At the other end of the Union, Laurence Keitt (D-SC) drew the same conclusions. Keitt, a self-described man of “nervous irritability” soon to be a congressional frequent fighter, was a fire-eating extremist who was passionately protective of Southern honor.24 He predicted a “strong struggle” in the pending session, a chance to “marry one’s name to mighty events, to mighty measures,” and to the South’s “immortal future.” Writing from London, Keitt’s friend Virginian Ambrose Dudley Mann agreed. Because of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the “time has arrived when the South is compelled to measure strength with the North.” If Northerners tried to block slavery from western territories, make Kansas a free state, or repeal the Fugitive Slave Act, “it would be the duty of the South to take possession of the Capitol … and expel from it the traitors to the Constitution.”25
The same rhetoric pervaded the election for Speaker. When slaveholders began to grill candidate Nathaniel Banks (A-MA) about his antislavery views (among other things, pressing him on his “let the Union slide” statement, which had been far more hesitant when he uttered it and was transformed into a rallying cry after the fact), the second-termer Preston Brooks (D-SC) took a stand. Resistance to Northern aggression should begin among the South’s appointed leaders in the House, Brooks said. “We are standing upon slave territory, surrounded by slave States, and pride, honor, patriotism, all command us, if a battle is to be fought, to fight it here upon this floor.”26
Despite such talk, there was no bloodshed during the speakership election, though there were uproars aplenty and two assaults, both against members of the press.27 On December 21, William “Extra Billy” Smith (D-VA)—so called because of the extra fees he raked in as a government contractor—assaulted the Evening Star editor William “Dug” Wallach for calling him a Know Nothing in his paper. The two clinched on the Avenue, and although Wallach routinely carried a “big knife, with which to settle such little controversies,” the two men did little more than scratch and claw each other, though one of Wallach’s fingers was “catawompously chawed up” by Smith.28 (Noting the incident, the British foreign minister warned the folks back home that no foreign minister should ever—under any circumstances—go down to the House floor; congressmen were too dangerous.)29 A few weeks later, when the New-York Tribune denounced Albert Rust (D-AR) for trying to disqualify Banks for the speakership, Rust assaulted the Tribune editor Horace Greeley twice, first punching him in the head on the Capitol grounds, then hitting him with his cane near the National Hotel a short while later. (Rust must have been contemplating a duel because, before striking a blow, he asked Greeley if he was a non-combatant.) Greeley did as many embattled Republicans would do for years to come, portraying himself as a heroic enemy of the Slave Power. “I came here with a clear understanding that it was about an even chance whether I should or should not be allowed to go home alive,” he wrote in the Tribune. Even so, he would stay true to the cause, refusing to run “if ruffians waylay and assail me.”30 William Pitt Fessenden believed him. “I do not think he would run to save his life,” he concluded after dining with Greeley shortly after the incident.31 Greeley and a “fighting party of Northern men” went armed thereafter. In private, Greeley let down his fighting-man mask, admitting that he was “too sick to be out of bed, too crazy to sleep, and … surrounded by horrors.”32
It took two months and 132 ballots to resolve the election, but ultimately, something remarkable happened: the House elected an antislavery Northern Speaker: Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, another Know Nothing on his way to becoming a Republican. Banks’s election was a stunning victory for the nascent Republican Party. When it was announced on the evening of February 2, 1856, the Republican side of the House erupted in a shout of triumph followed by hearty handshakes and heartfelt embraces. The stalwart Joshua Giddings, the oldest House member with unbroken service, was given the honor of administering the oath of office. “Our victory is most glorious,” he wrote home the next day. “I have reached the highest point of my ambition … I am satisfied.”33
Even in victory, the Republican press predicted trials to come. “There is a North, thank God; and for once it has asserted its right to be a power under the Constitution,” cheered The New York Times.34 “We shall see whether or no the North can take care of the Union.” Such concern was well founded given the feelings of at least some Southerners, as reflected in a letter to Speaker Banks. Not long after his election, he received a two-page string of insults signed “John Swanson & 40,000 others.” Condemning Banks as “a poor Shit ass trator tory Coward,” Swanson told him to “Quit the US God damn you and your party if you don’t like us.” (And in a sentence that raises interesting questions about Swanson’s image of hell, he swore that “Hell is full of Such men as You.… So full that their feet Stick out at the Window.”)35 Banks must have been amused, or at least struck, because he saved the letter. Doubtless it wasn’t his only piece of hate mail. Nor was it Swanson’s only commentary on the Thirty-fourth Congress; he had nothing but praise for Preston Brooks (D-SC) for caning “the Damn Rascal liar tory and Traitor Sumner.”36
From the moment that Brooks inflicted his savage blows, the caning of the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) on May 22, 1856, has been steeped in meaning. Generations of historians have plumbed its depths in explaining the coming of the Civil War and exploring American values at a peak moment of strife.37 But in the distance of time, its full context has been lost. As violent as it was, Sumner’s caning wasn’t shocking only because it was violent. It was the nature of the caning’s violence, its timing, and its connection to swirling conspiracy theories that gave the assault its full sectional punch and national impact. That impact, in turn, profoundly affected public expectations of congressmen, and in so doing changed the workings of Congress.
The caning was prompted by Sumner’s “Crime Against Kansas” speech, a monumental effort that took five hours over May 19 and 20, filling 112 printed pages. Two months past, Sumner had been itching to confront the “Slave oligarchy.”38 His speech fulfilled that goal and more.
This wasn’t Sumner’s first oratorical stab at the Slave Power, nor would it be his last. Like most of his speeches, it was polished to a sheen before delivery, typeset, and ready for mass mailing as he stood to speak. As was his habit, Sumner was reaching for a broad national audience, hoping to rouse widespread public support for his cause. In many ways, given the unlikelihood that persuasion would solve the seemingly irresolvable slavery problem, Sumner wasn’t really speaking to the Senate at all.
With that larger audience in mind, Sumner let loose. He first discussed the brutal “rape” of Kansas by proslavery forces, and condemned Southern “plantation manners” and his Southern colleagues’ habit of “trampling” congressional rules “under foot”—an echo of John Quincy Adams’s complaint of fifteen years past.39 The next day, he outlined proposed remedies for the Kansas problem, demanding its admittance to the Union as a free state. Biting, defiant, and filled with sexual innuendo about slaveholders and their love of slavery, Sumner’s speech was a tour de force. It also fulfilled the wishes of many of his constituents and supporters, who had been urging him to strike at “Southern bravado” and “crush these fellows into submission.”40
Throughout his speech, Sumner took special aim at three senators who had attacked him during the Kansas-Nebraska debate two years past—James Mason (D-VA), Stephen Douglas (D-IL), and Andrew Butler (D-SC), a relative of Preston Brooks—insulting them personally as well as politically. Many Southerners felt the sting. “Mr. Sumner ought to be knocked down, and his face jumped into,” declared Representative Thomas Rivers (A-TE).41 Butler’s friends felt that he was “compelled to flog” Sumner.42 Even as Sumner had been drawing his speech to a close, Douglas—pacing impatiently in the back of the chamber—had muttered, “That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damn fool.”43 Given that Sumner wasn’t a fighting man, he seemed to be asking Southerners “to kick him as we would a dog in the street
.”44 Fearing that was the case, a few of Sumner’s friends asked to walk him home, but he refused.
Charles Sumner, ca. 1855–65 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
The next day, Brooks decided to take action. A newspaper account of Sumner’s speech confirmed that he had insulted Butler, South Carolina, and indeed, the entire South. Considering it his duty as a South Carolina representative to resent the dishonor, Brooks decided to beat Sumner rather than challenge him to a duel because he knew that the New Englander would never accept a challenge and because sending a duel challenge “would subject me to legal penalties more severe than would be imposed for a simple assault and battery.”45 Here was the dark logic of the anti-dueling law. Better to beat Sumner than to run the more severe legal risk of challenging him to a duel.
So on May 22, as Sumner sat at his Senate desk franking copies of his Kansas speech for mailing, Brooks entered the Senate, cane in hand. Noticing several women in the chamber, he sat down and impatiently waited for them to leave. (Pointing to the last remaining woman, he asked a Senate secretary, “Can’t you manage to get her out?” When the secretary joked that ousting her would be “ungallant” because she was “very pretty,” Brooks took a second look and replied, “Yes; she is pretty, but I wish she would go.”) Finally, the moment was right. Walking up to Sumner’s desk, Brooks declared: “Mr. Sumner, I read your speech with care and as much impartiality as was possible and I felt it was 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.” At that, he raised his cane and began to beat Sumner over the head, inflicting more than a dozen brutal blows before his cane shattered, with his friend Laurence Keitt fending off intervention.
Preston Brooks, ca. 1856, allegedly taken shortly after he caned Sumner (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
This 1856 print captures Northern outrage at Sumner’s caning. Representative Laurence Keitt, hiding a gun behind his back, stands to the left of Brooks and Sumner, preventing intervention. In the background, Senator John J. Crittenden is being held back. (Arguments of the Chivalry by Winslow Homer. Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Stunned and bloodied, Sumner struggled to get away, but was held fast by his desk, which was bolted to the floor; he ultimately wrenched it free before collapsing. As luck would have it, the elderly Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky—who had watched Jonathan Cilley die in 1838—happened to be in the Senate chamber, and he ran toward Brooks yelling, “Don’t kill him!” But by the time he reached Sumner, Brooks had stopped. Bloody and barely conscious, Sumner was carried from the chamber.
Although Brooks couldn’t possibly have imagined the full impact of his actions before his assault, he made several choices that would amplify its power a thousandfold. Initially intending to obey the rules of congressional combat, he violated them in ways that couldn’t be forgiven. His first instinct was good: before attacking, he confirmed the precise wording of Sumner’s insults in the press. But from there his decisions went downhill.
Take, for example, his decision to attack Sumner in the Senate chamber. Physical violence on the floor was usually spontaneous; angry words or hostile charges escalated until someone jumped to his feet and headed toward his antagonist with no good intentions. Men who staged violent “collisions” in the House or Senate were usually chastised, as was Foote for arming himself before picking a fight with Benton. As people insisted after the resulting scuffle, deliberate assaults belonged on the street. Sam Houston’s 1832 caning of William Stanbery (AJ-OH) on Pennsylvania Avenue was typical of this kind of predetermined clash; before the assault, Houston had hefted his stout hickory cane in the House in full view of Stanbery as an advance warning.46 Brooks’s first impulse was in line with this tradition; he fully intended to attack Sumner out of doors. Only after two fruitless days of watching for Sumner on the Capitol grounds did he decide to confront him in the Senate, and even then he initially planned to ask Sumner to step outside.47
The powerful symbolism of a senator beaten to the ground on the Senate floor shows the wisdom of staging such attacks outdoors. Nothing that happened in the Capitol seemed purely personal, and everything that happened there could be played up by the press. This was particularly true in the context of the late 1850s, when a Southern assault against a Northern congressman in the Capitol, inflicted with calm intention, seemed like Slave Power brutality and arrogance personified. Even some Southerners felt that a line had been crossed. “All agree that if Brooks had beaten him anywhere but on the head & in the Senate, he would but have served him right,” wrote Charlotte Wise, wife of the flame-throwing Henry Wise’s cousin Henry.48 Brooks’s friend Henry Edmundson (D-VA) of Campbell-fighting fame, acting as an advisor of sorts, had good reason for questioning the wisdom of staging the confrontation in the Senate, asking a colleague for advice on the matter even as the assault began.49
Brooks also failed to make his fight fair. Of course, his most grievous sin along these lines was caning an unarmed man pinioned by his desk. But attacking that man without warning was also foul play. Unlike Houston, Brooks didn’t warn his victim of his violent intentions, nor did his confidants Edmundson and Keitt, and Sumner wasn’t known to carry weapons for self-defense. The committee report on the caning recommended the House “declare its disapprobation” of both Edmundson and Keitt for this “reprehensible” lapse, as well as recommending that Brooks be expelled for the caning.50 (A minority report suggested taking no action, claiming that the matter was a case for criminal courts.)
When it came to boosting sectional hostilities, the caning’s timing couldn’t have been better. One day past, the town of Lawrence, Kansas, founded by antislavery settlers, had been ransacked by proslavery assailants, and the press was rife with bloodshed. Newspapers were also filled with talk of the murder of a waiter at Willard’s Hotel by a California congressman. On May 8, the Southern-born Philemon Herbert (D-CA) had shot a waiter dead for refusing to serve him breakfast past the appointed hour (though not before provoking a dish-throwing, chair-tossing brawl). Even before the caning, the Northern press had portrayed the murder as proof of a “systematic” Slave Power reign of violence.51 Brooks’s attack seemed like more of the same but ten times worse. As the New Hampshire Statesman put it, the assault on Sumner had created a “hostility against the Slave Power more intense than ever.” It was another “link in the chain of flagitious outrages upon the North by which we are debased forever.”52 Violence in Congress and in Kansas were now inseparably linked.
In essence, Sumner’s caning was a final, brutal insult that drove home the meaning of a string of violent encounters, and the Northern press was quick to spread that message—very quick; thanks to the telegraph, The New York Times received its first news of the caning a mere forty-five minutes after it happened.53 The Boston Atlas heard that message loud and clear, noting: “We understand perfectly well that nothing could give [Southerners] more exquisite pleasure than to kill us all.”54 Linking the beatings of Wallach, Greeley, and Sumner with the murder at Willard’s Hotel and events in Kansas, the New York Courier and Enquirer editor James Watson Webb—now a Republican—concluded, “No reasonable man should doubt that the Slave power have unalterably determined to extend the area of their now merely local institution; and if possible to render it National. The bowie-knife, the pistol, and the bludgeon … to be used in effecting this result.”55 Webb’s column was reprinted widely, in part because, as the Lowell Daily Citizen explained, Webb, once a “highly conservative” defender of the slavery status quo, was now preaching resistance to the Slave Power with its own weapons. Webb’s conversion was a powerful story in and of itself.56 His harsh attack on the caning also earned him a letter from Brooks hinting at a duel.57
This print from the presidential election of 1856 attacks the Democratic platform as proslavery, pro-South, and pro-violence, linking “Bleeding Kansas” (in the left background) with the caning of Sumner (in the left foreground). (Courte
sy of the Library of Congress)
Republican congressmen were just as quick to stress the caning’s meaning, as was Sumner, who seized on the power of the moment even as he was carried off the Senate floor; moments later, still bloodied from the beating, he told William Seward that he hoped it would serve the antislavery cause.58 It did. Sumner’s speech became a national sensation. The New York Times printed 40,000 copies and sold out by May 28; within a month, 90,000 copies had been sold.59 Caught up in the wellspring of outrage that surrounded the caning, Republican congressmen voiced their grievances with gusto, raising fears of violent outcomes. Hannibal Hamlin (R-ME) believed that someone would be shot down before the session closed. “Let it come,” he wrote to William Pitt Fessenden. “If we do not stand manfully and fearlessly to the work before us, we ought to be slaves.”60 Fessenden was more optimistic; he thought that violence might subside for a time, but not because of cooler heads. Southerners might think twice before attacking because Northerners had “made up their minds not to be beaten to death without making such an experiment dangerous, and in my judgment such a determination is a duty of the Country, & the cause.”61 This was a severe message indeed: it was the patriotic duty of good Republican congressmen to fight. Brooks heard that message, admitting to his brother that his main risk was “assassination, but this you must not intimate to Mother.”62
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