A congressional death match

In her absorbing, scrupulously researched book The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman uncovers the brawls, stabbings, pummelings and duel threats that occurred among US congressmen

THE FIELD OF BLOOD 

Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War

Joanne B. Freeman

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

450 pages; $28

So, you think Congress is dysfunctional?

There was a time when it ran with blood — a time so polarised that politics generated a cycle of violence, in Congress and out of it, that led to the deadliest war in the nation’s history.

In her absorbing, scrupulously researched book The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman uncovers the brawls, stabbings, pummelings and duel threats that occurred among United States congressmen during the three decades just before the Civil War.

Ms Freeman, a professor of