The political civil war that is erupting in the Republican Party between loyalists of Donald Trump and Florida’s recently re-elected governor, Ron DeSantis, has the making for a full-blown Hatfield and McCoy-style feud. Although Trump supporters are largely cultists adhering to QAnon and white nationalist drivel, DeSantis supporters include several former Trump fans who are no less driven to settling scores on the streets. No sooner had he taken to disparaging DeSantis on his Truth Social platform, Trump began re-transmitting scores of anti-DeSantis postings from QAnon accounts.
American history is replete with examples of political feuds that turned violent. In 1829, the relationship between outgoing President John Quincy Adams and the incoming President Andrew Jackson was so bitter, on Inauguration Day Adams had to escape from the back of the White House to avoid supporters of Jackson from physically assaulting him. Jackson supporters called President Adams “Johnny Q” during his term, so the current QAnon cult antics are not the first time in American history that the political use of the letter “Q” was in vogue. Members of the Adams administration who were slow to make their exit from the White House were set upon by the pro-Jackson mob and many were beaten in fistfights that broke out within the Executive Mansion.
There is a reason why Trump holds “Old Hickory” in high esteem. The 1828 election between Adams and Jackson was their second match-up. In 1824, Adams won the presidency as the result of the election being decided in the House of Representatives—something that Trump was angling for in 2020 with his “Stop the Steal” insurrection. There were four candidates in 1824—Adams, Jackson, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, and Treasury Secretary William Crawford—and with none of the four having achieved the required votes in the Electoral College, the House decided the election in favor of Adams. Jackson, who had received a plurality of the popular vote that year, considered the House vote rigged since Clay had thrown his support to Adams. Jackson claimed that Adams had bartered the presidency by making Clay Secretary of State in return for his support in the House election. An embittered Jackson called Clay “the Judas of the West” (Clay was from Kentucky) who “had closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver” from Adams.
The rancor between Adams and Clay supporters on one side and Jackson loyalists increased in tenor during the Adams administration. Jackson loyalists contended that the Adams administration was crooked and guilty of “downright bribery & corruption.” As with Trump, Jackson spent the years after his defeat reading in newspapers that he had sent to his Nashville Tennessee home—the Hermitage—about all the pro-Jackson nationwide rallies and parades held throughout the country urging him to run again in 1828.
Three weeks prior to the 1829 inauguration, Jackson, who believed Adams was behind several unflattering rumors about his late wife Rachel, who died after his election but before the inauguration, refused to pay the customary White House courtesy call on the departing president. In return, Adams refused to attend Jackson’s inauguration. It was a repetition of 1800, when the bitterness between President John Adams, Quincy Adams’s father, and the newly-elected president, Thomas Jefferson, resulted in Adams refusal to attend Jefferson’s inauguration. In fact, many of the voters who had supported Jefferson in 1800 came to be among Jackson’s most ardent backers in 1824 and 1828.
The inaugural reception at the White House saw the mansion literally invaded by throngs of Jackson loyalists who broke furniture and china and soiled the carpets in their rush to greet the new president. Washington’s political aristocracy began referring to the Jackson administration as the “Reign of King Mob.”
The animosity between Jackson and Quincy Adams would outlive them both. In 1850, during a Senate memorial ceremony for John Calhoun, who had served as vice president under both Quincy Adams and Jackson, a shouting match erupted between Senators Henry Foote of Mississippi and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Fearing violence, Vice President Millard Fillmore, acting in his capacity of President of the Senate, issued a warning to the chamber to cease and desist from the rancorous display, stating: “A slight attack, or even insinuation, of a personal character, often provokes a more severe retort, which brings out a more disorderly reply, each Senator feeling a justification in the previous aggression.” Foote, who was pro-slavery, and Benton, an abolitionist nicknamed “Old Bullion,” who had gotten into a physical brawl with “Old Hickory” in 1813, engaged in another shouting match with Foote a few weeks later. When Benton began to physically approach Foote, the Mississippi senator drew a pistol and pointed it at Benton. Although other senators pulled the two apart, the incident would foreshadow America’s most violent domestic episode, the Civil War.
Six years after the near-bloodshed on the Senate floor, another violent encounter took place inside the Capitol. Representatives Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery congressman from South Carolina, attacked with his walking cane Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an outspoken abolitionist. The attack took place on the floor of the Senate, not far from where Foote almost shot Benton. Although other senators attempted to intervene, Brooks had one sympathizer in Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia. South Carolina Representative Laurence Keitt, who had accompanied Brooks to the Senate floor, was prepared to assist Brooks. Keitt brought his own walking cane and a pistol on to the Senate floor. Sumner required several stitches to close the gash on his head. Sumner became a martyr for the cause of the Union and abolition. The Cincinnati Gazette wrote, “The South cannot tolerate free speech anywhere, and would stifle it in Washington with the bludgeon and the bowie-knife.” The violent act against Sumner contributed to the animosity of the North to the Southern slave states. The New York Evening Post wrote, “Has it come to this, that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters? . . . Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves? Are we too, slaves, slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?”
Representative Anson Burlingame of Massachusetts humiliated Brooks to the point that Brooks challenged Burlingame to a duel. Burlingame accepted the challenge, but because of state anti-dueling laws arising from the 1804 duel between former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and former Vice President Aaron Burr—which resulted in Hamilton’s death; a 1806 duel between Andrew Jackson and attorney Charles Dickinson—in which Dickinson was killed and Jackson was wounded; and an aborted 1864 saber duel between Illinois state Senator Abraham Lincoln and Illinois state Auditor James Shields, the Massachusetts congressman stipulated that the duel had to take place on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls where dueling remained legal. When Brooks learned that Burlingame was an excellent shot, Brooks—the Lindsey Graham of his time—said he did not want to endanger himself by having to travel through Northern states to get to Niagara Falls.
The racism that was endemically baked into Southern politics after the defeat of the Confederacy continues to plague the country to this very day. And the violence, most recently demonstrated in the bludgeoning of Paul Pelosi, the husband of the Speaker of the House, by a deluded Trump support also remains a stain on American politics.
Brooks resigned his House seat after his conviction by a District of Columbia court for assault. So, too, did Keitt after he was censured by the House. However, both ran for re-election and easily won their South Carolina races. In 1858, Keitt tried to choke Representative Galusha Grow from Pennsylvania after having called him a “black Republican puppy.” Grow knocked Keitt’s hand aside and met him with a right-hand fist that knocked the South Carolinian to the House floor. In the resulting melee, Wisconsin Republican Representatives John “Bowie Knife” Potter and Cadwallader Washburn tore the hairpiece off the head of Democratic Representative William Barksdale of Mississippi. Elihu Washburne of Illinois punched North Carolina Representative Francis Craige in the stomach, causing Craige to upchuck his “terrapin supper.” Another group of Southern congressmen surrounded Grow to “catawampously . . . chaw him.” Representative Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (there’s that “Q” again) and Owen Lovejoy of Illinois engaged in a spirited fistfight until the brawl was broken up after Speaker James Orr instructed House Sergeant-at-Arms Adam Glossbrenner to wade into the crowd of brawlers, holding the House Mace in the air to restore order, telling the participants they faced arrest if they did not stop.
The political violence of dueling and donnybrooks, with a caning on the Senate floor, would eventually ratchet up to assassinations, with Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy all victims and with several other politicians either being killed or severely wounded as a result of attempted assassinations. And there is the January 6, 2021 attempted coup d’état at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Trump.
Considering this history of violence in American politics, the civil war that is now breaking out between Trump and DeSantis, while takings its toll on both camps, may also result in the death or injury of non-participants in the conflict. Because of that, President Biden now has an additional headache with two years to go until the 2024 presidential election.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and nationally-distributed columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
