BRIAN LAMB: Joanne Freeman, what is your book "The Field of Blood" about?
JOANNE FREEMAN: It is about physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830-ish and the Civil War.
LAMB: How many instances of violence do you have in your book?
FREEMAN: Well, I found about 70, which is not the total that there is. But at some point, I had to stop researching, and I had to actually sit down and write. But in the book, there are roughly 70 violent incidents. And by violent, that actually means something physical - so, punching, shoving, caning, hitting.
So- a couple of really enormous, just, melees, with multiple congressmen rolling around in the aisles. Once or twice, a gun went off in the House. So physical violence, and actually duel challenges - I think I throw that in there, too.
LAMB: And I know you write about the 1830s and '40s and '50s. But - you gotta tell the story about John Boehner and Don Young.
FREEMAN: Yes.
LAMB: Don Young, 85-years-old, the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives.
FREEMAN: Indeed. Well, I - and that came along - I discovered that really late in the process. I can't remember when in "Politico" that interview was - what year that interview was.
It wasn't that long ago that there was that sort of intimate John Boehner interview, where he went on at length, and he sort of revealed a lot of things. People were talking about it, buzzing about it for a while.
And in that interview, he talks about how Young pulled a knife on him basically in the House at some point - before he was speaker - but pulled a knife on him in the House. Which, you know, I had just spent 17 years writing about congressman pulling guns and knives on each other …
…and it felt to me like the 19th century. And lo and behold, you know, it sort of reminded me of the fact that, I'm writing about a lot of things that we haven't ever heard about before, really - that there's still stuff obviously that goes on in Congress and the Capital and in politics - that, even as outrageous as that, we don't know about until somebody leaks to the press.
LAMB: Do you - do you remember what Don Young was upset about?
FREEMAN: I think it had to do with a tax …
LAMB: How do you see that?
FREEMAN: … yes, I think it had to do with a tax of some sort that he opposed. There - because there are two incidents, and one of them has to do with a tax, it had something to do with walruses. But there - it had to do with some kind of policy that was going to affect Alaska.
LAMB: Did they ever make up?
FREEMAN: Yes, actually, they do. So you would think they wouldn't. But, apparently, they did make up.
I think Boehner tossed off some cuss words; they parted. One of them was the best man at the other one's wedding after that fact. So apparently, they didn't hold grudges. It was a momentary sort of flash.
LAMB: Seventeen years. Why did it take so long?
FREEMAN: Yes (ph). Partly because digging up the violence - and most of the time I was finding it in pieces. So finding these little bits and pieces of violence, weaving them together, so that I could figure out what happened - that took a really long time.
And then, once I had done that, and I had this wonderful collection of violent incidents, the big question was, how do I tell that story.
And I really agonized about it, and wrote different versions of different chapters, and different versions of the book before I figured out the best way to make it more than a string of one chapter, one fight, one chapter, one fight.
LAMB: Right. And I don't know how to ask this, though, because there's so many there - but what one of these did you find the most interesting?
FREEMAN: Which incident? Violent …
LAMB: Yes.
FREEMAN: … incident? Well, there are a lot of them. I mean, one that stands out to me - because conveniently, people at the time who were commenting on it said exactly what I wanted them to say.
LAMB: Yes (ph).
FREEMAN: This is an incident that happens in 1858. And, by this point, you have the Northern anti-slavery Republican Party in Congress, and they come to Congress aggressively willing to fight the slave power, and some of them literally do that.
And so, in 1858, during an evening debate, a fellow from Pennsylvania named Galusha Grow, who's a Republican, is standing amidst a bunch of Southern Democrats, and objects to something while he's standing amongst these Democrats.
And a fellow from South Carolina, a Democrat named Lawrence Keitt, gets upset, is offended, and yells to Grow, "Go object from your own side of the House. Get away from us. Don't do that here."
And Grow says something like, "I don't have to listen to you whip-driving slaveholders," which obviously gets Keitt more upset. And he storms over to Grow, and he grabs his collar to throw a punch, and Grow beats him to it and slugs him, and knocks him flat.
And, at that moment, a bunch of Southern Democrats, seeing one of their allies get knocked to the ground, go rushing across the hall to probably some of them to break it up, and probably more of them to join in.
And, at that, a bunch of Northern Republicans, seeing that their ally's being surrounded by Southerners, leap across the House, jumping over desks and chairs to get to that point of conflict.
And you end up with scores of congressmen just in a mass brawl. So, in and of itself, it's dramatic - you know, guys throwing punches and throwing spittoons. It's like a - you know, it's a massive encounter.
But what was really interesting to me was, people at the time looked at it, and what they saw was a group of Northerners and a group of Southerners, lots of them armed, running at each other in the House of Representatives.
And several of them said, "This doesn't look like a normal congressional fight; this looks like North against South. This looks like a battle." And that's really striking. And, indeed, it certainly did look like a battle, and it's not that long before the Civil War.
LAMB: Who was the biggest fighter over …
FREEMAN: My most frequent fighter.
LAMB: … most frequent prior? And I - and I know there have (ph) been several …
FREEMAN: Yes. One of them is Henry Wise of Virginia. And, you know, the - one of the many quirky things about writing this book is that I would end up being very happy when I would find congressmen that had an - a rage problem on the floor. Henry Wise is a younger congressman, he's from Virginia, and he at the time was called a bully.
And that was - you know, if you were the sort of person who came to the floor, and basically were very willing to fight in a literal way for your - to pass your policies, you were defined as a bully.
Wise was - he wasn't a stupid man. He was an intelligent man. He had a sense of humor. So he also wasn't a monster.
But when you look through people's letters and diaries, again and again and again, he's either deliberately sort of tossing off insults, or hinting at duel challenges to shut up an opponent, or just, losing his temper, and launching himself against somebody.
But he's one of the most frequent fighters. And the significant thing about him is, that doesn't hurt his reputation in any way.
And as a matter of fact, at some point when someone says to him, "You should be ashamed of yourself for what you're doing, "he says, "Oh, no - send me home for doing it. And guess what? My constituents are going to send me right back here, because this is what they want me to do."
He's reelected six times, which, in this time period, people are there for one term, maybe two. So he is essentially being applauded by the folks back home for defending their interest in that kind of an aggressive way.
LAMB: How long have you been at Yale?
FREEMAN: This is my 21st year.
LAMB: When did you first come on to your guy named Hamilton?
FREEMAN: Wow. When I was about 14-years-old - which, probably though, that roughly coincided with the Bicentennial, and so, the 18th century was everywhere, and the folks we call the founders were everywhere - and I started reading biographies.
And I remember starting with "A" and reading Adams. I don't know what I read between "A" and "H." But when I got to Hamilton, I stopped, because he was such a strange founder.
First of all, he hadn't been written about very much. People didn't really care about Hamilton, and if they knew who he was, he was the bad guy who was opposed to Thomas Jefferson.
And then he had - you know, as a 14-year-old, he had such a strange beginning, he had such a dramatic end, that I thought, well, this guy's kind of interesting, and not everybody's written about him, so maybe there's all kinds of cool stuff I could find out about him.
And so, I started reading biographies. And then, I got frustrated with the biographies. And the librarian pointed me to his writings - the 27 volumes of his writings - and I started reading those. And that fascinated me.
Because no longer was somebody else telling me the history; it felt like the history was in my hands. That, he was a person - the bulk of his correspondence - and I could just read from the beginning of his life to the end of his life, and figure out what it meant.
So that - I did that forever. Just - you know, I would finish, and then, I would go back and start again. Because, you know there was so much you could tell about him and his world and his politics and the late 18th century and the Early Republic, just by reading his letters.
LAMB: And I'm a - anybody that wants to know about this stuff needs to read this book, because it's so complicated, and there's so many people. But - and I'm going to be jumping around here, but this is (ph) …
FREEMAN: I'll jump with you.
LAMB: … this is page 152. "Not surprisingly, Foote was a frequent fighter. He fought four duels during his political career, and was shot in three of them, suggesting that he was far better at shooting off his mouth than his gun" - this - you're writing this.
"In addition, during his five years in the Senate, he was involved in at least four brawls with senators - once, exchanging blows with Jefferson Davis in their boardinghouse, an episode that prompted two near duels; once, exchanging blows with Simon Cameron, a Democrat from Pennsylvania on the Senate floor.
As Sam Houston, the Democrat of Texas put it, 'The,' quote, 'eloquent and impassioned gentlemen got into each other's hair,' unquote." I'm not going to read much more. But the - Henry Foote, who was he?
FREEMAN: Henry Foote. He's a Southern congressman who was well-known for being kind of waspish and irritating, generally speaking. And that came to a fore during the big debate over the Compromise of 1850.
And, although Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri was another Democrat Southerner, and they both basically, in one way or another, were not willing to totally eliminate slavery, but - they disagreed on what should happen with slavery in that Compromise.
And Foote was such an irritating and irritable character that, in that debate, he tries to goad Thomas Hart Benton into losing his temper and humiliating himself so that he will destroy his character and destroy his argument.
LAMB: Thomas Hart Benton, who - why was he so famous?
FREEMAN: Well, he - he's the famous sort of - you know, Manifest Destiny. He's the person who sort of spoke about the nation spreading across the continent.
He - but - had - was the senior senator and point of service for quite some time, so he was in in the Senate for a very long amount of time. So he had quite a reputation. He was, you know, definitely even in that period, seen as one of the nation's great statesmen.
The person in the book who's the sort of guide/narrator, says that he saw - he knew his own importance, I guess, is what this narrator says.
And he says that he saw Benton once sign his signature on something, and then point to it and say, "That is the signature of a very famous man." So he knew he was significant. So he had quite a reputation. But he was not just pro-slavery, and beginning in the 1850s and in 1850, that made him a controversial Southerner.
LAMB: When did you do decide that Benjamin Brown French was your guy? And explain what I mean by that.
FREEMAN: Yes, Benjamin Brown French kind of saved my life. So early in the project, I have 70 fights, and each one could be a chapter, and I couldn't figure out how to tell the story. And I thought, OK, one narrative device would be to find a person who you can sort of hook yourself on to at the beginning of the book, and follow him through.
Now, I knew that there was a sort of abridged version of the diary of this fellow named Benjamin Brown French that I'd looked at before, and I remember it because it had a lot of personal details in it.
So it was interesting - it's wasn't, you know, "Had lunch with Mr. Smith, had coffee with Mr. Jones," but he actually talked about what he felt and saw.
But the more I looked at the diary and the more I learned about him, I discovered that he is kind of the ideal person to put at the core of the book. Because he starts out, as at the time, what would have been called a "Doughface" Democrat.
So he was a Northerner Democrat who was willing to do anything to appease the South to promote his party and preserve the Union. And by the end of the book, he buys a gun in preparation to shoot Southerners.
And so, when I realized the transition that he undergoes over the course of the years that I discuss in this book, I realized, with him at the center of it - even though it's about much more than him - if a reader meets him at the beginning, and watches him transform over the course of the chapters in that book to get to that endpoint - where he's thinking about how and where he might have to shoot other Americans - that's a remarkable transition.
And that really shows you something about the deeper emotional logic of this Union and the approach of the war.
LAMB: I have to ask you about the diary. There are 11 …
FREEMAN: Eleven volumes.
LAMB: … 11 volumes, handwritten?
FREEMAN: Handwritten. Now, he's a clerk, so he has really good handwriting, which he…
LAMB: He was a clerk in the U.S. House of Representatives?
FREEMAN: … he was - a minor clerk. He was the clerk for one term, but generally speaking, he was a minor clerk in the House.
LAMB: Where was he from?
FREEMAN: From New Hampshire - from a rural town in New Hampshire.
LAMB: Yes.
FREEMAN: So he arrives in Washington in 1833. And, you know, he's in the big city for the first time, although, Washington isn't quite a big city at that point.
But his diary - it starts a few years before that. But it's detailed. He writes about his feelings about things. He writes about what he sees. And he records details about a lot of the fighting.
LAMB: Yes.
FREEMAN: Because he's can't quite believe what he's seeing. And so, you put all of that together. And, you know, I - as I was writing the book, I thought, people are going to think I made this guy up. Because he's kind of like a Zelig of the mid-19th century. When things are happening, somehow, Benjamin Brown French is there and sees them.
So, someone tries to assassinate Andrew Jackson - French is there, and he sees it happen. John Quincy Adams has a stroke in the House - Benjamin Brown French, not long after, is holding his hand.
Abraham Lincoln's assassination - who's at the bedside? Benjamin Brown French. Gettysburg Address - who's standing up at the platform? Benjamin Brown French.
So for someone that no one has heard of, and who in and of himself didn't do anything of great significance that would make him be remembered today, he's the most amazing emotive, sensitive and intelligent eyewitness that a person - a writer could hope for. So he really is at the heart of the book.
LAMB: So where's the diary?
FREEMAN: At the Library of Congress.
LAMB: Did you - were you allowed to put your hands on it?
FREEMAN: I was, I was. I got to. And he's - since he was a wonderful source, not only did he have this wonderful 11-volume diary - and I have a picture of it in the book somewhere, because I wanted people to see what it looks like - he had a newspaper column, and he pasted some of the newspaper columns that he wrote in the diary, which was (ph) sort of wonderful. He had an extensive correspondence, and he wrote poetry about politics. So he was beyond wonderful.
There was a point when I was writing it towards the end - his diary is not quite as juicy in the last few years before the Civil War. So I'm getting towards the end of the book, and I'm, like, OK, I have to start talking about Disunion. French - what are you going to give me? What do you say about Disunion?
So I'm looking through the diary, and I don't see much in the diary. And I'm thinking, oh, no - you got me all the way to this point - nothing on Disunion, I'm shuffling through papers.
And what do I discover - he wrote a poem about Disunion. So, I quote the poem in the chapter, and it certainly expresses what he's feeling at that moment.
So he's an amazing source. It just reveals the experience of seeing the nation be torn in two, and seeing Americans turn on each other on such a ground level, that it I think reveals things that haven't really been captured before, I think (ph).
LAMB: More than once in the book, you talk about somebody being killed. How often did that happen?
FREEMAN: Not a lot of deaths. There's one big dramatic death. So, in 1838, one congressman kills another congressman in a duel. That's actually the incident that started me out on the project. Because when I started on this project, I didn't say, I'm going to write about congressional violence …
LAMB: Yes.
FREEMAN: … because nobody knew there was all this violence. I just thought, well, my first book, "Affairs of Honor," is about the logic of congressional - of congressional - of national political combat in the 1790s.
So I thought, OK, I want to write about political violence; I don't know what I'm going to do next. I'll look a couple decades ahead of the period I've written about, and maybe I'll notice something different in the culture or the language or the logic or something, that will strike me, and give me an idea about what I want to write about.
And I knew that one congressman killed another in 1838. So I went to the papers of a congressman from the same state as the one who was killed, and just began reading. And by dumb luck, he wrote almost every day to his wife.
And his letters were wonderful. And as I'm reading, I keep seeing these incidents - you know, Henry Wise stands up and pushes up his sleeves to throw a punch - all of these violent incidents that I'd never heard of before, so I started noting them down.
I actually thought at one point that maybe he was making them up to entertain his wife. Because how could all of this be happening, and I - I'd never heard of it before. So I finished his papers, and I thought, I have to test this out, basically.
And so, I read - I spent about three months at the Library of Congress reading the papers of congressmen. And I never opened a collection without finding at least one violent incident.
And so obviously, by the end of that time, I knew there was a story. I knew that, for some odd reason, it hadn't been told yet, and I knew that I wanted to figure out what that story was.
LAMB: Who are the two involved in that duel where there - there (ph) was a death?
FREEMAN: Jonathan Cilley, who was a Maine congressman and a Democrat, and William Graves, who was a Kentucky Whig.
LAMB: Why were they in a duel?
FREEMAN: Well, this is the wonderful and horrible thing about their duel. They actually had no issue with each other.
That duel breaks out - actually, Henry Wise is at the heart of that. That duel breaks out because Henry Wise stands up and says something nasty about the Democratic party during a debate.
Cilley stands up and defends his party's name, and in doing so, says something nasty about a New York newspaper editor, who scurries down to Washington to try and find out if he needs to duel with Cilley, and asks Graves to deliver a letter.
And neither Cilley nor Graves has any understanding, really, of dueling culture - any of it. So, by the simple reason that Graves delivers a letter to Cilley on behalf of the senator, he ends up getting tangled in this affair of honor.
And these two men - because they don't want to hurt their reputations, they don't want to humiliate themselves in front of their constituents in the nation, they want to defend the honor of their state and the region - they end up getting pulled into this duel that nobody wants to happen.
And that's - there's a whole chapter on it for that reason, because it's - I call it, "The Duel That No One Wanted." No one wants that duel to happen. And it happens because it's so hard to pull out once that sort of thing goes into motion.
So the duel really shows the power of violence, both in Congress and around the nation, and the ways in which Congressman - and particularly, Northern Congressman, who were not accustomed necessarily to dueling culture, and who were sometimes bullied by Southerners - how hard it was for them to maneuver that in Congress.
LAMB: Why were Southerners bullies?
FREEMAN: Well, a few reasons. I mean, I think on a really basic level, a slave regime is grounded on violence, right? So these are people who, as leaders, have to be violent. That - that's just the nature of a slave regime.
They also knew that dueling and dueling culture and the code of honor - which, by this point, were beginning to seem very much like Southern things and not Northern things - Northerners are beginning to call it "barbaric." They knew that they could play with that - that they could throw out the threat of duel challenges, and that Northerners wouldn't know what to do.
What do - what do I do? If I - if I move into that - a duel, my constituents are going to ostracize me, and I'll lose my standing back home. If I turn my back, I'm going to look like a coward, and I'll humiliate my constituents in my region. So I refer to in the book as the Northern Congressman's Dilemma.
Southerners knew - so they had an advantage of numbers because of the Three-Fifths Compromise. They had a cultural advantage because of violence - that, the way in which they could use violence in a way that Northerners weren't comfortable with.
And they deployed that to manipulate what happened on the floor. And so, a lot of what the book shows is Southerners really kind of stampeding over the rules and bullying Northerners into compliance or silence.
LAMB: How often did people - and, we're talking about the 1830s, '40s and '50s, up to the Civil War - but how often did the members of Congress carry guns?
FREEMAN: Well, so I was dying to track that in some kind of organized way, and it's very hard, because there's no way to record it. I think a lot of Southerners - not all of them, but a good number of them were just routinely armed in life and were armed in Congress, more so than Northerners.
But as time goes along - by the time you get to the 1850s, and Northerners are beginning to feel threatened - the sectional crisis is beginning to heat up, and Northerners are beginning to want their congressmen (ph) to be a little more aggressive on their behalf - more Northerners have guns than before. And that keeps - continues to build through the 1850s.
LAMB: In the House of Representatives?
FREEMAN: In the House and in the Senate.
LAMB: They're wearing them on their body?
FREEMAN: They're wearing on their body guns and knives - Bowie knives and guns. I found one letter from a North Carolina congressman, I believe in 1850, in which he and a friend are trying to estimate how many people in the House have guns, and they guess 70 or 80. That's a lot of guns.
So a lot of people were armed. And sometimes, you only had to be known as a man who was armed to be threatening, right? If you were known to be someone who carries a gun or a knife, and you say something threatening, people know you mean business. So, you know, bullying is powerful for a lot of reasons, and here, it's a tool of debate.
LAMB: How often would a knife be pulled on the floor?
FREEMAN: Again, it's hard to …
LAMB: Or - but I mean, is there an example of …
FREEMAN: Oh, yes. Oh, no, for sure. There's an incident when John Quincy Adams in the House is trying to say something about anti-slavery petitions, and a congressman - actually, a Southerner, but a fellow Whig - wants him to be allowed to say what he wants to say, even though he doesn't agree with it. He says, "Let him speak; it's his right to speak."
And a congressman from Louisiana sort of stalks over to the fellow who said "Let Adam speak" - and he always wore a gun and a knife. And he makes visible the knife, and he says to this congressman, "You do that again, and I'm gonna cut your throat from ear to ear."
And we know that because, not long after, that fellow raised his hand, and said, "You know what happened? Because, you know, we're talking about order in the House. Can I tell you a little bit about something that happened a little while back that feels to me like it's somewhat disorderly?"
So - but that's one of the interesting things about writing the book is that, you find the violence - you find incidents like that by accident, like when they're leaked, or when someone says something they shouldn't.
And very often, someone will say, like, Henry Wise has a wonderful habit of saying just what he shouldn't say. So he'll stand up and say something, and then, the other congressmen'll say, "Shh." You know (ph)?
And then, I sing hosannas to the evidence gods, because I think, oh, good - not only did he say it, but now I know he's not supposed to say it. So, both of those things are going to be wonderful content for me to write about.
LAMB: How much did that diary - that 11-volume diary of Mr. French, how often was that your source of a violent - or gun activity on the floor?
FREEMAN: Well, I mean, a lot. Certainly, it was like a …
LAMB: I mean, if you didn't have that diary, would you have had a book?
FREEMAN: I would have, but I would've had a lot less emotional understanding, I think, of what was going on. And I think French really lets me get at the personal experience of it, but that, I had to do this sort of weird triangulation to find the violence.
So I learned very quickly that it's essentially censored out of the period's equivalent of the Record. So it's there, but it's masked. There are code words that you see sometimes that indicate that it's happening, but if you don't know that, you would never notice it.
So I spent a year just reading the Congressional Globe - just the equivalent of the record - and did not find in there obvious violence, other than the occasional brawl, and some exchanges of words that felt heated to me.
So it wasn't until I started reading letters and diaries and more private writings that I began to find evidence that stuff was happening.
Knowing that, I then went back to the record, and confirmed - I took the date from the letter and went into the record. And that was when I discovered that, when the record says something like, "The debate became unpleasantly personal at some point," that often means a violent moment. But you would not know that.
Or the record will say, "There was a sudden sensation in the corner," as it does on one occasion. Well, in that case, two congressmen started punching each other and they flipped a desk. But again, you would never know that.
So French gave me some of the evidence by talking about what he saw. Other people's letters and diaries gave me more evidence. The record let me get a sense of what was happening on the floor, so that I could get more of a sense of how it was playing out.
And then, the press, and increasingly over time. Because initially, there was not a lot of this violence in the press, but then, databases of newspapers actually became important, because I could sort of triangulate between all of those things, and piece together bit by bit what actually happened, or try to piece together what actually happened.
LAMB: Years ago, I can remember sitting in the House gallery before television at night - and I'm bringing this up for an obvious reason - and you knew that there was drinking going on, and a lot of noise and activity off the floor.
FREEMAN: Yes.
LAMB: How much drinking was there going on in the '30s and the '40s and the '50s?
FREEMAN: A lot of drinking. There was a lot of drinking. And there are many reasons why congressmen didn't like evening sessions, and one of them was, people got to dinner and they would drink, and then they would come back.
And almost inevitably during evening sessions, something bad would happen, and it would be at 2:00 in the morning - it would be some hour when everyone's tired, and someone would say something, and then tempers would snap, and a bad thing would happen. And alcohol was a big part of it.
So there are accounts - and I talk about some of them in the book - congressmen too drunk to stand; you know, congressmen too drunk to leave their boardinghouse.
Congressmen - I - John Quincy Adams at one point is talking about someone who is sitting in for the speaker, and he just writes in his diary, "Drunk in the chair." Like, there's just drunkenness - a lot of drunkenness.
And my wonderful narrator, Benjamin Brown French, that's one of the first things he notices when he gets to Washington, is, like, wow, you know, there's liquor on every corner. He says - I think he says something like, "If Washington was in heaven, there'd still be liquor on every corner." You know, he can't quite believe the amount of alcohol.
And, you know, not everyone is a bachelor in Washington, but there is - some congressmen come, and they bring their families with them - but a lot don't. So there is also kind of a bachelor culture going on that's probably fostering some of the drinking and gambling. And so (ph) …
LAMB: Has anybody else done what you've done in this book? In other words, find all of these incidences of violence on the floor?
FREEMAN: No. I mean, a lot of historians have written about the 1850s, have written about the fact that Congress got more violent in that era in a general kind of a way.
There - and there's a quote - there's a South Carolina congressman who says something like, you know, "The people here who don't have one gun have two guns." So there was a general acknowledgment.
But as far as really trying to - and again, I can't be comprehensive - but putting together a collection, and seeing - trying to get a sense of what the scale was, and what the logic of it was and its impact - no.
LAMB: Did Thomas Hart Benton, who was (ph) a senator, was he in the House also?
FREEMAN: I think at an earlier point, maybe (ph).
LAMB: And it didn't matter for my …
FREEMAN: Yes.
LAMB: … question. My question is, did he - did he shoot somebody?
FREEMAN: He - before he got to Congress, yes. As a young man.
LAMB: Did he kill him?
FREEMAN: As a lawyer, he fought a duel with the opposing lawyer in a case and killed him.
LAMB: You have a footnote, page, oh, 153. "Benton became involved in three disputes with the opposing lawyer, Charles Lucas. Lucas called Benton a liar during the case, and Benton challenged him to a duel, but Lucas argued that it impinged on his rights at the bar. Nine months later when they clashed again, Benton called Lucas a puppy …
FREEMAN: Yes.
LAMB: … and Lucas challenged him. Lucas was shot, but recovered. Not long after that, Lucas' friends began whispering that Benton had been too scared to shorten the distance between the two men on a dueling ground. The two men duel again, and this time, Benton killed Lucas." Explain the duel. So how long were duels allowed in this country, and how did it work?
FREEMAN: Well now, duels were illegal; even in this period, dueling was illegal. I mean, one of the …
LAMB: Everywhere?
FREEMAN: … in - different states in different ways, but pretty much everywhere. But, you know, there were anti-dueling laws, and it was the lawmakers violating the anti-dueling laws regularly. And part of that was because they were elite folk, and they did what they did, and they typically were not penalized for it in any way.
So North and South, dueling is illegal, but it's also something that, you know, increasingly in the South and less so in the North, that gentleman do - and particularly political gentlemen, or, I guess also lawyers as well, would do.
And it was a way to prove and - your - defend your reputation. Prove - you know, if you were humiliated in an election, you could be involved in a duel to prove that you were a man of honor who deserved to be a leader.
If someone insulted you, a duel would be a way for you to push off that insult, and prove that that was not true. Not all affairs of honor end up going to a dueling ground. Because the main point of an affair of honor is to prove that you're willing to die for your name.
And so, there's a lot of challenge-sending and letter-sending and negotiating, and in the second of the two principles in a duel, sending things back and forth - hoping - and it happened quite often - that there'd be some way that a - an apology could be negotiated.
Both men could walk out of it, saying, "Well, I have defended my name" - you know, "I am a man of honor," and that would be the end of that.
So the - it's kind of counterintuitive, but the point of a duel is not to kill somebody; it's not even necessarily to shoot. And if you go to the dueling ground, the point is not to kill the other person - it's to be there, and prove that you're willing to stand there and face fire.
So there isn't necessarily a lot of killing in duels. And very often, the person who does the killing doesn't fare so well afterwards, because it's very easy for public opinion to turn against that person.
LAMB: Back in those 30 years that you write a lot about, who dominated from a political standpoint in the House of Representatives?
FREEMAN: Well, certainly one person in the late '30s and the '40s is John Quincy Adams. And he's amazing.
LAMB: You say he taunted the Southerners?
FREEMAN: He did. He's - and he's kind of a magical character for me, as far as the story goes. So by the time he comes to the House, he's already been president. He's elderly in age.
He's the son of a founder, and another president. He's pretty much not the kind of guy you're going to be able to slug, right? He's kind of violence-proof. And he knows that, and he uses it.
So he's constantly sort of taunting and bullying Southerners, well aware that they can't slug him, and sometimes, they say so. Henry Wise, actually, is someone - he and Adams go head-to-head quite a lot.
And at one point, Wise says, "If you weren't who you are, you'd feel more than my words." And Adams writes in his diary that night, "And today, Henry Wise threatened to kill me in my seat."
So he took full advantage of his reputation to really aggressively fight to defend the right of petition, and to fight against slavery. And he was incredibly powerful.
And he also was a brilliant parliamentarian. He knew the rules. He had a lifetime of experience in politics. And he was fearless. So you put all that together, and he was a force to be reckoned with.
LAMB: Would you describe "tobacco, the carpeting smoke, the dirt"?
FREEMAN: Yes, those - the tobacco. I start out the book by talking a little bit about tobacco-stained rugs. Because this - Congress in this period - I think people think back to this period, and they think of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster - people in these sort of black frock coats sort of standing around with their finger in the air saying great debating words. And some of that was going on.
But, particularly the House, it was crowded, it was stuffy, it didn't smell very good. It was much hotter than it was outside. But - and there was tobacco spitting - there was spittoons all over the place. People were spitting, and they weren't always hitting the target.
So the rugs were tobacco juice-spattered. They were repulsive to the point that, foreign visitors - I found a letter at one point from a British minister who's leaving, and he writes to the person coming after him, and he says something like, you know, "Whatever you do, don't touch the rug" - like, just don't touch - "You don't want to touch the rugs."
So it was a dirty, heated, occasionally angry, stuffy, smelly place that - one of the things I talk about in the book is a series of climate reports.
Because congressmen keep saying, "This is the worst place in the world to work," and they keep doing a climate report, and each report says, "Oh, it's 30 degrees hotter in the House than it is outside. Huh. And there's no air circulating at all."
So, you know, and there's a kind of wonderful symbolism to that. That, in this moment when the Southerners are kind of holding forth, and are bullying their way into protecting slavery, that it's tobacco juice that's tainting, staining the floor of Congress. You know, it's sort of symbolically carrying out what's happening through the legislation.
LAMB: "Doughface" you mentioned earlier. Where did that name come from?
FREEMAN: It comes from John Randolph of Roanoke, and it's always been a phrase that, people aren't quite sure what he meant. Some people think "doe face," as in, you know, a deer - like a person - a cowardly person.
I think more likely he meant "dough" as in, you know, bread dough - that there was some kind of a game that you would play in which you would make masks of dough, and put it on your face and scare people. So I think by "doughface," he meant these people who are sort of hiding behind masks.
It was an insult that he threw around. He threw it around a couple of times, and it took on. You know, people liked it and threw it around, and it became this sort of ultimate insult that you would throw at a Northerner for being a cowardly, submissive servant to the South.
I think - what does Franklin Pierce Call it? "A craven man," I think he says. "You call me a 'doughface,' you're calling me a craven man."
So it was highly insulting, and it was insulting because it seemed like these Northerners were appeasing the South at any cost. And in fact, they were. A lot of these Northern Democrats were very much trying to appease Southerners.
LAMB: You have a footnote on page 314 which got my attention, and it's - I'm looking for it rapidly. It's about - 'scuse me - members of the House.
And you say, 282 at the time in the House in the 1830s, 61.1 percent hadn't attended college - 61.1 percent - in the 1840s, 55.9 percent, and in the 1850s, 48.5 percent. What do you think that meant? That - that all - that huge number hadn't attended college?
FREEMAN: Well, you know, education, particularly in the early part of this period, was kind of scattered. You know, I mean, New England was very schooled.
You know, there was a system - a school system in place there to a greater degree than there was in the South. Initially early on, there were not a lot of colleges that weren't state colleges; they're coming to the fore in this period.
So to some degree, you know, you went to Harvard, you went to Yale, you went to William & Mary, and then, after a while, I guess UVA, too. But it's not as like today, where there're (ph) colleges everywhere.
A lot of people had, you know, what would have called common school educations, where you'd go to school for a number of years, and then, you would go on and have a life.
LAMB: Others in here - a name that everybody will recognize - Charles Dickens.
FREEMAN: Yes.
LAMB: 1842, a visit to the United States. Did he see this stuff?
FREEMAN: He did. There's a kind of wonderful thing that he does. So first of all, he writes about what he sees, and he talks about the tobacco and the spitting. I think he says, "Congress is the center of tobacco-tinctured saliva," or something like that - there's a wonderful phrase he uses. So he sees Congress sort of in its best and worst.
But what's wonderful about it is, clearly, the (ph) - this idea that some congressmen were bullies and that they were notorious for that, clearly, that that was something that he knew before he came.
Because one of the things he does, he comes and he sits and watches Congress. He explicitly asks for two congressmen to be pointed out to him. One of them is Henry Wise, and the other one is John Dawson, the guy who had the Bowie knife. They're the two foremost bullies.
So Dickens goes to Congress, and says, "You know who I want to know who is? This guy and that guy, Wise and Dawson. I know those are the troublemaking guys. What do they look like?"
And then he writes. You know - "Wise is a scary-looking individual with a big ball of tobacco in his cheek." So it - it's not as though this is invisible at the time.
LAMB: What are the stories of the people that would do the violence out of the House of Representatives around town, and they would even ambush people? How much of that was going on?
FREEMAN: Some of that went on. I mean, so one of the things about the fighting which is kind of counterintuitive - you know, and, despite all of this mayhem that I'm talking about here - the people doing the fighting are not trying to destroy Congress.
They want to get what they want from Congress - but they're not trying to destroy the institution. So they're very focused on fair fighting. If there's going to be a fight, they want the fight to be fair.
So for example, if two men are fighting, sometimes, they'll be allowed to continue their fight. If one is armed and the other isn't, they'll be separated, because that's not a fair fight.
And so, some kinds of fights, you know, kind of explosions on the floor, happen on the floor. But if there's someone who is out to get someone and has a grudge or an issue, those kinds of fights tend to play out on the streets.
You can stage an attack on the street and have it seem less controversial than if you do that in the House and Senate chamber, where then, it looks like what happens with the Caning of Charles Sumner, when, you know, you have someone plotting an attack on the floor of a - the House or Senate in a deliberate kind of a way that's particularly ugly, and is particularly symbolic.
So street - there are street fights. Over time, there are more street fights because it becomes kind of a Northern duel.
Northerners who don't want to fight a duel but want to defend their name sometimes will arm themselves with weapons and friends and then wait on the street for a chance encounter, and there'll be a street fight of sorts.
There's even a moment when one congressman says after a fight, "There are plenty of places outside for you to do this - go outside and do your fighting, but (ph) don't do it in here."
So the fighting, you know, it's important to say, I guess, along the lines of that statement, there's a crazy amount of violence, but America is also violent in this period.
So some of what we're looking at here is Congress, and some of it is the slavery debate, and some of it is polarization; and some of it is, antebellum America was a violent place. So it's not only happening in Washington.
LAMB: I have to divert it (ph) for a minute, and ask you this - I wanted to ask you this ever since this happened. What was it like watching your primary authoritative work being made into a Broadway show, and Ron Chernow got all the attention?
FREEMAN: Ah, well, no. I mean, his biography was the basis of the show, but it was certainly surprising to go see the show for the first time. And I saw it Off-Broadway at The Public Theater. And I knew that this person was writing a play, and that it was a musical, and it was about Alexander Hamilton.
And I had found a way when he was writing the book to give him my Library of America collection of Hamilton's letters, because I wanted - I figured there will not be two musicals about Alexander Hamilton in my lifetime. So, if there's one, I want Hamilton's own words to be in it.
LAMB: Explain, by the way, what the Library of America is …
FREEMAN: Oh, yes.
LAMB: … and what you did.
FREEMAN: So the - so the Library of America's a wonderful organization, a nonprofit organization, that is basically about keeping American letters and literature - Great American letters and literature in-print. And they produce these wonderful volumes; they've been doing it for quite some time.
Wonderful quality, and just, you know, to keep America's culture alive, in a way. And they do it for literary characters; they also do it for historical - for the - political figures.
So there's an Alexander Hamilton volume that I edited that's - I don't know, it's about 800 pages or something, of sort of what I considered to be the most important and most revealing letters of Hamilton's 27 volumes.
So that's what I wanted to give Lin-Manuel Miranda, because I thought, here's a lot of Hamilton's words, and their words that I think are significant.
LAMB: Let me run for you just a little bit - this is only about 25 seconds. And I know a little bit of this story, because - but you tell the story after we listen to this little part of a rap from the musical.
FREEMAN: OK.
(Video Begins)
FULL COMPANY: Five!
CHARLES LEE: Duel before the sun is in the sky.
COMPANY: Pick a place to die where it's high and dry. Number six!
ALEXANDER HAMILTON: Leave a note for your next of kin. Tell 'em where you been. Pray that hell or heaven lets you in.
COMPANY: Seven!
LEE: Confess your sins. Ready for the moment of adrenaline when you finally face your opponent.
COMPANY: Number eight!
JOHN LAURENS/LEE/HAMILTON/AARON BURR: Your last chance to negotiate. Send in your seconds, see if they can set the record straight …
(Video Ends)
LAMB: Now, when you were listening to the musical and you heard that, what was your reaction?
FREEMAN: I thought, that really, really sounds like chapter four of "Affairs of Honor."
LAMB: Yes (ph).
FREEMAN: Because - particularly because there's a line in that song that comes from a document that I found at the New-York Historical Society. So that's the "Ten Duel Commandments." It's a song about the rules of dueling.
And when it started, the first time I saw the play, I thought, "Oh, excellent! There's a dueling song." And as it goes on, I'm, like, "Huh, it's a rules of dueling song" - like, "I write about the rules of dueling."
But I - like, when Ron Chernow was writing his book, he interviewed me about dueling. And so, I thought, well, it's probably from my conversations with him.
And then, there's a line about the doctor on the dueling ground turning his back so he can have deniability. That's from this document that I found on the bottom of a box at the New-York Historical Society.
And when that line happened, then I thought - gasp - that's my chapter - like, I think that's my chapter. But (ph) …
LAMB: Did you deserve a cut of the action there? I mean …
FREEMAN: For the bit of my chapter? No. But I did at least get it confirmed. I did - when I met Lin-Manuel Miranda, and I gave him a gift of "Affairs of Honor" to thank him for doing the play, and he said, "I have that already."
And I said, "You do? Is that song based on part of the book?" And he said, "Yeah." And I thought, "Oh, OK. I'm the historian who has a little tiny bit of my book being sung Off-Broadway and On-Broadway."
LAMB: So we know what kind of impact it's had on the country, but what kind of impact has this musical had on your work?
FREEMAN: Well, certainly as a teacher, it's had a profound impact. Because young people are now not just fascinated by history, but fascinated by early American history to a degree that I've never seen before.
So, you know, obviously it - it's musical theater, so it's not 100 percent accurate, nor was it intended to be. But by getting students so - and students of all ages. I've spoken at high schools. You know, I - there are young people who come hear my talks about Hamilton because they want to learn more about Hamilton.
LAMB: Yes.
FREEMAN: And then, my classes at Yale are bigger now because of this as well. It (ph) - if that play gets people to be interested in the period, and opens a door where I can, and other professors and history teachers can use that interest to teach past the play - you know, use it as a starting point - that's pretty profound. And I think the play had had that kind of an impact.
I also think it revealed to a lot of people, and not just students, that history isn't just a bunch of dates, right? That it's human, that they're real people - that, even though the writing and the words from that time period sound so distant and foreign and stiff, that they're real people engaging in the moments that were unfolding.
LAMB: OK, fill in the blanks with this. I was up visiting the Grange and his house up in New York City, and as we were coming out of the Grange, sixth-graders were walking in rapping the "Hamilton" musical score. What did you have to do with the Grange?
FREEMAN: Well, I have a long history with the Grange. So many years ago - we're probably talking, gosh, I don't even know - probably more than 20 years at least - maybe 25, maybe 30 years ago, when I first moved to New York after college, I was already the Hamilton person.
And by dumb luck, the Lord & Taylor Christmas windows that year were "Great Houses of New York." And one of them was the Grange. And I thought, "Of course! The Grange is here in New York. I can volunteer my services to the Grange. I can work for the Grange."
And one thing led to another, and I ended up being hired to do some research for them, and maybe put together, like, a small exhibit for them. So I did that for a number of years. I would go up there on weekends and do research and hang out at the Grange.
Then, years later, when they began to think about moving it, and they began to think about, you know, upping the visitor center in some way, improving it, I was brought in as a consultant for that process again, and worked on that with them for quite a time.
And now, I just - you know, whatever I can do for the Grange, I want to do for the Grange.
LAMB: For those here (ph) who will go to New York at some point, where is the Grange?
FREEMAN: It's on I believe 141st off Broadway. It's up - it's in Harlem. I think it's a 141st or a 143rd off Broadway, I think …
LAMB: And I think one of the …
FREEMAN: … and Convent.
LAMB: … most amazing parts is that (ph) the move - that whole …
FREEMAN: It's moved several times.
LAMB: Yes.
FREEMAN: It's moved several times. And it used to be - so when I first went up there, it was crammed between - it was going to be destroyed. And it was bought by a church, and sort of reshaped so it would fit in a space, and that's the only reason it survived.
And so, this last move - you know, and it kept being moved because of the street pattern advancing north in New York.
The last time that it was moved to where it is now, for the first time, it looks like a house. You know, it has land around it, they put it together. It's a very symmetrical, Federal-style house; for the first time, it looks that way.
LAMB: Yes.
FREEMAN: So it's kind of wonderful to see that it - it's looking good.
LAMB: Here's another part of Joanne Freeman's life. This was 2010, and it's (ph) something …
FREEMAN: Yes.
LAMB: … called "Open Yale Courses - The American Revolution." We're just going to watch a little bit of it, and you can tell us whether anybody can watch this other than the kids.
FREEMAN: OK.
Paine's corpse disappeared. We really do not know where Thomas Paine. I mean, truly, like, there was a trunk, and it had Paine in it, and then it vanished.
And I went searching today before I gave this lecture trying to figure out, like, OK, maybe there's been a recent development in the search for Thomas Paine, the corpse - and, no, actually.
Although, I did discover that in 2001, a - there was a society that wanted to create some kind of memorial here in America, and they decided they were going to try to trace the body. So they set out trying to trace the body.
And what they found was, all over the world are people who claim to have a piece of Thomas Paine, right? Well, his skull might be in Australia, that his leg - that might be in England.
LAMB: And then, there's the New Rochelle, New York home of Thomas Paine. You're - you've probably been there.
FREEMAN: I have not actually been there. I know it's there, but I have not yet made a pilgrimage there (ph).
LAMB: And there's no bones buried there? They're all over the world?
FREEMAN: You know, I have not in the last few years redone my search, but every time I go online before I teach that course and try and find a new development, I do not find the solution to where Thomas Paine's body went.
LAMB: Who can watch Open Yale courses?
FREEMAN: Everybody can watch Open Yale courses. So Yale did a great thing. They put cameras in the back of lecture rooms for popular lecture courses, and just filmed the lectures, and put them up online for free.
So I - and I know it's on iTunes U, and I believe they're on YouTube as well. But you can go to Open Yale courses, is the website, and I think the course is, like, History 116 - The American Revolution - and it's the entire course.
It's I think 26 lectures, all of them about 45 minutes. So it's essentially as though you're sitting in the classroom with my students, and it's the American Revolution, beginning to end.
LAMB: One more thing that you're involved in, something called the "BackStory."
FREEMAN: Yes.
LAMB: Here's an excerpt from, "It's Audio, It's Radio - It's BackStory." Let's listen.
NATHAN CONNOLLY: Do we know that fake news or fantasy news precedes the Republic, but other examples were, it actually helped in the founding of the Republic?
FREEMAN: Oh, helped - I can think of a lot of examples where it shaped the Republic.
CONNOLLY: OK.
FREEMAN: You know, I mean, I can think of …
CONNOLLY: Wow.
FREEMAN: … moments where there were - was fake news that was directly incorporated into, for example - surprise, surprise - political campaigns.
CONNOLLY: Yes, yes.
FREEMAN: So in the presidential election of 1800 - and, again, this partly the fact that, this work does fake news, this partly relies on the fact that it was hard to spread information, and because of that, it was hard to contradict rumors once they got started.
So the Federalists, who did - definitely did not want Thomas Jefferson to be president, and he was running in that election …
CONNOLLY: Right.
FREEMAN: … there were some Federalist newspapers that began to spread the story in the middle of the election that Jefferson died, which I think is just ingenious.
LAMB: What is "BackStory"?
FREEMAN: OK, so "BackStory" is a podcast, a - an American history podcast, and every week, we choose a subject that in some way or another is touching on current events, and we do a deep dive into the history that sort of shows something about the past of it. So the shows are thematic or topical. There are four of us who are co-hosts who are all historians.
And the show is a combination of interviews with specialists, who tell us some of the amazing stories that surround the topics that we're discussing, and then, conversations between the four of us, the co-hosts, in which we just get to enjoy talking to each other, and sort of seeing what we think.
LAMB: Now, when I first heard this, I heard it on the radio on Sunday mornings or Saturday mornings - and (ph) this time, I can't remember - but there was a man on there named Peter Onoof (ph), and I think he has something to do with your early education.
FREEMAN: Peter Onuf. Yes, Peter Onuf …
LAMB: Owe-nehf (ph)? They call him …
FREEMAN: … Onuf.
LAMB: … Onuf? Yes, OK.
FREEMAN: Yes. He was my graduate adviser. So the original "BackStory" was three people - it was Brian Balogh, Ed Ayers - Brian Balogh does 20th century history, Ed Ayers does 19th - and Peter Onuf is an Early Americanist, and they were the "BackStory" team.
And when Peter decided that he didn't want to do it anymore, and I looked for an Early American replacement, I ended up stepping into those very big shoes to be the - essentially, the Early Americanist. But he did that for very many years, and they were quite a team, the three of them.
LAMB: What was it like replacing your former - one of your former mentors?
FREEMAN: Well, I can't replace him - I mean, he's irreplaceable. But it certainly is - it - if - it's moving to me that I get to just sort of stand in his place and fill that role.
It's something - you know, when you're a graduate student, you don't imagine yourself ever reaching any height anywhere near your teachers. So if you come anywhere close, it's the biggest honor in the world.
LAMB: You're at Yale now. Where were you born?
FREEMAN: I was born in Queens, New York.
LAMB: Your parents did what?
FREEMAN: My father was a market researcher who worked for General Foods and Bristol-Myers, and then transferred some of those marketing techniques to film. So it very early on, when 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. were creating market research departments, my dad was sort of out there.
LAMB: How about mom?
FREEMAN: Mom was initially a teacher, stopped teaching for a while, became an interior decorator and did that for a while. Stopped doing that for a while, and went back to do some more teaching.
LAMB: This is a review of your book in "The Weekly Standard" by a man named James Banner. "Freeman's research is prodigious, her scholarship unimpeachable. By shifting her gaze from the conventionally cited causes of the Civil War, she has deepened our understanding of its coming.
She doesn't discount these other sources of Disunion; instead, she draws attention to the realities of governance, its rules, processes, and ethos, and to the way their degradation can spill beyond institutions to affect, in this case fatally, wider public life." I can go on - does that hurt when you hear things like that?
FREEMAN: It was very nice to see that review. I mean, it - you know, I - after working on this book for 17 years, getting positive reviews is a is a - is a wonderful thing.
LAMB: Does it have any impact on sales?
FREEMAN: I couldn't tell you that yet. I mean, you would assume it would, right? I don't - I do not know that yet. I mean, the book came out, like, what, a week and a half ago? So.
LAMB: So this year, early comments in here were January that you write in this book of this year.
FREEMAN: Right.
LAMB: Are you on to your next book, and then, if you are, what is it about?
FREEMAN: I am pondering how to jump into my next book. My next book right now has the working title, "Hunting for Hamilton."
I do not want to write another biography of Hamilton, but what I do want to do is write a book about figuring out how you get to know who he is through his writings, and through the craft of doing history.
So I want it to be kind of an exploratory book - you know, kind of a book that shows people the thrill that I have of playing with evidence, and the way in which you can put it together and find things out.
And I think that's going to show a side of Hamilton or sides of Hamilton as a - as a real person, and a - as a political thinker that haven't necessarily been really written about a lot before.
Because I think people tend to write about him either as a person or as a thinker, and I'd really very much like to come out with a different picture using history, historical evidence, in a really interesting way.
LAMB: The name of the book is "The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War," and our guest has been Joanne Freeman, professor at Yale. Thank you very much.
FREEMAN: Thank you so much for having me.