As Congress tried in committee rooms to structure a compromise, many of its members, especially Southerners, preferred making bombastic speeches. The galleries often filled with admiring women. “We spend so much time in the Senate,” one woman recalled, “that many of the ladies take their sewing or crocheting, and all of us who are not absolutely spiritual provide ourselves with a lunch..”
”If we must secede,” she added with a flourish, “let us do so becomingly.”
Congressmen were hardly unaware of the presence of so many appreciative ladies, and may have played a bit to the audience. On the last day of December the rotund Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana provided the observers with such a stirring secessionist peroration that they broke into loud applause. On a motion from the floor the galleries were cleared – “a circumstance,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper noted, “that had not occurred for years.”
Source:
Detzer, David. “Twilight of the Old Union.” Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War. New York: Harcourt, 2002. 76, 77. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Margaret McLean, “When the States Seceded,” Harper’s Magazine (January 1914), CXXVIII, 283-84.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, January 12, 1861, p. 114.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...