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There’s been a fair amount of talk lately about American politics in the 1850s. Mostly, it’s linked to the fighting that has plagued Congress in recent weeks, with multiple instances of Republican members sniping at each other, — and in one case with a GOP Senator even threatening to duke it out with a witness during a hearing. So it’s not surprising that some observers would liken the situation to the angry incidents that took place in Congress in the years before the Civil War.
But is the comparison apt? Are we in any way reliving the 1850s?
You’ve surely heard the Fight Club stories by now, but let’s briefly revisit the nonsense that has recently flared up in Congress.
There was, first of all, the moment when former Speaker Kevin McCarthy allegedly elbowed Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee in the hallway of the Capitol, causing Burchett to run after McCarthy to chastise him. Burchett was one of the eight members who cast the votes to remove McCarthy as speaker, so there was already bad blood between the two.
The reported incident, which Burchett said hit him right in the kidneys, prompted Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, the ringleader of McCarthy’s demise, to call for an investigation by the House Ethics Committee. McCarthy denied he intentionally hit Burchett, but a reporter who was there at the time recounted the episode. McCarthy is no doubt still bitter over his ouster as Speaker of the House, and perhaps with good reason since he had the support of the vast majority of his caucus and was taken down by a number of votes that you can count on your hands.
Then, in a subsequent phone call with former president Donald Trump, the now ex-Speaker was supposedly told that Trump didn’t stand up for him during this battle because McCarthy hadn’t expunged the two impeachments from Trump’s record and hadn’t yet endorsed him in the presidential race.
To which McCarthy reportedly responded to Trump: “Fuck you.”
The same week, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky got into a shouting match during a House hearing with Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida and called him a “Smurf,” while Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia accused her colleague, Rep. Darrell Issa of California, of being a pussy. This isn’t exactly out of character for Greene, who has also described Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado as a “little bitch” and Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina as “the trash in the GOP conference.” Nevertheless, there is no shortage of insults flying around Congress these days.
The most intense dispute, however, was when Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma nearly got into a fistfight with Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien. Right in the middle of a Senate hearing. The two had traded barbs on social media, so Mullin challenged O’Brien.
“You want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults, we can finish it here,” Mullin said.
“Okay, that’s fine, perfect,” replied O’Brien.
When Mullin then stood up and started taking off his wedding ring to prepare for a fight, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was chairing the hearing, intervened.
“Hold it, stop it,” shouted Sanders, banging his gavel. “You’re a United States Senator, act it!”
So, but for the intervention of Sanders, a U.S. Senator was prepared to slug it out in public with the head of the Teamsters. And then Mullin said he wasn’t sorry for his actions, pointing to what he said was a long history of violence in American politics.
“You got to remember,” noted Mullin, “that President Andrew Jackson challenged nine guys to a duel and won nine times.” Not only that, but “you used to be able to cane.”
Well, not exactly.
It’s true that Mullin’s desire for a Senate cage match with O’Brien did have distant shades of an 1856 incident between Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina. As I recount in my book, Quest for the Presidency, Brooks was upset over an antislavery speech Sumner had given, so on May 22, 1856, he walked into the Senate chamber and clubbed a surprised Sumner over the head with a metal-tipped cane. The Massachusetts Senator was beaten unconscious and nearly to death. The head trauma kept him out of the Senate for the next three years.
This attack was symptomatic of the vitriol that was then sweeping the nation. Notably, it took place during the same month the “Bleeding Kansas” struggle was coming to a head, with the battle over slavery in the territories becoming so violent that pro- and anti-slavery settlers were being murdered in their homes.
Given this, it’s obvious that the violence of the 1850s was quite a bit more extreme than what we’re seeing today. But even if the fierceness doesn’t rise to the same level, the sentiments may be more similar than we’d probably like to acknowledge.
After all, what would the reaction have been if Mullin had, in fact, punched O’Brien? Outrage, of course, from anyone who cared about civility in politics or about America’s democratic institutions. But you can also imagine a fair amount of cheering and backslapping from parts of the MAGA movement, which often seems to thrive on violent rhetoric.
Again, not a surprise when the movement’s leader, former President Trump has, among other things, suggested roughing up protestors, praised a Congressman for assaulting a reporter, called for the execution of the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and mocked the 82-year-old Paul Pelosi after he suffered a head injury from an attack with a hammer.
Outrage from some, cheering from others. That was exactly the reaction in 1856 to Brooks’ attack on Sumner.
From the North came the outrage. “Has it come to this? Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves?” asked the New York Post. Across the region, more than a million copies of Sumner’s anti-slavery speech were circulated, and the Massachusetts legislature returned him to the Senate for another term, even though his health prevented him from serving for quite some time.
In the South, meanwhile, Brooks was applauded. Dozens of people sent him new canes and messages of congratulation. There was a motion to expel him from the House, but instead Brooks resigned to give his constituents an opportunity to weigh in. And weigh in they did, resoundingly returning him to office in a special election.
And no, I don’t think we’re on the verge of another actual civil war. The country is too interconnected now, and way more people think of themselves as Americans, rather than as citizens of a particular state, than was the case back then. Even so, there is enough frustration boiling over to make one wonder where it’s all headed.
But something else fairly important did happen in the 1850s that could, somewhat realistically, happen again. That is, the nation’s politics were radically transformed and the political party system was realigned.
This realignment didn’t happen all at once, but was the product of forces that had been churning for some time. The 1840s, for instance, saw the rise of the abolitionist Liberty Party. Although it received just a small portion of the total presidential vote, the Liberty Party played an outsized role in determining the winner of the 1844 election.
Then came the Free Soil Party, which advocated stopping the spread of slavery, in 1848 and 1852. In 1848, the party was even headed by former Democratic President Martin Van Buren. An Ohio newspaper noted that year that people seemed “to be cutting loose en masse from the old party organizations.”
By 1856, the parties were so riven by internal tensions that the Whig Party disintegrated. Some northern Whigs helped form the new Republican Party, while states’ rights Whigs in the South largely merged with the Democrats. Still others joined the new, nativist American Party (popularly called the Know Nothings), which put forth former Whig president Millard Fillmore as its nominee.
Then, four years later, it was the Democrats who imploded, splitting into northern and southern factions, each with its own presidential candidate, a division that helped tilt the election to the Republican Abraham Lincoln.
Voters and officeholders at the time were responding to the passions of the moment. But seen from the perspective of history it’s significant that nearly every election between 1840 and 1860 had a prominent third party candidate.
We see over and over again that third parties play more of a role during times of political ferment. In 1856 and 1860, at least, this culminated with one major party collapsing (the Whigs), another splitting in two because of disagreements over its presidential candidate (the Democrats), and a third major party being born (the Republicans).
Is it so crazy to think something similar could happen today? After all, two of the last six presidential elections have already had third party candidates that arguably determined the outcome, as Ralph Nader in 2000 and Jill Stein in 2016, both on the Green Party ticket, had more votes in key electoral states than the Democratic candidate’s margin of defeat.
Meanwhile, 2024 has a veritable Star Wars bar scene of third party hopefuls. Stein is back with the Green Party, Cornel West is running a left-wing independent campaign, Robert Kennedy is polling well as an independent candidate with both left- and right-wing positions, and No Labels is dreaming of a moderate bipartisan ticket. Not only that, but as recently as October Liz Cheney refused to rule out a presidential bid if Trump is the GOP nominee.
All of this is happening as voters are dismayed over the prospect of a likely rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump (which may, as a result, drive some of them to a third party candidate), and the Republican Party itself sometimes appears to be pulling itself apart because of divisions between ardent Trumpers, Never Trumpers, and more moderate traditionalists.
There are enough candidates, enough ideologies, and enough frustrations in the electorate today that (if all the independent candidates manage to get on the ballot in key states) the 2024 election could go off in any number of unexpected directions.
Elections are impossible to predict one year out. There are almost always surprise developments. But the anger in Congress could, in fact, be an early sign of a wild ride still ahead. If you squint, you can surely see the faint beginnings of an 1850s-style election that rocks American politics in unforeseen ways.