CHIP.
Reading edition
THE CONGRESSIONAL PRIZE-RING.
The forcible mode in which debates are conducted in the parliament of the United States, and the personal encounters which sometimes follow them, are believed by the present generation, to be novelties and only recently brought to a culminating point by the Honourable Preston S. Brooks’s life-preserver, upon the head, face, eyes, and body of Senator Charles Sumner. This is a mistake. Fifty years ago, exciting debates often ended in a regular stand-up fight in the lobby of the House of Representatives. The combatants stripped, a ring was formed, bottle-holders appointed, and the battle fought and reported quite in the style of Moulsey Hurst and Bell’s Life in London.
In corroboration of this statement we present to our readers the following paragraph copied from the New York Evening Post of December the thirteenth, eighteen hundred and five, into the Annual Register for eighteen hundred and six:—
On Friday last, the well-known Leib, one of the representatives of Pennsylvania, and the leader of the Duane party, and Joseph H. Nicholson, one of the representatives of Maryland, met in the Congress lobby about one o’clock, when Leib immediately called Nicholson a liar; and, thereupon, commenced one of the best fought battles recorded in the annals of congressional pugilism. The fight continued till the sixty-fourth round, when Leib had received such blows as deterred him from again facing his man. He protracted the fight; falling after making a feeble hit. In the round which ended the fight, those who backed him advised him to resign; which he did after a combat of one hour and seventeen minutes. The combatants were both very much beaten.