness & insult." Plumer once asked his Federalist housemates to notify him before they invited a certain Federalist to dinner, because, he said, he couldn't stand to eat with the gentleman.

A few years earlier, at a dinner in Miss Shields' boardinghouse, Representative John Randolph of Virginia, another Jeffersonian, and Representative Willis Alston, a Federalist from North Carolina, ended an evening of verbal insult by throwing glassware at each other. They managed not to interact for the next six years--until Alston insulted Randolph one day on their way out of session. Randolph whacked Alston on the head with his riding crop, drawing blood, and paid a fine of $20 for the privilege.

If tempers did not noticeably improve, eventually the supply of Congressional boardinghouses did, enough so that single bedrooms became the norm. Congressmen also got better at sorting themselves out into more or less congenial groups. Over the years, predominantly Republican or Federalist houses evolved, as well as houses that catered to highly partisan political tastes. Quite early, there was a "War Hawks" boardinghouse (for supporters of the War of 1812) and, starting in the 1830S, a hostelry known as "Abolition House" for those opposing slavery (who, for years, tended to be dismissed as crackpots and political madmen).

Of course, parties and political allegiances evolved over time. A Representative who started out in 1800 as a Federalist conceivably might have joined Madison and Jefferson's new "Republican" Party (which later became the Democratic Party) after the Federalist Party petered out in 1814, supported Andrew Jackson as a Democrat in the late 1820s, and finally bolted to the Whigs after Jackson destroyed the Bank of the United States by removing federal funds from it in 1833. But whatever his political views, he could still find a "mess" of boarders somewhere who agreed with him.

Thus organized, the boardinghouses became the political "war rooms" of the day. Following a plan hatched in the boardinghouse known as the "war mess," a number of War Hawks burst into the House one night in June 1812. A group of Federalists had held the floor nonstop for three days, trying to fend off a vote on the declaration of war against Britain. The intruders grabbed brass spittoons from the floor, banging on the metal and flinging them around the room. The Federalist speaker, startled, abruptly shut up and sat down. A War Hawk instantly moved to cut off debate, and the fateful measure shot through the House like the proverbial hot knife through butter.

When the declaration came up for a vote in the Senate on June 18, the War Hawks apparently rounded up a drunken member, usually absent from important sessions, to help carry the vote. The nation was at war. When the news reached the war mess on New Jersey Avenue, 30-year-old Representative John C. Calhoun of South Carolina-often described as somber and humorless--reportedly threw his arms around the neck of Speaker of the House Henry Clay and joined his comrades in a Shawnee war dance around the boardinghouse table. ("I don't like Henry Clay," Calhoun once said. "He is a bad man, an impostor, a creator of wicked schemes. I wouldn't speak to him, but, by God, I love him.")

To be continued!