Volume 51, Number 20 · December 16, 2004
Specimen Days
By James M. McPherson
Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War
by Ernest B. Furgurson
Knopf, 463 pp., $30.00
John F. Kennedy famously described Washington, D.C., as a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency. Indeed, neither charm nor efficiency was in evidence during the 1850s, when representatives came armed to the floor of Congress, fistfights between Northerners and Southerners broke out in the House, and a South Carolina congressman clubbed a Massachusetts senator almost to death with a heavy cane on the floor of the Senate as the nation drifted toward civil war. The partisanship and political polarization in Washington during recent years has been child's play compared with those events a century and a half ago.
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