In the sharp-elbowed world of U.S. politics, the selection of Speaker of the House of Representatives usually comes with a predictable rubber stamp. Now and then, however, the choice provokes an extended rumpus. Recent jostling over who would hold the gavel during the new session of the 116th Congress did not heat up as much as some had predicted. But simmering emotions can boil over, as they did in the even more troubled Congress that opened in December 1859.
The speakership fight that erupted that winter proved the most contentious ever, lasting for two months. Some members carried pistols and bowie knives into the debate—a rehearsal for the bloody Civil War that would commence in 1861. Surprisingly, the rancorous battle on Capitol Hill hinged on a book, and on the troubling statistics it contained. That volume, by Hinton R. Helper, challenged the smug bravado of the South’s Cotton Kingdom. Indeed, it threatened to overturn slavery by striking a chord with restive non-elite white southerners.
All through the fall of 1859, political tensions had been rising. John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry had occurred in late October. In early November, after a brief trial, Virginia officials sentenced the abolitionist to death. Brown’s controversial public execution, which enflamed and divided national opinion, took place on December 2. No wonder animosities were running high when the 36th U.S. Congress convened three days later.
As always, the first order of business in the House Chamber was the election of a speaker. The Republican Party, which emerged from the midterm election of 1858 with a House plurality, nominated for the post John Sherman of Ohio—brother of future General William Tecumseh Sherman. But to elect him, Republicans would need several votes from other parties. The Democrats, having lost a bruising speaker battle four years before, dug in their heels to block Sherman. It took forty-four roll call votes, and venomous speeches about “all things on earth and under the earth,” to decide the matter.
As voting began, a Democrat from the slave state of Missouri named John B. Clark introduced a resolution saying no member who had “recommended” Helper’s controversial recent volume was “fit to be Speaker.” The irate congressman resolved that “the doctrines and sentiments” of Helper’s book, The Impending Crisis of the South—How to Meet It, “are insurrectionary and hostile to the domestic peace.” He went on to show that Sherman, with many other prominent Republicans, had endorsed a new shortened version of Helper’s 1857 attack on slavery.
Helper’s diatribe waved red flags in front of pro-slavery forces in the divided Congress. For one thing, the young writer, who was not quite thirty years old, was a product of the South. He had grown up in western North Carolina, and he attacked slavery in terms that appealed to poor whites left behind in the cotton boom of the 1850s. Helper saw the institution as hobbling Southern economic and cultural progress. The influential New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, who aided in marketing the book, sensed that Helper’s “rolling volleys and dashing charges of argument and rhetoric” could serve the Republican Party’s anti-slavery cause.
In his book, Helper attacked the South’s self-serving “oligarchs” and the peculiar institution they defended. He ripped into slavery’s debilitating economic and social effects on the region’s free white majority. (Never a champion of racial equality, he would later adopt overt anti-black hostility). But his detractors were less provoked by his sharp words than his striking numbers, or what Greeley admiringly called the book’s “heavy artillery of statistics.”
Helper’s barrage of figures undercut slaveholders’ arguments about the benefits of slavery for white southerners and the southern economy. His Impending Crisis had been roiling public opinion for several years, and the long and loud debate in Congress gave it further publicity. Agitated public figures, North and South, had to look again at Helper’s statistics and what they implied. Many were jolted by what his array of tables seemed to document.
Numbers can lie. Compiling Big Data remained a crude science in the 1850s, and Helper was not always careful in gathering statistics or judicious in interpreting them. But his primary source, the national census of 1850, was hard to refute, especially since the man in charge of summarizing its results was none other than the proslavery Louisiana publisher, J.D.B. DeBow.
The country’s seventh decennial headcount was the best planned and most probing the country had ever conducted. Crucially, it examined literacy rates and access to education for the first time. DeBow had to concede that the illiteracy rate for white adults in the South was more than twice as high as in the North, even when measured just as a percentage of the white population.
But the 1850 census counted 3,204,313 enslaved people in the South, and almost all had been denied access to basic literacy. So if DeBow had figured the illiterate proportion of the whole southern population, the true percentage would have been shockingly higher. The census also showed southern states with a far lower proportion of schools, books, libraries, newspapers and periodicals than those in the North.
With one comparative table after another, Helper drove home his statistical argument that slavery was not only impeding the South’s broad economic prosperity but also its cultural growth. He even noted he could not publish his book in Baltimore, as hoped, since a Maryland statute mandated ten years in prison for creating anything that could “excite discontent” among “people of color”! Slavery, Helper argued, was a backward system that needed to die.
In the end, the Democrats denied Sherman the Speaker’s chair by tying him, tenuously, to a controversial book. On February 1, 1860, they finally forced the election of a weaker and less controversial candidate for speaker: William Pennington, a one-term Republican congressman from New Jersey. But their tactic proved costly, since it highlighted Helper’s anti-slavery argument at a crucial moment. One historian sees The Impending Crisis as “the most important single book, in terms of its political impact, that has ever been published in the United States.” “Even more perhaps than Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” George Frederickson adds, “it fed the fires of sectional controversy leading up to the Civil War.”