Over the next two years, Sumner became appalled by the compromises that Senator Daniel Webster and other Northern Whigs were making to preserve the Union. In response, Sumner joined with a group including Salmon P. Chase of Ohio to form a Free Soil Party.
As a Free Soiler, Sumner ran against a Whig congressman in 1848, lost badly, and retreated to the practice of law. But when President Millard Fillmore appointed Webster as his secretary of state, the naming of Webster’s replacement fell to the commonwealth’s legislature.
Many of its members were put off by what they considered Sumner’s arrogance and self-righteousness. These days, when he was invited to speak, Sumner insisted that he appear on a stage and not behind a pulpit, which he called “a devilish place.” To heighten the insult, he added, “I do not wonder that people in it are dull.”
That uncompromising spirit had closed the doors of most of Boston’s first families to him. Even his closest friend from Harvard, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, lamented Sumner’s growing obsession. “Nothing but politics now. Oh, where are those genial days when literature was the topic of our conversation?”
Despite those misgivings, Sumner was sent to the U.S. Senate by the margin of a single vote. Once there, he became an unyielding champion of his father’s ideals and took satisfaction in being described as the conscience of New England.
Sumner was unperturbed by his unpopularity. Ideas mattered to him, the men who held them hardly at all. When he had come across congenial spirits, they tended to be poets and writers—Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier. And the circle was exclusively male. One friend observed that at any gathering, Sumner “would at once desert the most blooming beauty to talk to the plainest of men.”
In the years leading to the war, Sumner had remained a bachelor.
• • •
If Charles Sumner was a product of the culture that had produced the stern John Quincy Adams, Representative Preston S. Brooks reflected—like Henry Clay—the more indulgent life of the South and West. By the time he graduated from village grammar schools, Brooks had become so devoted to local taverns that the faculty of South Carolina College felt compelled to tighten its disciplinary code. Even so, Brooks was expelled before he could graduate for what the college described as “riotous behavior.”
Moving on to practice law in Edgefield, South Carolina, Brooks was twenty-one when he fought his first duel—turning a trifling affront into a point of honor. Because dueling was illegal in the state, he met his antagonist on a nearby Georgia island. Brooks took a bullet in his abdomen and thigh. The other man was also wounded, but both of them survived.
At six-foot, Brooks was nearly as tall and imposing as Sumner, but his life involved far more romance. When his first wife died after two years of marriage, Brooks married her sister. A supporter of the war with Mexico, he went off jauntily to fight. A fever soon sent him home again, but his service contributed to his military bearing.
As a Democrat who did not favor immediate secession, Brooks was rewarded for his moderation in 1852, with election to Congress from South Carolina. There he joined his cousin, the state’s senator, Andrew Pickens Butler, and he was present in the Senate chambers on March 19, 1856, when Sumner of Massachusetts rose to argue that for Kansas to enter the Union, it must outlaw slavery.
• • •
Sumner had already annoyed fellow senators in 1852 by urging repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act at a time when both parties wanted to slip past that year’s presidential election without debating the issue. Senate leaders did their best to stop Sumner from speaking, but he finally got the floor and introduced a motion to end the requirement that every citizen, North or South, join in apprehending runaway slaves. Sumner attracted three votes besides his own.
Although his crusade failed, Sumner’s eloquence drew disaffected Whigs and Free Soilers to another new movement. In September 1854, they came together in Worcester, Massachusetts, to form a coalition they called the Republican Party.
Other Whigs, however, were still put off by Sumner’s intemperance. For the time being, men like Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and Henry Seward of New York saw a brighter future with the Whigs than with the Republicans or another splinter group, the secretive and anti-immigrant Know Nothings.
And yet, the Know Nothings did much better than any other slate in the election for the Massachusetts legislature—377 Know Nothings won, against a single Whig, one Democrat, and one Republican.
Sumner responded with renewed passion. On a trip through Kentucky, he absorbed the lessons of his first extended exposure to slavery. In Lexington, he watched a slave auction and saw a coach driver whipping a Negro. At his hotel, a black child who was waiting on tables was knocked to the floor by a white man’s blow to his head.
Back home, Sumner’s speeches berated the Know Nothings—“I am not disposed to place any check upon the welcome of foreigners”—and stumped energetically for the Republicans. But within his new party, schisms were already arising. Men who shared Sumner’s resolute politics—Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania—were being called radicals.
• • •
By the time Sumner rose for his next two-day oration, the label had become official: Sumner was a Radical Republican. Yet he considered his speech simply a historical review of slavery, and he had shown a draft to New York senator Henry Seward, also an abolitionist but far less impatient and outspoken than Sumner. Seward had not supported Sumner’s repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act four years earlier, and now he urged Sumner to delete any personal attacks from his speech.
Henry Seward already knew, however, how stiff-necked Sumner could be. Once he had asked Sumner, as a personal favor, to support legislation that would benefit a New York steamship line. Sumner refused. He said that he had not been sent to the Senate to get Seward re-elected.
Seward had snapped, “Sumner, you’re a damned fool.”
Sumner ended up voting for the bill, but the two men did not speak for months. Their coolness thawed, partly because Seward’s wife, Frances, had always been unstinting in her praise of Sumner’s “clear moral perceptions” and his being “so fearless a champion of human rights.” But even she had advised Sumner against denouncing his colleagues by name.
Sumner ignored her advice and shifted from a mild review of the Kansas affair to biting ridicule. He assailed President Franklin Pierce for bowing to slave owners and Illinois senator Stephen Douglas for supporting a proslavery community within the Kansas territory.
In the past, Sumner had enjoyed his place on the Senate floor next to Preston Brooks’s cousin, Andrew Butler. In fact, Sumner had once paid him a high compliment: If only Butler had been born in New England, Sumner said, “he would have been a scholar or, at least, a well educated man.”
But Sumner’s opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act had destroyed any traces of friendship. Now Sumner claimed that there was nothing Butler touched “that he does not disfigure.” The accusation was especially pointed since it could be taken as referring to the defect in Butler’s lip that distorted his speech. Sumner went on to add that Butler “cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.”
Butler was not in the chamber as Sumner mocked the way he had boasted about South Carolina’s venerable traditions. “He cannot surely have forgotten its shameful imbecility from slavery, confessed throughout the Revolution, followed by its most shameful assumptions for slavery since.”
• • •
The first Democrat to respond was Michigan’s Senator Lewis Cass, his party’s presidential candidate eight years earlier. Cass called Sumner’s speech “the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body.”
Speaking next, Stephen Douglas charged that Sumner had shown “a display of malignity that issued from every sentence.” Douglas asked, “Is it his object to provoke some of us to kick him . . . ?”
Answering Douglas, Sumner referred to him as a
skunk or—as he put it euphemistically—“a noisome, squat and nameless animal” that was “not a proper model for an American Senator.”
When newspapers published extracts from Sumner’s oration, titled “The Crime Against Kansas,” he received lavish congratulations from throughout the North. The New York Tribune praised his “inspiring eloquence and lofty moral tone.” Sumner’s friend Longfellow called the speech “the greatest voice on the greatest subject that has been uttered.”
• • •
After listening to the first day of Sumner’s speech, Preston Brooks had not returned for its conclusion, but Sumner’s diatribe against South Carolina was being hashed over at every dinner party in the capital. A consensus was emerging that the tepid response by Southerners to Sumner’s provocation had been unmanly.
Brooks realized that his cousin was expected to punish Sumner for his insults. Southerners agreed that a duel was out of the question since Sumner was no gentleman. He would have to be whipped like a dog or a slave.
And yet Senator Butler, a frail sixty-year-old, could not carry out that retribution against the powerfully built Sumner. Brooks decided that punishment fell to him, even though Sumner outweighed him by thirty pounds.
For two days, Brooks lay in wait for Sumner to leave the Senate, but each time Sumner got immediately into his carriage. After another sleepless night, Brooks was ready to change his tactic and run up the flights of stairs to confront Sumner as he entered the Capitol. But when he confided that plan to Congressman Henry Edmundson, the Virginian warned him that the exertion would exhaust him. Since Sumner was the stronger man, Brooks should conserve his strength.
On the third day of his vigil, Brooks went inside the Capitol to pass the time until the Senate adjourned. He then had to wait another hour until a group of women visitors finally left the lobby. Edmundson saw that Brooks had taken a seat on the largely vacant Senate floor and said lightly, “Are you a senator now?”
Brooks was in no mood for joking. “I will stand this thing no longer,” he said.
Sumner had remained at his desk, franking copies of his “Crime Against Kansas” speech to mail to constituents. He did not rise when Brooks approached him.
“Mr. Sumner,” Brooks began, “I have read your speech with care and as much impartiality as was possible, and I feel it my duty to tell you that you have libeled my State and slandered a relative who is aged and absent, and I am come to punish you for it.”
With that, Brooks raised a cane that had been given to him a few months earlier. He had chosen it today because it was made from gutta-percha, a tropical wood that he thought would be less likely to splinter.
Brooks brought down his cane on Sumner’s head, pleased to see each strike hitting home. He swung so rapidly that Sumner was soon blinded by his own blood and could not fight back. As the beating continued, however, Sumner made a desperate effort and pulled himself up with such force that he ripped the desk from its iron screws embedded in the floor.
He found, though, that by crouching he had made himself even more vulnerable. The unrelenting blows had splintered the cane, after all, but Brooks persisted, reveling in the sound of Sumner’s pain. His victim was bellowing “like a calf,” Brooks said afterward.
Sumner passed out and was about to fall. Brooks caught him with one hand while he kept beating him with the other. His cane was in shreds, but Brooks was still flailing when two congressmen heard the uproar and rushed to Sumner’s aide. One of Brooks’s friends, Representative Laurence Keitt, brandished his own cane to ward them off and shouted, “Let them alone, God damn you!”
But the two reached the scene and pulled Brooks away from Sumner just as a Kentucky senator was hurrying up the aisle to plead, “Don’t kill him!”
Awakening from his frenzy, Brooks mumbled, “I did not intend to kill him.” As he pocketed his cane’s gold head, he added, “But I did intend to whip him.”
• • •
With Brooks being led to a side room, Sumner slipped again toward the floor. Supported by a friendly congressman, he leaned against a chair while he regained consciousness. A Senate page brought him a glass of water.
Sumner’s bleeding head was soaking his coat and trousers. He said he could walk to a sofa in the Senate anteroom but asked that someone recover his hat and the papers on his desk. A doctor arrived to stanch Sumner’s wounds and sew four stitches in his scalp.
Soon afterward, he visited Sumner at his lodgings and warned Sumner’s friends that he must have absolute quiet. As he drifted off to sleep, Sumner murmured, “I could not believe such a thing was possible.”
• • •
The doctor was optimistic about Sumner’s recovery. He described the beating as producing “nothing but flesh wounds” and predicted that Sumner could take up his Senate duties within a few days. But when Sumner continued to run a high fever, his brother brought in specialists who found that Sumner’s spinal cord had been injured, which made his walking erratic and painful.
As time passed and Sumner did not return to the Senate, his enemies accused him of cowardice. But it took many months at health spas before he could move about freely. In the meantime, Republican lawmakers in Massachusetts elected him to a second Senate term.
When Sumner finally returned to the Capitol, he found that the first day at his desk exhausted him and “a cloud began to gather over my brain.” He decided that the most effective cure would be a return to Europe after twenty years.
During the next seven months on the continent, Sumner’s hectic social calendar suggested a full recovery. In Paris, the young novelist Henry James, expecting stigmata from the abolitionist hero, was surprised to find Sumner’s wounds “rather disappointingly healed.”
But returning again to Congress for the new session in December 1857, Sumner discovered that he was still not ready. He could concentrate for only short periods, and he took no interest in the jousting over the status of Kansas between Stephen Douglas and the new president, James Buchanan. Sumner withdrew to Boston and diverted himself by examining a collection of engravings recently donated to Harvard College.
• • •
Preston Brooks’s assault had made both men famous. From the time of the attack, crowds throughout the North cheered Sumner’s name and groaned and hissed at any mention of Brooks. At an Indignation Meeting, Emerson spelled out the lesson of Sumner’s beating: “I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.”
In the South, acclaim and calumny were reversed. The Herald of Laurensville, South Carolina, described Brooks as “noble” and Sumner as “notorious.” The merchants of Charleston took up a collection to buy Brooks a new cane inscribed “Hit Him Again.”
That theme was taken up by the Richmond Whig, whose editors had argued in the past for civility. Now they regretted only that Sumner had not been horsewhipped and urged that “Seward and others should catch it next.” Another Virginia newspaper, the Petersburg Intelligencer, went further in singling out Henry Seward of New York:
“It will be very well to give Seward a double dose at least every other day until it operates freely on his political bowels.”
But North Carolina’s Wilmington Herald spoke for other Southerners when it argued that although perhaps “Sumner deserved what he got,” the editor could “not approve the conduct of Brooks” and found the entire episode “disgraceful.”
Andrew Butler, his honor avenged, returned to the Senate in time to hear Sumner’s friend Henry Wilson denounce Brooks’s “brutal, murderous and cowardly assault.”
At that, Butler shouted, “You are a liar!” and demanded a duel. Wilson turned away the challenge as a “lingering relic of a barbarous civilization.”
• • •
The Senate appointed an investigative committee of two Southern Democrats and three Northerners considered moderate on the issue of slavery. They invited Brooks to offer his version of the incident. After he declined to appear, they concluded that he could be punished, if at
all, only by his colleagues in the House.
While the House debated over expelling Brooks, a denunciation by one of Sumner’s friends provoked Brooks to issue his own challenge to a duel. The other man agreed. But to avoid U.S. laws, he proposed a site on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.
Brooks backed out, complaining that he could not be protected from Northern mobs. His enemies turned that refusal into a ditty:
“But he quickly answered, No, no, no.
“For I’m afraid, afraid, afraid,
“Bully Brooks’s afraid.”
Nearly two months after Sumner was assaulted, the House motion to expel Brooks came to the floor. It passed 121 to 95, less than the required two-thirds vote. The following day, the House censured Laurence Keitt for his role but absolved Henry Edmundson.
In New York State, Frances Seward was resigned to the verdict. In the days after the hearing, she had been asked whether Brooks would hang if Sumner died from his wounds. No, she said cynically, only slaves were hanged in Washington, and then by men who thought it was too mild a punishment.
After a district court fined Brooks three hundred dollars, voters returned him to the House in the next election. When he died from a throat infection early in 1857, Sumner was visiting Longfellow in Boston and received the news calmly. He saw Brooks as “a mere tool of the slaveholders,” Longfellow recalled.
To another friend, Sumner said, “The Almighty has settled this, better than you or I could have done.”
• • •
When Sumner returned full-time to the Senate, however, his colleagues learned that any mildness had been fleeting. As a martyr, he had been spared criticism from Northern Whigs, even those who considered him insufferably self-righteous. They found that it was a trait his convalescence had not mitigated.
Sumner said he dreaded being again in Washington “amidst tobacco-spitting, swearing slave-drivers, abused by the press, insulted so far as it is possible, pained and ransacked by the insensibility . . . to human rights and the claims of human nature.”
After Lincoln Page 2