You may think that hothead Joe Wilson is the only congressman from South Carolina ever to “let his emotions get the best” of him in public, but in fact he’s part of a tradition stretching back to the antebellum period. Sure, South Carolinian politicians used to get worked up about things like slavery and civil rights, but I guess health care will do in a pinch. Why does South Carolina engender outspokenness? A question for the ages, I’m sure, but perhaps a remark made in 1860 by James Petigru, a congressman from the state, sheds some light: “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.”
Thankfully, outspoken politicians engender good books.
Representative Preston Brooks, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War,” by David Herbert Donald.
In May, 1856, Charles Sumner, a Democratic abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, gave a speech in the Senate, denouncing the “crime against Kansas.” The Kansas territory had been created and opened to settlement in 1854, but the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the territory had been left up to the inhabitants of the state. “The South,” Donald writes “determined to create a new slave state in Kansas, had banded together ‘murderous robbers from Missouri,’ ‘hirelings, picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization,’ ” (in Sumner’s words). Sumner’s impassioned rhetoric against this pro-slavery faction enraged Preston Brooks, a Democratic representative from South Carolina. On May 22nd, he stormed into the Senate and beat Sumner with a gold-handled cane, striking half a dozen blows to Sumner’s head, blinding him with blood.
Senator John C. Calhoun, in Irving H. Bartlett’s “John C. Calhoun: A Biography.”
Calhoun, a Democrat, was elected Vice-President under John Adams in 1824, and retained the position under Andrew Jackson. But Jackson and Calhoun fought, primarily over the doctrine of nullification. Things escalated until, in 1830, Calhoun took the bold move of publishing a private correspondence between himself and Jackson. In 1831, he became the first Vice-President to resign his post. But his uppitiness didn’t stop there. Elected to the Senate the following year, he became the most vocal proponent of slavery in Congress, and in 1837 delivered his famous “Positive Good” speech. “I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.”
Strom Thurmond, in “Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change,” by Nadine Cohodas.
It’s hard to choose just one example of Thurmond’s public displays of patriotism, so I decided to go with the most physically demanding one. In 1957, he conducted a filibuster in response to the Civil Rights Act of that year that lasted twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes. Cohodas includes a blow-by-blow account of the session, and ends with a truly heartwarming anecdote: Harry Dent, Thurmond’s aide, “was waiting in the cloakroom with a a pail in case Thurmond needed to relieve himself in a hurry. But he brushed his aide aside and went to find his wife. Jean Thurmond greeted her husband with a kiss that was photographed by the waiting press and prominently displayed in many newspapers the next morning. She told reporters that he often got mail addressed ‘Strong Thurmond’ and that the previous day he had proved the writers correct.”
Sarah and Angelina Grimké, in “The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké,” by Gerda Lerner.
These spitfire Quaker sisters weren’t actually members of Congress, but I’m giving them a pass because of the whole “No Women Allowed” aspect of nineteenth-century politics. The Grimkés had a profound effect on American political history despite their gender, and they caused a stir by becoming the first women to address a session of the Massachusetts legislature. Born on a plantation in South Carolina, they devoted their lives to travelling, lecturing, and advocating for the abolition of slavery in front of mixed-gender crowds, and the space they carved out for women in the public sphere ultimately made them founders of the American feminist movement. Angelina in particular was known for her charisma and rhetoric: “The denial of our duty to act in this case is a denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed the white slaves of the North, for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.”