In the three decades leading up to the Civil War, members of the U.S. Congress commonly carried pistols or bowie knives when they stepped onto the floor, where more than 70 violent incidents broke out. Some constituents sent their congressmen guns as gifts.
* In 1838, Representative William Graves of Kentucky shot and killed Representative Jonathan Cilley of Maine in a duel with rifles.
* In 1837, a representative in the Arkansas House insulted the Speaker during debate, and the Speaker responded by murdering him with a bowie knife on the House floor.
* On May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the Senate Chamber and savagely beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts into unconsciousness with a metal-topped cane. This attack came after Sumner's "Crime Against Kansas" speech, in which he fiercely criticized slaveholders and characterized South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler's relationship with slavery as taking "a mistress... the harlot, Slavery."
* The largest floor brawl in the history of the House erupted on February 6, 1858, as members debated the Kansas Territory's pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution. Shortly before 2 a.m., Pennsylvania Republican Galusha Grow and South Carolina Democrat Laurence Keitt exchanged insults, then blows, with more than 30 Members joining the melee. The fight started when Keitt called Grow a "black Republican puppy," to which Grow responded: "No negro-driver shall crack his whip over me."
I thought of those incidents when I read this morning about the shouting that erupted yesterday in the House after 30 seconds of silent “prayer for Charlie Kirk and his family.” Kirk, 31, a popular conservative activist and close ally of Donald Trump, had been assassinated as he gave a talk at Utah Valley University in Orem. Another aftermath of the killing was political analyst Matthew Dowd’s comment on MSNBC that Kirk’s “hateful thoughts” and rhetoric contributed to a culture of political violence. MSNBC immediately fired him, and he apologized....
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