A House Divided

BRIAN BALOGH: Every year, the American Library Association spotlights books that are pulled from local schools and libraries. They call it Banned Books Week. So this year, we’re marking the occasion by taking a look at episodes of censorship in US history. We’ve got stories of journalists jailed for mocking the president, censorship of a 19th century sex columnist, and Hollywood studios self-censoring to boost their bottom line.

ED AYERS: But first, we’re going to turn back to the fight over censorship in the mid-1830s. After being shut out of the postal service, the American Anti-Slavery Society brought the issue of slavery to a new venue, the United States Congress.

The group tried to keep the issue of slavery in the public eye by flooding Congress with thousands of anti-slavery petitions. Then sympathetic congressmen would read the petitions on the floor of the House.

PETER ONUF: Southern lawmakers were incensed. In 1836, they began passing a series of resolutions tabling the petitions. Known as the gag rule, the resolutions in effect outlawed talk of slavery on the House floor. But a small group of anti-slavery congressman refused to be silenced. They read the petitions anyway.

The leader of this group was none other than John Quincy Adams. The former president, diplomat, and senator had been nicknamed Old Man Eloquent. And he was carrying up for his final campaign.

Adams regularly stood on the House floor to read anti-slavery petitions. One account from an abolitionist in the stands painted a raucous picture.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Scores of Southerners, on their feet howling, screaming, calling points of order, calling for the Speaker to put him down, saying how are we supposed to stand these insult? Someone please put him down.

PETER ONUF: This is Yale University historian Joanne Freeman. She describes the scene and John Quincy Adams’s battle against censorship in her forthcoming book, The Field of Blood, Congressional Violence in Antebellum America.

JOANNE FREEMAN: And a bunch of Southerners went and stood around Adams’ chair to try and intimidate him that way. And Adams supposedly looked up and said, oh, so does the shoe pinch? Well, I’ll make it a pinch more.

So Adams was in full Adams form. But the fellow watching this wrote in his letter, I’ve never seen anything like before.

PETER ONUF: So this sounds like a pretty dangerous situation. Adams is stirring up. Just about every congressman is packing heat at this time. Isn’t that true, Joanne.

JOANNE FREEMAN: A lot of them certainly are packing heat. Or I don’t know what the phrase is for packing–

PETER ONUF: Canes or whatever.

JOANNE FREEMAN: One or the other.

PETER ONUF: So Adams does not get beaten up, if I recall. But it doesn’t mean that other people are immune.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Well, yeah, Adams is kind of literally and figuratively bulletproof because of who he is. But obviously, other people didn’t have those advantages.

People were intimidated and actually physically attacked. And the most extreme example of that is Joshua Giddings of Ohio, who also really aggressively and consistently, like Adams, made anti-slavery fighting his cause. And not surprisingly, during his congressional career, at least seven times he was assaulted in one way or another.

PETER ONUF: Wow. So let’s talk a little bit about how John Quincy Adams fought. Aside from constantly presenting these petitions, what were some of the moves he made? How did he keep this thing going?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Adams sustained this campaign in a number of ways. And yes, partly it was just being persistent and consistent. But it was also partly how he did it, joined with his amazing skill with parliamentary maneuvering.

For example, there’d be a roll call vote. And in the middle of the roll call vote, when it got to him, he would suddenly bring up an anti-slavery petition. But he knew this was not the thing to do. Adams was deliberately, aggressively kind of flamboyantly violating this gag to make a point about slavery and also to force the public to see the ways in which he and other Northerners were being gagged.

PETER ONUF: This is the most violent kind of censorship. You can’t talk. It sounds to me just faintly un-American. Don’t we have something in the Bill of Rights about free speech?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Well, certainly, Adams took advantage of that argument, right. One of the things he did was he said– that thing in the Bill of Rights.

PETER ONUF: Yeah, we’ve got a right to petition. What is this nonsense?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Yes, the people have the right to petition. He was really aggressively making that point, particularly, hey, you Northerners, who might not really have strong feelings about slavery yet, you’re probably going to have really strong feelings about the fact that your fundamental right in that First Amendment is being violated.

PETER ONUF: So in some ways, it seems to me, as Southerners began to figure out that this wasn’t really working effectively, they had overplayed their hand. And it maybe hurt their cause in the long run.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Right, absolutely, they essentially– and you can see this even in some of the foremost promoters of the rule– is that they literally and in some cases announced that they were backing down, because it was very apparent the attack on the rule was doing everything that they didn’t want. It was stirring up northern opposition. It was putting anti-slavery into the conversation again and again and again.

And Northerners, of both parties, realized this is now an issue, whether it’s an anti-slavery issue or a First Amendment rights issue. They now feel far more able to stand and say that they don’t like the rule. And on both counts, the rule, Standing Rule 21, gets overturned.

PETER ONUF: Yeah, so they back down. And hooray, American democracy routines itself. And peace and love return to the halls of Congress. Is that the story?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Not so much.

PETER ONUF: Well, tell us, what’s the aftermath of this attempt at extreme censorship?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Well, right, so the extreme censorship goes away. But the violence doesn’t. They still are able to either gag people with calls to order– shut them up effectively with parliamentary maneuvering– or by threatening people, intimidating them, threatening them with dual challenges.

There’s one instance in which a guy called someone to order. And a Southern doesn’t like it. And he comes up to this poor fellow and says, you do that again, and I’m going to cut your throat from here to here.

And he’s wearing a bowie knife, so he could do it. So the violence, I mean, it isn’t every second of every day, every congressman thought he was going to get stabbed in the gut by a Southerner. But the violence was a consistent, continuing threat. And that didn’t stop with the gag rule.

PETER ONUF: Well, thanks so much for joining us today us, Joanne. Joanne Freeman, professor of history at Yale and author of the forthcoming book, The Field of Blood.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Thanks for having me.