At about two in the morning, in the space before the Speaker’s desk, William Barksdale of Mississippi lost his hairpiece. Two Northern politicians had gone at him in the crush, and when Barksdale hurried to restore the wig to his head, he put it on backwards.[1]
The 1858 Congressional brawl was a real floor fight in the U.S. House, involving roughly 30 to 50 representatives during a late-night slavery debate. It began with Laurence Keitt and Galusha Grow, then broke apart when Barksdale’s backwards wig made men on both sides laugh.
The House had been sitting through a bitter fight over Kansas, slavery, and the Lecompton Constitution, the pro-slavery statehood proposal at the center of the debate.[2] The fight broke out around 2 a.m. on February 6, 1858, during a session strained by the wider violence of Bleeding Kansas.[2] Some Southerners, according to later historical summaries, had been brought in for the late-night vote after drinking.[2]
Galusha A. Grow, a Pennsylvania Republican who represented the Scranton area, was on the Democratic side of the House chamber when Laurence M. Keitt of South Carolina confronted him.[1] Keitt, a pro-slavery Democrat, was already associated with congressional violence through his role in the 1856 caning of Senator Charles Sumner.[3] He reportedly called Grow a “black republican puppy” and told him he ought to be taught a lesson.[2]
Grow struck Keitt’s hand away and answered with the line that lit the room: “No negro-driver shall crack his whip over me.”[2] Keitt grabbed at Grow’s throat, and the quarrel stopped being a quarrel between two men.[2] In a chamber already split by slavery, the insult gave everyone nearby a side.
A Fight That Formed Sides
Most of the punching happened in front of the Speaker’s desk.[2] The strange part was the pattern. This was not a pair of lawmakers slipping into a corner to settle a private grudge. One account says members fought in “battalions,” aligning themselves by sectional and political allegiance, with pro-slavery men on one side and anti-slavery or Republican men on the other.[2]
Between 30 and 50 congressmen joined or swarmed the fight.[2] Men shoved, struck, grabbed at clothing, and crowded into the confusion.[1] Speaker James Orr of South Carolina tried to restore order, and the Sergeant-at-Arms was directed to use the House mace, the formal symbol of congressional authority, to help bring the chamber back under control.[4]
In the middle of that scramble stood Barksdale, a Mississippi Democrat who would later become a Confederate general.[1] Wisconsin Republicans Cadwallader Washburn and John Potter attacked him, and his hairpiece came off.[4] One account describes the wig being ripped away in the melee.[1] Barksdale tried to recover himself quickly, but he put the hairpiece back on the wrong way around.[1]
The effect was immediate. Representatives from North and South stopped to laugh and jeer.[1] The room had been fighting over slavery, Kansas, and power in the Union. Then, for a moment, it was looking at a man with his dignity visibly reversed.
The Joke Before the War
The laughter did not make the politics harmless. The brawl belonged to an era when violence in Congress was becoming part of the sectional conflict that preceded the Civil War.[2] The House floor had not simply lost its manners. It had begun to sort itself into the same hostile camps that would soon face each other outside Washington.
Grow went on to become Speaker of the House in 1861.[1] Keitt later left the U.S. Congress for the Confederacy, served in the Confederate Army, and died in 1864 after being wounded at Cold Harbor.[3] Barksdale also became a Confederate general.[1]
For one late-night moment in 1858, the House floor held both futures at once: men gathering in battalions near the Speaker’s desk, and a Mississippi congressman standing among them with his wig on backwards.
