In 1856 a hungry congressman didn’t get the breakfast he ordered. So he shot the waiter.

Capitol Hill, but it is nothing like the volatile world of pre-Civil War Washington, where lawmakers routinely dueled and brawled. Even then, the shooting of a waiter by a member of Congress was regarded as beyond the pale. “Of course there is no excuse for the murder in the circumstances of the case,” the New York Tribune declared.

It may have been inexcusable, but it was a sign of the times. The incident occurred weeks before a more notorious confrontation in which South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks beat Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts senseless on the Senate floor after Sumner called Southerners flocking to support slaveholders in Kansas the “drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization.” Anti-immigrant sentiment, manifested in a secret society whose members pledged to say they “know nothing” about its activities, was rampant.

In the wake of the shooting, the Northern press reported that Herbert was an “Alabama-born bluebood and an avid secessionist” who had been expelled from the University of Alabama after he stabbed a fellow student, according to Guy Gugliotta, a former Washington Post reporter and author of a book on pre-Civil War Washington and construction of the U.S. Capitol. That a hotheaded, highborn Southerner killed a working man confirmed Northern fears about the intemperate behavior of Southern defenders of slavery, according to Gugliotta.