Citizenship and Civil Disobedience: Reflections on Civil War and Civil Disobedience

This talk was given at the 2018 Hannah Arendt Center Conference “Citizenship and Civil Disobedience.”

In the years leading up to the Civil War, there were more than 70 violent clashes between Representatives and Senators in Congress. In her book “Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and Road to Civil War” Joanna Freeman tells a story of a raucous antebellum Congress replete with bullying, dueling, and fistfights. Even now amidst the bitter animosity that pervades Washington, DC, it takes some effort to imagine our elected officials engaging in regular canings, duels, and fistfights, or to learn that they were brandishing pistols and knives and even flinging the occasional brick in the Capitol Building. But all this was happening in Congress in the two decades before the Civil War.

The fighting culture in Congress reflected the country at large. In four months during 1835 alone, there were 109 riots across the United States. The murderous battles of “Bloody Kansas” in 1850 actually played out a mini-civil-war between pro-slavery Missourians and anti-slavery Kansans from the North. And John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry unleashed a tide of anger on both sides of the national divide over slavery.