'Congressional Row' cartoon from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1858 (the wig incident can be seen in the lower left hand corner)
Laurence Keitt (1824 - 1864)
'Incidents of the Fight by Night' from Ben Perley Poore's Reminiscences, 1886
Galusha Grow (1822 - 1907)
February 6th 1858: Brawl in the House of Representatives
On this day in 1858, in the early hours of the morning, a fight broke out in the U.S. House of Representatives. The altercation began between Laurence Keitt of South Carolina and abolitionist Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania. The two had been engaged in a particularly fraught debate over the Kansas controversy. Since the passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, the territory had become a hotbed of sectional violence between Northerners and Southerners who rushed to the area to claim the land as free or slave respectively. Keitt and Grow were debating the merits of the Lecompton Constitution, the pro-slavery document drafted by the fraudulently elected Kansas convention that President Buchanan wanted Congress to support in order to admit Kansas as a slave state. Keitt had a history of involvement with violence in the halls of Congress. In 1856, he prevented others from coming to the aid of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner as he was savagely beaten almost to death by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks. Sumner was attacked in his office as Keitt stood outside brandishing a pistol and threatening those who attempted to intervene. However his violent streak was most explicitly demonstrated in the 1858 incident. The conflict began when Grow crossed to the Democratic side of the chamber to consult a colleague, causing Keitt to become incensed and call Grow a ‘black Republican puppy’. Grow shot back calling Keitt a ‘negro-driver’, and with that the House descended into an open brawl. The Speaker and Sergeant-at-Arms, wielding the ceremonial mace, failed in their attempts to restore order. The fight finished in a particularly absurd manner, with Wisconsin Representative John Potter pulling the toupee from Mississippi Representative William Barksdale’s head, causing the floor to erupt in laughter when he put it back on the wrong way round. This was not the first incident of Congressional violence, nor would it be the last, as the situation only became more tense in the years leading up to Civil War.
“Hooray, boys! I’ve got his scalp!”
- What Potter supposedly said when he seized Barksdale’s wig
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