Highlights Archives
"Bowie Knife" Potter Recalled
"Congress has become little better than a den of semi-savages," wrote the New York Tribune in 1860. The newspaper was reporting on one of the more bizarre incidents in Wisconsin's political history. It began two years earlier when a bloody melee broke out in the House of Representatives on February 8, 1858. The House was engaged that day in a heated debate over sectional issues. Northern representatives outnumbered those from the South and they pressed their parliamentary advantage, infuriating the few Southerners present. A fistfight between two members quickly turned into a general brawl, and during the fray Wisconsin Congressman John Fox Potter pulled the wig off a Southern opponent's head. At this, a cry went up in the gallery that Potter had "taken a scalp." After things settled down, Potter was covered in blood and forever marked by Southerners as an enemy.
Two years later, on April 5, 1860, tensions were mounting as the nation approached civil war. During a heated exchange on the House floor about slavery, Virginia congressman Roger Pryor felt so offended that he challenged Potter to a duel. The Wisconsin lawmaker accepted, and, as the person challenged, had the right to name the weapons and conditions. He specified bowie knives in a closed room. He later explained, "I felt it was a national matter — not any private quarrel — and I was willing to make sacrifices."
Pryor's second, however, refused the selection of weapons as "vulgar, barbarous, and inhuman." Potter's second replied that the custom of dueling itself was "barbarous and inhuman." The District of Columbia police arrested both men to keep the peace, and the duel never occurred.
A month later the Republican Party held its national convention in Chicago and nominated Abraham Lincoln for president. At the convention, Republican delegates from Missouri presented John Potter with this 34-pound, 6-½-foot-long folding knife. The engraving on one side of the knife's blade reads, "Presented to John F. Potter of Wisconsin by the Republicans of Missouri 1860." The other side is engraved with the pun, "Will always meet a Pryor engagement." It was a highlight of the convention and earned national press exposure. From then on, Potter was widely known as "Bowie Knife" Potter.
During the Civil War Potter served as Lincoln's consul general to Canada. He kept the oversized knife in his Wisconsin home until the number of visitors who wanted to see it became bothersome. He then gave it to Lawrence College, which donated it to the Wisconsin Historical Society in 1957.
:: Posted April 2, 2008
|
