American Bloodshed

The Atlantic

8 hours ago

You would be forgiven for not knowing which lesson, exactly, Americans ought to take from the bloody morning of September 13, 1859. On that day, in the mouth of a clearing by Lake Merced, in the hills of San Francisco, two men decided to settle an argument the old-fashioned way: with a pair of handcrafted .58-caliber pistols and a mutual death wish.
Theirs wasn't the most famous duel in American history. But David Terry's murder of his friend turned rival David Broderick that California morning is, I would argue, America's second-most-famous duel, and possibly its most consequential.
Broderick and Terry had originally traveled westward in search of gold—Broderick from his hometown of Washington, D.C., and Terry by way of Russellville, Kentucky. Instead they found careers in public service, which is how they crossed paths: Broderick as a U.S. senator, Terry as the chief justice of the California Supreme Court. They were both Democrats, but very different kinds of Democrats, at a moment when those differences were matters of life and death. Over the years, their friendship had been badly strained by the question of slavery—Terry was for it, Broderick against. This disagreement hardened into disgust. Their relationship fell apart publicly and spectacularly. Locals were so seized by the drama that on that fateful Tuesday in September, a caravan of spectators rode out in carriages to the lake to watch the ritual unfold.
The duel ended as duels often did, quickly and irreversibly. Ten paces, wheel around, fire. Broderick had a reputation as a superior marksman. He was also given first dibs on his position at the dueling grounds. But neither advantage did him any good. The hair trigger on his pistol—the guns, with their smooth walnut handles, had been provided by a Terry ally—meant that Broderick accidentally fired too early, the bullet disappearing into the sandy soil at his feet. Terry knew he could take his time. He aimed his pistol carefully. He shot. Broderick crumpled. He died three days later.
Duels were still common in those days, and although they were not exactly popular with the public, they were tolerated. (At the time, the U.S. Navy lost two-thirds as many men to duels as to combat.) Duels were a matter of honor, and an established political rite.
Broderick's murder changed all of that. He was the first—and still the only—sitting U.S. senator to be killed in a duel. His death made headlines nationwide, as newspapers recounted the face-off obsessively. The public was mesmerized by the coverage but also repulsed by the violence. After that, Americans still dueled here and there, but not as they had before. Today, many consider the Broderick-Terry duel to have been the last real American duel—the one that turned the nation against dueling once and for all.
I was thinking about Broderick and Terry recently after a gunman disguised as a police officer assassinated the lawmaker Melissa Hortman, along with her husband, Mark, in their Minnesota home last month. For many years I have been preoccupied by questions about political violence in America—most of all with the question of how to interrupt a cycle of political violence before more people are killed. Those who study political violence have told me that it frequently takes a catastrophe to shake a numbed citizenry to its senses about the violence all around them. Ending any cycle of political violence requires a strong collective rejection—including the imposition of a political and social cost for those who would choose or cheer on violence to get their way.
When I wrote about this subject at length for this magazine, in an April 2023 story, William Bernstein, the author of The Delusions of Crowds, told me he was not optimistic that anything other than a violent shock to the system would work against the current spasm of political violence in America. By that point it had become clear that any hope that January 6, 2021, would prompt a course correction—that it could be the event that forced Americans into a shared mass rejection of political violence—had long since evaporated. 'The answer is—and it's not going to be a pleasant answer—the answer is that the violence ends if it boils over into a containable cataclysm,' Bernstein told me at the time. What if, he went on—'I almost hesitate to say this'—but what if they actually had hanged Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi on January 6? 'I don't think it ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm,' he said. 'I think, absent that, it just boils along for a generation or two generations.'
I have heard echoes of that bleak projection from many experts in the intervening years. Given that the violence in our nation is not only tolerated but often celebrated, I worry more now than I did even two years ago about how bad it will have to get for this particular fever to break.
In addition to the recent assassinations in Minnesota, Americans have in the past year alone witnessed two assasination attempts against Donald Trump; the Midtown Manhattan murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO; an arson attack at the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro; the murder of a young couple leaving the Capital Jewish Museum, in Washington; the murder of an 82-year-old woman in a firebombing attack in Colorado; and the attempted kidnapping of the mayor of Memphis. With startling frequency, Americans are attempting to resolve political disagreement through violence. And all the while, leaders at the highest levels of American government are aggressively stoking this national bloodlust, and demonstrating a willingness to carry out violence against citizens.
The president of the United States has repeatedly fantasized about violently hurting and even killing Americans. He describes those who disagree with him politically as 'vermin' and has said that 'the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.' Trump infamously mused about executing General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and proceeded to take away Milley's security detail. (His anger was prompted by a profile of Milley by The Atlantic 's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed the numerous ways that Milley had defended the U.S. Constitution from Trump during his first presidency.)
Trump has repeatedly described, in bizarre detail, his desire to see Americans journalists suffer—he is specifically preoccupied with fantasies of journalists being beaten and raped in prison. According to Trump's former defense secretary Mark Esper, Trump implored Esper to have troops shoot into a crowd of protesters. (Trump has denied this.) And on January 6, as Trump's supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol, he angrily pushed back against those in his administration who expressed alarm, saying, 'I don't fucking care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me,' as his former aide Cassidy Hutchinson has testified. Trump promised he would act as a dictator on the first day of his second term. And on that day, he pardoned more than 1,500 people who had been convicted for their actions in the 2021 insurrection, including those with ties to various extremist groups and those who had violently attacked law enforcement at the Capitol.
One of the most chilling aspects of living through any period of intense political violence is not knowing, while you are in it, how long it will last or how bad it will get. That is in part because, somewhat counterintuitively, you can't properly account for political violence simply by tallying attacks. As Erin Miller, the longtime program manager at the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database, once told me, 'There are a lot of people who are out for a protest, who are advocating for violence,' but who will never actually take violent action. 'Then there's a smaller number at the tip of the iceberg that are willing to carry out violent attacks.'
We're not yet at the level of violence that plagued the nation during the Civil War, nor even at the level of violence that ripped through American cities in the years before and after World War I, when dynamite attacks were common. Scholars lately have been debating whether things are officially as bad as they were in the 1960s and '70s. And many point out that America's political-violence problem could just as easily be described as a gun-violence problem. As the legendary columnist Henry Fairlie wrote in The Washington Post shortly after the attempt on then-President Ronald Reagan's life, in 1981: 'Nothing links Lee Harvey Oswald to Sirhan Sirhan to Arthur Bremmer to Sarah Jane Moore to Lynette Fromme to John Warnock Hinckley Jr., except guns.' No matter where you fall on the spectrum of these debates, political violence in America is clearly worsening across several key measures.
Vigilante violence is on the rise—mostly in the form of lone-wolf attacks, or what the FBI sometimes calls 'salad-bar extremism.' At the same time, organized violence may be poised to resurge—not only because so many leaders of violent extremist groups recently waltzed out of prison with their golden-ticket Trump pardons, but also because of the ever more extreme tenor of political debate in America. In a recent report from a nonpartisan group at Princeton University about the biggest threats we face in 2025, researchers found that immigrant groups are at an especially high risk of political violence this year and for the foreseeable future. 'Proposed bounty bills, in particular, could embolden private citizens to engage in self-styled enforcement actions targeting immigrants and their allies,' the report said.
At the same time, trust in law enforcement is down. Police killings of citizens are back up. Death threats and violent attacks against public servants are way, way, way up. And although many Americans are highly concerned about domestic political violence, many people are also moving toward violence rather than away from it. A 2024 poll shows that as many as one in five Americans believes they may have to resort to violence to get what they want. A more recent poll shows that even more Americans—one in three—believes that 'because things have gotten so far off track, Americans may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.'
One of the challenges of addressing political violence in America lies in navigating the many intellectual cul-de-sacs—all worthy in their own right—that can distract from the task of preventing further violence. There are debates over what counts as political violence in the first place. (I favor a simple, classic definition: Political violence is violence that is intended to prevent or provoke change.) There are arguments over how bad political violence actually is. (My colleague Graeme Wood makes a persuasive argument that everyone in America should actually just calm down about all this.) And, of course, there are legitimate disagreements over when and whether resorting to violence is ever morally permissible, or even necessary (a people's uprising against an oppressive dictator, for example). And some violence is already seen as permissible by law—acting, for instance, in self-defense.
Political violence is of course fundamentally at odds with the philosophy of democratic self-governance. This is because violence poses an existential threat to the conditions—republican independence and freedom from government interference chief among them—that allow for the people to hold power. Or as Sarah Birch, the author of Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order, has put it: 'A community that will tolerate violence will get violence. A community that does not tolerate violence is much less likely to have violence.' Birch has argued that it is up to 'every single citizen to condemn violence and to talk in such a way that makes it unacceptable.'
She's right that the communities that tolerate violence will get it. They'll get it from vigilantes, from organized extremist groups, and—most concerning of all—from the state itself. Throughout history and around the world, periods of political violence have been met with the enthusiastic opportunism of those who seek to quash democracy and seize power for themselves. Even in instances where resorting to violence gains broad public support—as when, for example, workers facing deadly conditions demand basic protections on moral grounds—the crackdown on civil liberties that often comes in response is a terrible threat to American values and freedoms, and has left many stains on our history. I don't have to tell you that Trump seems particularly eager for such opportunities to come his way. His record speaks for itself. (See also his deployment of thousands of National Guard troops and some 700 Marines to Los Angeles in a show of force against protesters there.)
Back in Broderick and Terry's day, public revulsion over the duel ended Terry's political career—but not just that. His eagerness, and that of other defenders of slavery, to resort to violence doomed their cause. And so, among the several lessons that one might take from the bloody events of September 13, 1859, there is this: Nothing good can happen between two furious men pointing pistols at each other before dawn.
Also: If you believe in settling arguments with violence against those who disagree with you, you should expect to die that way.
And: If you look away while others resolve their differences violently, if you believe you can comfortably compartmentalize certain kinds of violence from a safe distance, you should expect to die for what you believe, too, because political violence does not stay contained or ideologically pure. Political violence has a way of perpetuating itself—feeding on itself, spilling ever more blood—until enough people are willing to say, 'No more.'
Politicians often react to political violence by insisting that it is alien to our character, that it is not who we are. They are wrong. In just the three decades leading up to the Civil War, there were at least 70 violent skirmishes among members of Congress, according to Joanne Freeman, a scholar of political violence at Yale and the author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. That included the time when, in 1841, a brawl broke out in the U.S. House of Representatives; several members of Congress piled on top of one another, and others stood on tables. (One journalist who observed the fight described having seen several canes above the melee, 'raised up as if in the act of striking.') In 1850, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi pulled a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri on the Senate floor. (Benton was not one for de-escalation. He reportedly ripped open his shirt and shouted, 'Let the assassin fire!' before onlookers successfully grabbed the pistol out of Foote's hands.)
The congressional pile-on of 1841, with all of those canes hoisted as weapons, calls to mind another infamous tremor of political violence that I've been thinking about lately. This particular incident happened three years before Broderick's death, on May 22, 1856. That day, Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, confronted Charles Sumner, a congressman from Massachusetts, over (once again) their differing views on slavery. Brooks owned slaves and wanted to keep it that way. Sumner was an abolitionist. So right there on the Senate floor, Brooks lifted his thick, metal-topped cane and beat Sumner until blood ran into his eyes and he slipped into unconsciousness. Brooks didn't stop beating him until the cane had broken apart into bloody pieces.
Today, people remember Brooks's attack for its terrible brutality and sheer pettiness. But in retrospect, one of its most terrifying aspects is not the violence itself—as horrible as it was—but what came next.
Sumner was permanently injured, and would spend years trying to regain basic functions. Brooks never apologized for what he did. He only doubled down. Yet after the attack, Brooks's many supporters in Congress took to wearing fragments of the broken cane, fashioned into rings that they strung around their necks, in a gruesome showing of solidarity. And then the people of South Carolina reelected him. They began to send him new canes, more than he could ever use, bearing inscriptions such as Hit Him Again and Good Job. This wasn't just tolerance of political violence, or forgiveness of it, but full-throated support.
Often, it is only when events recede into history that a society can see clearly what it has endured—and how close it has come to disaster. For generations, a portrait of Charles Sumner that hangs in the Capitol went mostly unnoticed. But on January 6, 2021, there it was in the background of photos showing the unthinkable: insurrectionists stalking the halls of the Capitol, 150 years after the end of the Civil War, waving the Confederate flag under Sumner's nose. The mass pardoning of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol is a clear message: Good job. Hit him again.
Those pardons are also a signal to society that violence is in fact the way that we settle political differences in America. The president of the United States has made clear to the American people that when you want to get your way, you can do it however you want—whether with a Belgian pistol, or a cane, or the blunt end of a flagpole, or an AK-47 and a rubber mask on your neighbor's doorstep in the middle of the night.
It need not be this way. It should not be this way. But right now, it is. And it will get worse until Americans demand otherwise—from one another, from our elected officials, from ourselves. A society in which people resign to resolve their differences through bloodshed will eventually carry that logic to every possible argument, every small town, and every last household.
This is our national paradox. Political violence is deeply, inescapably American. It has been this way since the very beginning. The first recorded duel in the New World took place in 1621, not long after the landing at Plymouth. Our nation was born in a swirl of revolution and musket smoke, and episodes of political violence can be found in every decade since we declared our independence.
Yet for us to build the country we have promised ourselves, and that we have promised our children—for the guarantee of the very freedoms our fellow citizens have fought and died for—we must find a way for America to be America without killing one another over what we want this nation to be. We must insist on resolving political differences passionately but peacefully. We must return to power only those who believe in decency, honor, and dignity—not only for their political allies but for all Americans. Two centuries ago, Americans defended their honor through acts of violence against one another. Today, Americans should defend their honor through the courage to show restraint. It is too late for David Broderick, and for Bobby Kennedy, and for Martin Luther King Jr., and for Melissa Hortman, and for every other American who was ever lynched, executed, tortured, or killed for their beliefs. But it is not too late for this nation and its citizens to choose peace.