I’m getting really tired of reading, and hearing, about the arguments in Congress. It sure seems as if all of the disagreements are based on “what’s best for me, or my party, the country be damned.”
You’ve probably gathered from reading this blog, that my opinion of our elected officials has continued to deteriorate over the years and is currently at an all time low. I don’t ever remember issues that are important to our country and citizens becoming “all about me” until relatively recently.
During my working years, I spent some amount of time in meetings with various Senate committees. A high percentage of these committee members were more interested in just getting their name in the record rather than working the problems/issues. A few were always present in order to “break the record” for attendance by their predecessors.
Actually, Senate members have always taken some satisfaction from setting records — just like baseball or football players. This brings me to my topic for the day….
One Senator, back in 1859, established a record that hasn’t been broken to this day — and very possibly will never be broken.
California Senator David Broderick, in September of 1859, became the only sitting senator to die in a duel.
Broderick was born in Washington, D.C. in 1820 — the son of a stonemason who worked on the Capitol. His family later moved to New York City, where he worked as a stonemason and a saloon keeper. He was an avid reader and became a shrewd student of human nature, and observed the super heated political culture of New York City’s ward politics.
He joined the 1849 gold rush to California and settled in San Francisco, where he quickly made a fortune in real estate. He was elected to the California state senate, where he became a power broker within the Democratic Party’s antislavery wing and set his eyes on a seat in the U.S Senate.
During the campaign for the Senate, California chief justice David Terry denounced Broderick as no longer a true Democrat. In Terry’s opinion, Broderick was following the “wrong Douglas.” (He had abandoned Democratic Party leader Stephen Douglas in favor of “black Republican” leader Frederick Douglass.) Broderick angrily responded that Terry was a dishonest judge and a “miserable wretch.” Because of these words, Terry challenged Broderick to a duel.
The two met early on the morning of September 13 at Lake Merced, south of San Francisco. Broderick’s pistol discharged prematurely — and Terry cooly aimed and fired into Broderick’s chest. The senator’s death three days later established Broderick as a rough-and-tumble political operator with a martyr’s crown, and accelerated the downward spiral to civil war. David Terry was acquitted of the crime and went on to serve the Confederacy. Years later, in 1869, Terry was gunned down after threatening the life of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field.
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