♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein.

I'm gonna be in conversation today with Joanne Freeman, who is professor at Yale University of History and American Studies.

And we're gonna talk about her new book, "The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War".

Thank you very much for coming Professor Freeman.

FREEMAN: I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

RUBENSTEIN: So let's talk about how you got into this a bit.

Um, your background is you are a professor at Yale in American studies and history.

And did you grow up saying, I want to write about violence when I grow up or how did this come about?

FREEMAN: I definitely did not say that.

Um, I've had a really long standing interest in, um, the people who we now call the Founders.

Um, but my interest has always been not in, um, Founders in all capital letters on a pedestal, but really, um, the ground level reality, the-the real working of elite politics on the national stage in the founding era, and-and particularly how these people sort of reason their way through politics, what their mental landscape was like, what did they think they could do?

Or what do they think they could not do?

How did violence among other things shape the way politics worked?

But, um, generally speaking, I suppose what I'm doing is trying to reconstruct elite politics with a deeper understanding of the culture and how that culture can let us understand really sort of basic straightforward events differently.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, let me talk for a moment about your first book, your first book deals with dueling, to some extent, um, why where did dueling come from, how prevalent was it, uh, in the United States, in the 1790s and so forth?

FREEMAN: Well, um, dueling probably came to the colonies, the North American colonies, along with colonists from Europe, it was a European practice.

Um, what's interesting about dueling and it's really, counter-intuitive, it's very logical to assume that when two people go onto a field with guns and shoot at each other, that the point of that is for them to shoot or maim or kill each other.

When in fact, political duels were about proving that you were willing to, uh, risk your life to defend your honor.

In the political world, fatalities were pretty rare.

And if you did end up killing a political opponent, often you were in trouble.

You had to leave town because that was not the expected outcome.

RUBENSTEIN: Were duels always outlawed in the United States or were they ever legal?

FREEMAN: Well, it varied colony by colony and state by state.

What's really striking is that, um, even when they were illegal, pretty much everywhere, elite politicians were kind of above the law.

I found in the course of my research for that first book, um, a letter that said something along the lines of, um, the jails are full of duelists and those people in those jails are not the people I write about.

Those are more average Americans who engaged in this practice.

So in part, what you see when you look at dueling among politicians is people who assume that they're above the law and they can deploy this practice for whatever reason, politically that they see they need to.

And they won't really face any kind of retribution.

RUBENSTEIN: So, before the Hamilton play and after the Hamilton play, the most famous duel in our country's history is the Alexander Hamilton/ Aaron Burr duel where Alexander Hamilton is ultimately killed.

Um, what was the real story did Aaron Burr not get the signal that he wasn't supposed to kill Alexander Hamilton and Alexander Hamilton intentionally not try to kill Aaron Burr?

What's the real story?

FREEMAN: Well, the real story of that duel is, um, Burr ran for governor of New York in 1804.

He lost that election.

Hamilton stepped forward as he often did when it came to Aaron Burr and spoke out against him to prevent him gaining that office.

And when that election was over and he was faced with the loss, he felt that he needed to prove that he was a leader worth following by basically engaging in an affair of honor with the first person he could find an affair of honor with.

Someone put a letter into his hand that had Hamilton insulting him.

And so that's how you come to have those two people against each other.

Burr said, okay, fine Hamilton has said these things against me and he confronts Hamilton and they go back and forth.

Their negotiations don't go really well.

Uh, and they ended up going onto the dueling ground.

Um, and both men, it's worth saying, both men as most duelist did tried to put their affairs in order and wrote some kind of farewell statement before going out to the dueling ground because they had to assume that they might die, even though that wasn't the point.

Um, Hamilton when asked about what he wanted to happen on the dueling ground, um, said something along the lines of, um, "I will not fire at Burr the first time we exchange fire, but if he demands a second fire, then I don't know."

Which is interesting because Burr, they could have exchanged fire and Burr could have said, honor is not yet satisfied.

I demand another exchange of fire.

And Hamilton is basically saying all bets are off when you come to that second shot.

So it's not entirely clear what happened on the dueling ground.

Um, it seems as though Hamilton probably in that first shot, as he intended, didn't shoot directly at Burr.

Um, Burr shot at Hamilton, but I actually don't think he intended to kill him.

He does get in trouble for doing that.

And when you look at his letters before the duel and people ask him, his friends, "who should we bring along as a doctor", Burr basically says, 'we don't need a doctor, let's just get this over with.'

So he's not seeing this as a moment to kill his grand opponent.

He's seeing this as a moment to really redeem himself so that he can run for office again.

RUBENSTEIN: Now duels typically occurred outside, but you have written a book about violence inside and particularly on the floor of the Congress of the United States.

So what made you, uh, realize that there had been so much violence?

Your book is really focused on 1830 to 1860, and I think you uncovered that there were roughly 70 fights, more or less, during that time between members of Congress.

So first, um, how did you find out that there were 70 fights?

Was it written about before?

FREEMAN: Right.

I think most people, um, or certainly a lot of historians knew, uh, that there were random violent incidents and of course the most famous one being the caning of Charles Sumner in 1856.

Um, when I began writing this second book, I actually wasn't sure what the topic would be.

I knew vaguely that in 1838, one Congressman killed another one in a duel.

So when I began the project, I went off to 1838 and I found the papers of a Congressman from the same state as the fellow who was killed and just began reading his correspondence to his wife.

As luck would have it, he wrote to his wife every day and in the letters, there's a lot of violence I found.

Um, and I wondered, you know, he-he talks about people rolling up their sleeves to throw a punch, that there was just more violence there than I expected to see.

And I thought maybe he's entertaining his wife, or maybe there's something here that we haven't expected.

So I had, um, a fellowship at the Library of Congress for a few months and throughout that time, I never opened the papers of a member of Congress without finding at least one violent incident.

Now, the reason why it hasn't been found is partly because people didn't know to look for it, but more than that, they, the-the congressional record doesn't really record them.

Once you know that they're there, you can see them sort of in the margins or in the-the wording, but this was something that not until very late into the 1850s, for reasons that we can talk about later, um, did they become more known to the public, but in the 1830s and much of the 1840s, they weren't advertised to the public.

And so it's very easy not to know that they're there.

RUBENSTEIN: When there's a fight on the floor of the Congress, I assume it would be written up in the newspaper, so why wouldn't you just read the newspapers and say, well, here's a fight, here's a fight.

Why would it take so long to figure this out?

FREEMAN: Well, the newspapers didn't necessarily report it in the 1830s and much of the 1840s.

In the mid 1850s when the slavery crisis really began to steam ahead because of expansion West and-and the fact that that raised all kinds of questions about which States would be free and slave states, then politics became more heated and newspapers had a further reach.

You had the railroad, you had steam-powered printing presses, you had the Telegraph.

And so in that period, the press reached a really national audience and it reached them quickly.

And so what you see happen in the 1850s generally, and then really in the mid 1850s is the public can see what's happening more quickly.

And there's a lot more violence in the newspapers because of the polarized nature of this fight that just gets increasingly polarized.

RUBENSTEIN: But of the 70 fights that you talk about and you've, uh, uncovered, how many of them actually occurred on the floor of the house or the Senate?

FREEMAN: Most of them, um, a few of them happened, um, on the streets of Washington when Congress was in session.

Um, a handful of them happened, um, in hotels, in the area.

Um, but most of it is actually on the floor of the House and on the floor of the Senate, particularly the House.

RUBENSTEIN: Now in your book, you talk about the fact that the fights accelerated as we get closer to the Civil War.

And it seemed as if most of the fights are occurring between northerners and southerners, is that fair or not?

FREEMAN: Yeah.

Although the-the dynamic of it changes.

So initially in the 1830s southerners, if you think about it, the Southern slave regime is a regime, grounded on violence.

Southerners were very comfortable with man-to-man violence, dueling being the most extreme example of that.

So they come to Congress knowing that they have that advantage, they're ready Duelists and northerners aren't.

And they use that on the floor of Congress to promote their interests.

Initially southerners would step forward and threaten and intimidate northerners for party purposes.

But over time as the slavery debate intensified, then you have southerners really just confronting northerners, um, uh, to-to silence them generally.

RUBENSTEIN: So were you able to uncover whether the southerners started the fights typically, or did the northerners start- start the fights typically?

FREEMAN: The southerners tended to start them.

What changes really interestingly is in the mid 1850s, you get the rise of the Republican party.

And the Republican party, it's a Northern anti-slavery party, um, and they come to Congress declaring that they are going to fight the slave power, which is the rhetoric that they use.

And in Congress that had a, that had a reality to it, that they were not going to back down from southerners.

And when you look at the congressional record, you see many northerners standing up to intimidation and essentially saying again, and again, we weren't put here to back down, we're put here to stand up.

We're a different kind of northerner.

We're not going to do what happened before.

And so logically you can understand why with the slavery crisis intensifying and a new kind of Congressman coming to Congress, violence got increasingly worse between the mid 1850s and the Civil War.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, in doing your research, you found, uh, the, uh, I guess, journals of one individual who seemed to know more about what was going on in the 1830s, '40s, and '50s and '60s than probably anybody else, who was this person and how did you get his, uh, journals?

FREEMAN: At some point in the middle of the project, um, when I decided it wasn't going to be an "and then, and then" kind of book, I had to confront how I was going to tell the story.

And I thought, well, if I put a person at the center of it, the readers will be able to experience what's happening on a ground level in a way that might, uh, be more realistic than looking from on high.

And at first I thought, John Quincy Adams, what might be that person I could use him.

But eventually I realized that the ideal, um, sort of guide for the book, the person who is at the center of the book and who leads you through changing events, is this fellow Benjamin Brown French.

Um, he was a clerk.

He's from New Hampshire, from a small town in New Hampshire.

He comes to Washington in the 1830s, a-a really avid Jacksonian Democrat.

His job was to be in and around Congress, observing things and writing down what he saw.

So in and of itself, his job was wonderful.

But even better, he kept an amazing diary.

He had a newspaper column.

He had an extensive correspondence.

He wrote poetry about politics.

He was this endless resource and as a witness, he was a sincere kind of a witness in which he was really wrestling with himself and confessing often, particularly in his diary, how he felt about what was going on and how it was affecting him.

So in a book, trying to recreate what I call in the book, the "Emotional Logic of Disunion", how do you get from Americans trying to save the union to Americans, being willing to shoot at each other?

French was the ideal person to put at the center of the book.

And ultimately, I don't think the book would exist without him.

RUBENSTEIN: So Woody Allen did a movie a few years ago called "Zelig" in which a character appears at every historic event, that's you can think of.

Um, your, um, the figure, your raconteur, to some extent appears at an amazing number of events.

Can you describe what events he has showed up at?

FREEMAN: Yes, because his job was to be in the Capitol and around national leaders, almost anything that happened that was a big event in Washington in some way or another, he was there.

So, um, there's an assassination attempt against Andrew Jackson.

He witnesses it and writes to his, uh, father describing it.

Um, John Quincy Adams has a stroke on the floor of the House.

Who's next to him holding his hand, Benjamin Brown French.

Um, Abraham Lincoln's assassination, uh, who rushes to be by his side after the assassination attempt and helps Mary Lincoln get to the bedside, Benjamin Brown French.

He really is everywhere.

And yet more ideal to be at the center of a book, because it's not some important person who I'm following.

It's someone who knew that he had some importance, but he was an observer and we can observe alongside him.

RUBENSTEIN: So, were these fights one where people were designed to punch somebody one or two times, say to their constituents, I hit this person or were they really trying to hurt and really maim the person that they were fighting?

FREEMAN: There was a really performative aspect to those fights.

They knew that the press was watching, particularly in the later years, they knew that newspapers would say something about it.

They knew that what they did would prove to their constituents, that they were, um, defending their interests and their honor, uh, of their party or their constituents or their section of the union.

So they very much were performing to an audience, but that doesn't mean that the threats and even the violence were pretend.

Um, they also were dealing with each other in that room, people in close contact with each other, who really very much were judging their compatriots based on how they dealt with each other.

So reputations were really on the line in a very real way during these violent incidents and people who did not behave correctly, people who did things that others thought was cowardly or inappropriate, they were blamed for that.

So they were performing these-these threats and fights.

There was a performative element, but they had a very real impact and not all of them were performative.

Sometimes there was just an explosion on the floor.

RUBENSTEIN: So the most famous fight on the floor of the Congress occurred when a Senator from Massachusetts who was a big abolitionist, Charles Sumner, was attacked by a member of the House.

And you write a bit about that.

Why is that the most famous fight that occurred on the, on the floor of the Congress and what actually happened there?

FREEMAN: It is the most famous fight.

Um, it happened at the time after a string of other violent incidents, so to people at the time, it seemingly had more importance.

It was showing that southerners were seemingly in a campaign to silence northerners and from a modern viewpoint, it's very dramatic and seemingly very clear.

Charles Sumner stood up and gave a really aggressive anti-slavery speech in the Senate.

Preston Brooks was in the house from South Carolina, um, felt insulted for his state and his section of the union and a-a kinsmen of his who Sumner mentioned in the speech.

Uh, Brooks went into the Senate, waited for all the women to leave the room so he wouldn't disturb them based on what he knew he was going to do, and then confronted Sumner and said, you, you've insulted my kinsmen.

You've insulted my section of the union and my state and basically says, you're going to pay and really violently canes him.

Sumner, um, he was a big man, uh, but his chair was in his desk in the Senate underneath it.

So he couldn't just stand up and get away.

So in his anxiousness to get away from the caning, he literally pulled his desk, bolted desk, from the floor and ultimately collapses.

Brooks breaks the cane and ultimately stops caning, but it was very dramatic and it literally looked like the South beating the North into submission.

RUBENSTEIN: So how long did it take Sumner to recover from this, uh, beating?

FREEMAN: It took him years.

Uh, it was a really, really, um, violent beating and it shook him psychologically as well as hurting him physically.

So, um, it took him years to come back.

When he did come back, he does this amazing sort of gesture, that, uh that it still has its power today.

He comes back, uh, and he gives this speech about, um, basically slaveholder's as barbarians.

And there's a section of that speech that he gives that's explicitly about southerners in Congress being violent and what that says about the barbaric's of the South, and the fact that southerners are all barbarians.

And he marches through talking about a lot of the events that I talk about in my book saying, again and again, this is the South, this is the South.

This is what they do.

This is how they support their regime.

So he may have been hurt, uh, and in some ways, uh, really became something of a martyr, but he really came back and- and gave his own in response when years later, when he came back to the Senate.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, uh, the individual who attacked him, the House member, was he admonished by the Congress from what he did?

FREEMAN: Well, he was.

Um, and here's an interesting point about, um, southerners and northerners and violence.

There was a debate about what to do with Preston Brooks, uh, a debate in the House about what should happen.

Um, ultimately Brooks, um, resigns.

Often when people were going to be censured, uh, by Congress, they rather than face that humiliation, they would resign and go home.

Um, Brooks leaves with a, gives a speech, uh, that, you know, sort of insists that what he did was virtuous and right, and is immediately reelected to Congress because his constituents approved of what he'd done.

But, um, somewhat providentially, certainly according to northerners, uh, he comes back to Congress and is stricken with some kind of a throat ailment, uh, and basically suffocates to death.

So he doesn't last very long beyond when he comes back.

But the fact that he was cheered on by the South, um, that he was reelected, that he was sent celebratory canes to thank him for defending the South in that way, that really tells you about polarization in the United States, in the late 1850s.

RUBENSTEIN: After the Civil War, uh, where there as many fights on the floor of the Congress where that kind of dissipated.

FREEMAN: It dissipated.

I mean, that's a really good question that, and it's one that I ask myself, which is, okay, so I've been tracking this violence, then the southerners leave.

They-they, when they leave the union, obviously they leave the House and Senate.

Uh, as I was tracking violence, there is, uh, an immediate drop.

There, there's a "New York Times" editorial that says something like, um, 'it's so pleasant to be able to walk around the streets of Washington without having your hand on your gun, now that the southerners are gone.'

Um, and when the Southerners come back is the next moment when there's a little flurry of violence.

There, the debate is about whether they should be allowed back in the union.

So it-it, to southerners, it feels personal, it's affecting their honor and the honor of the South, but what's really fascinating about it is the whole dynamic of national politics has changed.

The Civil War is over, the North has won, the South has lost.

So, for example, there's one instance in which, um, a southerner beats violently beats, uh, a northerner, who he thinks is keeping his state out of the union in a dishonorable way, beats him in the Capitol.

And this is debated, uh, I believe it's in the Senate.

And, um, one Congressman stands up and says to the surrounding senators, "Some of you may not remember this, but I remember what it was like here in the 1850s, when these guys were there and they were behaving this way all the time, "Do we wanna let them back into the union?

Because we have the power to decide that."

so the whole power dynamic shifts and the South can't get away with what it got away before.

And so in a sense, violence leaves the floor of the Capitol, but it goes into the South where during Reconstruction, they're doing their best to, um, prevent freed slaves and others from gaining rights that they didn't have before.

RUBENSTEIN: In the era that you write about, could members of Congress bring alcohol onto the floor of the Congress, and could they bring guns onto the floor of the Congress?

FREEMAN: Uh, they could bring both onto the floor.

Um, they often they would describe themselves as drinking, um, cold tea, which meant hard booze.

During night sessions they sometimes made, um, committee rooms into temporary bar rooms.

So there was no attempt to-to prevent that and weapons were allowed on the floor as well.

As a matter of fact, some people wore weapons deliberately to intimidate opponents.

Um, there were people who wore guns, uh, so that others would see that they were armed and not wanna mess with them.

Bowie knives, that was a threatening looking knife and people wore them so that they were visible.

So that you would know that's an armed and dangerous man.

RUBENSTEIN: In the 20th century, were there a lot of fights on the floor of the Congress?

I know of one between, I guess, Strom Thurman and, uh, Senator Yarborough, famous fight, but was that very common?

FREEMAN: It's not common.

Um, it-it happens occasionally.

I think there's a tie-pulling episode.

I think there's an elevator episode at-at some point, there's an ink-throwing incident, ink uh, pot throwing incident in the early 20th century.

But what's really interesting and I didn't study the 20th century, but, um, what I discovered as I was completing my book is that there was violence that again, not surprisingly wasn't recorded.

Um, and I just didn't realize the extent of it.

Um, John Boehner gave, uh, uh, uh, interview to I think, "Politico" magazine.

And in that extended interview, he describes a moment in which, um, a colleague pulled a knife on him, uh, within the halls of the Capitol.

Uh, and I had never heard of that before.

And most people that I talked to it about had never heard of that before.

RUBENSTEIN: But let me ask you, when you talk about this to audiences, what is the biggest surprise that you find in the audience when you talk about all the fighting, are people surprised that members of Congress acted this way, or they're not?

FREEMAN: They are, they're surprised that members of Congress acted this way.

And they're surprised at the amount of violence, the fact that it was virtually routine and this links to a larger idea, which I think is really important.

I think Americans think of their government, um, as being exceptional in all ways, immune to all problems, um, not suffering from the problems of other democracies around the world.

Part of what my project shows is that democracy, no matter where it is, is fragile, that it has to be worked out, that it isn't automatic in and of itself as a functioning form of government and that you really have to protect it.

RUBENSTEIN: So if Mr. French could reappear and you had dinner with him, what might you like to ask him?

FREEMAN: Oh, wow.

He came to Congress, uh, in the 1830s.

He was liked by everyone, both parties, all sections of the union, really sort of pleasant, joking, jocular, kind of a fellow.

Um, by the end of the book, he goes out to buy a gun in case he needs to shoot Southerners.

And the book tracks his, the evolution of his willingness to turn on the South that way.

So, what I would wanna hear from him is really how he experienced that and what it felt like and how he made choices.

I write about that in the book, but I'm doing it by pulling at his papers, um, trying to understand how he felt and why it drove him to do what he did.

How do Americans turn against each other to the point of violence?

That's part of what I try to explore in the book, but I would love to have French give that to me from a first person point of view, so that I could understand it in an even deeper way.

RUBENSTEIN: We've been in conversation with Joanne Freeman, professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, specifically about her book, "The Field of Blood".

Thank you very much for a very interesting conversation.

FREEMAN: Thanks so much.

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