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Commentary
“A colorful Member with a fiery temper” is how the U.S. House “History, Art & Archives” describes Matthew Lyon “depicted in this infamous print with Roger Griswold of Connecticut.” (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
The first sound bite in American political history was recorded more than two centuries ago in Western Kentucky.
First District Congressman Matthew Lyon of Eddyville, a fierce Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican, used his teeth to detach a detractor’s digit.
It was self-defense. The constituent was trying to pop the congressman’s eyeball out.
Lyon was an Irish-born Revolutionary War veteran who’d been a Vermont congressman before he migrated to frontier Western Kentucky and helped found Eddyville on the Cumberland River. (Eddyville is the seat of Lyon County, which was named for his son, Rep. Chittenden Lyon, an Eddyville Democrat who was in Congress from 1827 to 1835.)
Matthew Lyon was elected to the Kentucky legislature in 1802, and he served in Congress from 1803 to 1811.
“The coonskin democracy of southwestern Kentucky idolized the Colonel,” wrote historian Bernard Mayo in an old article in “The North American Review.” “In all Kentucky there was no candidate so energetic, so colorful. Lyon’s bag of electioneering tricks, said seasoned observers, was inexhaustible.”??
Lyon reportedly could “out-shout his rivals, ‘drink grog all day long without getting drunk, & tell pretty rough anecdotes.’”
Lyon said he owed his political success to stationing himself “at a crossroads by which everybody in the district passed from time to time … abusing the sitting member,” according to Mayo’s book, “Henry Clay: Spokesman for the New West.”??
One time, abuse came from a man named Cofield. He tried to embarrass his member of Congress by dredging up the story of Lyon spitting in the face of Congressman Roger Griswold, a Federalist foe, during a 1798 House session. It’s unclear if the great expectoration was saliva or tobacco juice, but it led to a brawl on the House floor between “The Spitting Lyon” and Griswold.
A year later, Lyon was briefly jailed under the Alien and Sedition Acts for printing commentary sharply critical of Federalist President John Adams — whom he hated — in his newspaper, “The Scourge Of Aristocracy and Repository of Important Political Truth.”?
Lyon was still behind bars when his Green Mountain State constituents reelected him. After he was released, he returned to Congress in time to help make Jefferson president over Aaron Burr in 1801. The two tied in the Electoral College after the 1800 presidential election. (The Federalist Adams lost.) So the House had to decide who won.?
Lyon claimed if it hadn’t been for him, Burr might have triumphed. “During that long tie-vote contest ending only with the thirty-sixth ballot, ‘a Lyon grim and bold, for desperate warfare fam’d of old,’ manfully resisted Federalist bribes and cast Vermont’s vote for Jefferson,” Mayo wrote in his article.
He also quoted from a New York Herald account of Lyon’s “lively scuffle” with Cofield: “Mr. Lyon immediately cracked away at Mr. Cofield, but Mr. C so completely defended himself that he parried off the blow, and the scene of action commenced hot and hard.”
Cofield finally knocked Lyon flat and prepared to deliver the coup de grace in a backwoods brawl: gouging out an eye with a deft thumb flick.
“In the attempt, however,” the “Herald” explained, “the honorable gentleman got Mr. C’s thumb in his mouth and completely amputated it at the first joint.”
In his book, Mayo wrote that by chomping off Cofield’s thumb, Lyon helped confirm eastern opinions “that Kentucky was truly a paradise for barbarous Yahoos.”
Lyon died in Arkansas in 1822 and was buried in Eddyville’s Riverview Cemetery. Neither his epitaph ?nor a nearby state historical marker mention “The Spitting Lyon’s” unique form of hand surgery though it truly was a sound bite.
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Berry Craig
Berry Craig, a Carlisle countian, is a professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and the author of seven books, all on Kentucky history. His latest is "Kentuckians and Pearl Harbor: Stories from the Day of Infamy" which the University Press of Kentucky published. He is a freelance journalist, a member of the American Federation of Teachers and a longtime union activist.
Berry Craig