Henry S. Foote: The Senator Who Pulled a Pistol During the 1850 Debate

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Henry S. Foote was born in Virginia in 1804, graduated from Washington College around age 15 in 1819 and was admitted to the bar in 1822. In Tuscumbia, Alabama he practiced law, started a Democratic newspaper and helped found LaGrange College, then set up practices in the Mississippi river towns of Jackson, Natchez, Vicksburg and Raymond, and in 1841 published the two volume Texas and the Texans. Mississippi sent him to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1847, where he chaired the Foreign Relations Committee and fought for the Compromise of 1850. In 1851, running for governor on a Union ticket of anti-secession Democrats and Whigs, he narrowly defeated Jefferson Davis and served from 1852 to 1854.

Five days before his term ended he resigned and moved to San Francisco, joined the Know Nothing Party, failed to win a California Senate seat and campaigned for Millard Fillmore in 1856. Back in the South, he represented Tennessee in both Confederate Congresses while attacking Davis's war policies and making antisemitic attacks on Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin. In early 1865 Confederate troops caught him trying to cross Union lines, and a vote to expel him fell short of two thirds. Lincoln refused to see him, and he went into exile in Canada and London before returning to practice law in Nashville. He joined the Republican Party in 1875, ran the New Orleans Mint from 1878 to 1880 under Rutherford B. Hayes, and died in 1880.

• When Thomas Hart Benton charged at him on the Senate floor, Foote drew a loaded pistol, and senators wrestled it away and locked it in a drawer.
• Benton shouted for them to let the assassin shoot.
• The Confederacy later made him a commissioner for Confederate prisoners held by the Union, and one of those prisoners was his own son.
• His final public speech, in 1879, argued for civil rights.
• His second wife's inherited land in West Nashville became the core of Vanderbilt University, where their 1858 house, Old Central, still stands.