Three weeks after the conclusion of the 2020 presidential election, many Republican members of Congress find themselves boxed in. Some have privately congratulated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for their historic win. But publicly, most Republicans have remained silent, while others have actively encouraged President Donald Trump’s baseless accusations of mass voter fraud.
The situation these Republicans face is one that many southern members of Congress would have recognized during the aftermath of the 1860 election. Southern congressmen had spent years stirring up anger and promoting fear of their opponents, and were so successful that by 1860 they had lost control of their message. Abraham Lincoln’s election caused a mass movement among white southerners to leave the Union. Even though they knew that the claims being embraced by their constituents were conspiratorial and overblown, many southern members of Congress felt they had to get on board or be left behind.
Cynical public speech aimed at winning political power had consequences in 1860, and it surely will have consequences now. In 1861, those consequences included a four-year Civil War that claimed the lives of 750,000 people and nearly destroyed the American democratic experiment. Thankfully, we’re still a long way from that today. But the experience of 1860 should serve as a warning of what can happen when political leaders deliberately inflame their supporters, trading short-term political gain for long-term ruin.
In the years before the Civil War, members of Congress from across the country frequently delivered “buncombe” speeches on the House and the Senate floors. “Speaking for buncombe” meant that a congressman was holding forth in a way designed not to appeal to the other members of the chamber, but to convince his constituents that he was working for their needs and beliefs.
Senators and representatives paid little attention to their colleagues’ buncombe speeches; the chamber could be practically empty and still a member would deliver an impassioned address. The goal was to have their words dutifully copied down for the editors of the Congressional Globe (the precursor to our Congressional Record) and for newspapers back home.
By the 1850s, a significant majority of buncombe speeches were about slavery. This was true of the speeches delivered by both northern and southern members, but such speeches became especially common among senators and representatives from many of the Deep South states, such as Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. These states held millions of enslaved men and women whose forced labor was the backbone of the southern economy. And in these states, two-party competition had begun to die out earlier in the decade. So, to maintain their place in Congress, southern leaders loudly and repeatedly declaimed their pro-slavery bona fides on the floor, in speeches that could be reprinted for their constituents.