The field of blood : violence in Congress and the road to civil war
Joanne B. Freeman (Author)
"The Field of Blood offers a new and dramatically rendered portrait of American politics in its rowdiest years. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, historian Joanne B. Freeman shows that today's hyperpolarized environment cannot compare with the turbulent atmosphere of the decades before the Civil War, when the U.S. Congress itself was rife with physical conflict. Legislative sessions were routinely punctuated by canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. One representative even killed another in a duel. And many were bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance or silence, particularly on the issue of slavery. These fights didn't happen in a vacuum, and Freeman's accounts tell a larger story of how those behaviors--and a press that amplified conspiracy theories--raised tensions between North and South and fueled the coming war. The result is a fresh understanding of the workings of American democracy and the bond of Union on the eve of their greatest peril"--Back cover
Print Book, English, 2019
First Picador edition
Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2019