1798 - Griswold-Lyon Affair
On the morning of February 15, 1798, pandemonium errupted on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Without warning, Federalist Representative Roger Griswold of Connecticut strode across the chambers to where his colleague Matthew Lyon was sitting preoccupied with some correspondence. Cursing Lyon as a “scoundrel,” Griswold pounded the Vermont Republican’s head and shoulders with a thick, hickory walking stick… Moments after the two grappling combatants were separated, Lyon retreated to the House water table; when Griswold re-approached him, Lyon lunged forward with the fire tongs and initiated a second brawl.
Griswold’s attack was not a random act of violence — to some it did not even come as much of a surprise. On January 30, Lyon had brazenly insulted the Connecticut Federalist Representative and an offended Roger Griswold had retaliated by publicly calling Lyon a coward. To this character attack Lyon had responded by spitting directly in Griswold’s face; when Congress subsequently failed to marshal a two-thirds majority to expel Lyon for indecorum, Griswold thought it necessary to avenge his damaged honor by publicly caning Lyon in the House chambers. This hickory stick attack was the climax of over two weeks of fierce congressional turmoil.
In contemporary politics, the Matthew Lyon-Roger Griswold confrontations might simply appear as battles of individual beliefs or conflicting personalities. After all, Lyon was a Republican and Griswold, a Federalist; Lyon was an Irish immigrant of humble origins, while Griswold belonged to the upper echelon of the Connecticut elite. The congressional fracas of 1798, however, was peculiar to the political culture of early national America, a culture in which politicians were hypersensitive to their public reputations as gentlemen, in which personal honor and politics were intimately related.
Roger Griswold grew irate listening to Lyon and from a distance asked him whether he would march into Connecticut “[wearing his] wooden sword”; this was a direct reference to Lyon’s temporary and dishonorable discharge from the Continental Army. Lyon either did not hear Griswold’s comment or chose to ignore it; in any case, Griswold approached Lyon, placed his hand on his arm, and repeated the question. Insulted, embarrassed, and dishonored before his fellow Representatives, Lyon spat straight in Griswold’s face. Without a word, Griswold wiped the spit with a cloth and exited the chambers. The Committee of Privileges instantly drew up a formal resolution calling for the expulsion of Matthew Lyon for “a violent attack and gross indecency.”
Lyon and Griswold fought in a competition of reciprocal character attacks, each man intending to reclaim his damaged honor by degrading the other. In defending or castigating the “Spitting Lyon,” Congressmen fought almost entirely along party lines, calling on the political honor code to label one combatant the victim and gentleman, the other the culprit and coward. This unseemly congressional scandal thus manifested and exacerbated the ideological rift between the Federalists and the Republicans and was a national awakening to the virulence of America’s increasingly partisan political process.
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