Southerners also were enraged and prepared to take action; by their account, Sumner’s speech had been an outrage, Northern aggression was flaming out of control, and Brooks’s response was praiseworthy. As Governor Henry Wise of Virginia put it, “How can we stand continual aggression everywhere—in Congress, in the pulpit, in the Press?”63 Even the mere idea of a Southern conspiracy was insulting; hearing the claim, the ever extreme Thomas Clingman (D-NC) jumped to his feet and declared the Northerner who uttered it a liar. When Lewis Campbell of Kansas fame responded by asking if Clingman meant anything personal—an opening for a duel—the matter fizzled.64 If Brooks was punished for combatting Southern degradation, the result might be ugly, many claimed. Visiting Washington a week after the caning, Wise’s cousin Henry thought the House might “ring with vollies from revolvers” when Brooks’s expulsion came up for debate.65 Laurence Keitt thought that if Northerners fought force with force, the nation’s capital would “float with blood.”66
As Wise predicted, the debate of Brooks’s expulsion in July was explosive. The feeling on the floor was made apparent in a letter sent to Speaker Banks on July 10 by a Democratic congressman so fearful of being exposed as a compromiser that he didn’t sign his name, identifying himself only as “A Well Wisher.” Because of the intense feelings on the floor, the writer feared an “impending calamity.”
Do you know, Sir, that there exists at this time an almost murderous feeling, between certain members of the North and South, and that it is with some difficulty that a few peace-loving and happily influential associates, can prevent demonstrations upon the floor, which in the present state of excitement, would almost certainly lead to a general melee and perhaps a dozen deaths in the twinkling of an eye.
A number of Southerners were “constantly on the qui vive to prevent the throwing of missiles first from their side.” Would Banks do the same among his friends? Would he discourage them from exploiting the crisis with Buncombe speeches full of abuse that would “goad their opponents beyond bearing?”67 Clearly, as much as congressmen were performing for a national audience, the feelings on the floor were real.68 Not everyone was ready to throw missiles, but a few missile-throwers could cause chaos.
Despite that warning, one Republican after another condemned Brooks and the “Sumner outrage,” and howled defiance at the Slave Power. Brooks saw it coming and swore that “if this is done there will be an exciting time.” He stayed true to his word. Although he initially planned to “degrade the most prominent” Republican “to degrade their party too,” he went on something of a degradation spree, initiating duels with three Republicans who spoke out against him, insultingly dismissing a fourth Republican as not worth dueling (after allegedly threatening him in the lobby of Willard’s Hotel), and trying to bludgeon two Republicans at that same hotel while roistering with friends in a drunken haze.69 Keitt also nearly fought a duel with a Republican, and Robert Toombs (D-GA) was rumored to have considered one. Alexander Campbell (R-OH), who proposed a House investigation of the caning, was also threatened with violence.70 All told, the caning spawned at least eight confrontations that session, as well as countless threats.
Brooks’s two most notable wrangles were with Massachusetts Republicans Henry Wilson and Anson Burlingame; in response to their speechifying, he challenged both men to duels. Wilson saw trouble coming and armed himself with a revolver. “[H]e is just the man to use it,” chirped French, who also predicted trouble for James Watson Webb. Webb’s newspaper piece would doubtless “stir up the Chivalry,” and as French knew all too well from “Cilley scenes” of years past, “Webb is a man who fights.”71 French was calculating congressional combat, as was most of Washington.
Faced with that eternal conundrum for Northern congressmen—a duel challenge—Wilson and Burlingame took different paths. Wilson denounced the barbarity of the code of honor but upheld “the right of self-defence,” essentially making himself available for a street fight, as was widely understood at the time.72 Burlingame issued a hedgy apology for his words, saying that he meant nothing personal, but then retracted his statement and accepted Brooks’s challenge, naming the Canadian side of Niagara Falls as their dueling ground. Burlingame’s second claimed to have headed north—far north—because congressional insiders told him that Jonathan Cilley had been disadvantaged by fighting his duel in the South.73 In both cases, nothing further happened, though Brooks emerged from his non-encounter with Burlingame tainted by a whiff of cowardice for declining to fight, despite his insistence that he had good reason; as he explained in the press, had he traveled north he would have been killed in “the enemy’s country.”74 (French was still thinking about the non-duel during a trip to Niagara Falls a year later, quipping “Burlingame not there!”)75 More than one Southerner noted that Brooks clearly didn’t want to fight, and that Burlingame and his clueless Yankee friends had missed their cues and almost stumbled into a duel.76
Although in the end neither Wilson nor Burlingame did any fighting, they showed what their contemporaries would have called “pluck,” and were applauded for it in the North and Northwest, Wilson for spurning a challenge without backing down, and Burlingame for not spurning a challenge; as ever, Northerners were conflicted about the code of honor and their congressmen. Although there was a good deal of murmuring about Burlingame’s acceptance of a challenge (including on the part of Sumner himself, who deplored Burlingame’s surrender to “Southern barbarianism”), in light of the grievous insult of Sumner’s caning, the criticism was outweighed by the praise heaped on Burlingame’s head for standing tall before the Slave Power.77 He received reams of fan mail praising his “manly” spirit.78 Barnstorming out west for the coming elections, he was feted like a hero. In Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, people sang his praises, celebrating him with parades and processions and flocking by the thousands to hear him speak. In Indiana, people traveled in horse teams to see him. One event featured women dressed as states and men as “border ruffians,” revealing the close link between the caning and Kansas in the public mind. “It touches my heart Jennie to find how, on account of that Brooks affair, the people seem to regard me with tenderness,” Burlingame told his wife. The “whole population of the west seems wild to see your naughty husband because he did not run away from Brooks … [T]he people like such ‘bad’ men as I am.”79 Wilson, too, was heralded with pomp and circumstance. At a massive protest meeting in Faneuil Hall, he was praised as “a gentleman who believed in the defence of freedom, and also in self defence.”80
Sumner’s caning had made heroes of fighting Republicans. Burlingame was right; in the context of a rising Slave Power plot, with the humiliation of Sumner’s caning fresh at hand, people in the free states did like “bad men.” The fist-raised fighting posture of Republicans became so marked that Democrats mocked it in electioneering fodder, as in a campaign song sung to a popular tune titled “Wait for the Wagon,” which smacked at swaggering Republicans in its opening lines:
Will you come with me good Democrats,
And rally round our flag,
To fight the black Republicans
Who play the game of brag?81
This perfect storm of events—the pull of the Slave Power plot, the chain of events that seemed to prove it, the savvy of Republicans who connected the dots and sold their party as the way to stem the tide, the stunning brutality of Sumner’s caning, and the presence of Republican congressmen willing to step up and fight—fueled the Republican Party’s rise to power.82 Although the presidential election of 1856 went to Democrat James Buchanan, the Republicans did remarkably well for a new party, garnering 33.1 percent of the electoral vote.83 The attack on Sumner and public support of the congressional fighting men who championed him were an inherent part of that telling feat.84 Congressional violence ushered in the Third Party System.
The fuel that powered the rise of the Republican Party was emotion: fear of Southern dominance, anger at Northern degradation, horror at the brutal realities of sla
very.85 Thus the many heavily attended “indignation meetings” throughout the North after Sumner’s caning. As a speaker at a meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put it, Brooks was guilty of an “indignity offered to Massachusetts, a sovereign state, in the person of her Senator.” Others considered the assault an insult not only to Massachusetts, “but to New England and all the Free States.”86 For many Northerners, an attack on Sumner was an attack on them all.
Beneath the indignation was a blunt reality, long known but now unavoidably exposed: Northern congressmen were routinely silenced by Southerners. In Northern meetings, demonstrations, and printed resolutions, the same points were made again and again. Northern representatives were being denied freedom of debate on the floor. Their constituents were being denied their representative rights in Congress. As a speech at an indignation meeting at Union College expressed it: the attack on Sumner had been a “blow aimed at the Freedom of debate,” a “bold attempt to terrify the representatives of a free people in the exersise of their constitutional rights.” A Maine newspaper agreed: “the blows showered upon bleeding Sumner, are blows directed at us, for using rights that we have enjoyed every day of our lives.”87 For this writer, the right of free speech wasn’t an abstraction. It was a routine part of everyday life that had to be defended, a thought echoed in dozens of letters to Sumner.
Congressmen had long acted as surrogates for all that they represented, fighting and even dying for the rights and honor of their people, their states, and their sections when duty called. The caning raised awareness of that fact to new heights in both North and South. To countless Americans, Sumner was the North suffering at the hand of the South and Brooks was the South enforcing its command. As one newspaper put it, the assault was a “representative act.”88 “I have lost my individuality in my representative capacity,” Brooks said after the caning. “I am regarded to a great extent as the exponent of the South against which Black Republicanism is war[r]ing in my person.”89 French knew that the caning “in itself, was a personal matter.” But he also knew that it would create “a feeling throughout the Union that cannot easily be calmed.”90
The Cilley-Graves duel had touched a similar nerve. Both men fought for the honor of their people, their state, their section, and their party, and the North had responded to Cilley’s death with horror and outrage. But national parties had cushioned the blow. Although a Southerner had killed a Northerner using a Southern weapon—the code of honor—the tragedy came to be viewed as an unfortunate moment of excess in an ongoing party struggle. The lesson learned, if any, was that Northerners were at a disadvantage in the sectional middle ground of Congress.
The lessons of Sumner’s caning were more severe; Brooks’s savage blows hit their mark. Northern audiences learned what Northern degradation felt like; they saw its power in the near-speechless outrage of Northern congressmen as depicted in the press. The all-too-appropriately named Northern indignation meetings show the intensely emotional public response, as did the fleeing of many a man’s son to Kansas to champion its admission to the Union as a free state. French calmed his son after the caning, but William Fessenden wasn’t as lucky; his son Sam ran away from college to fight in Kansas, though he was tracked down in Illinois and brought home.91
Northerners also learned what it felt like when their representatives fought back—and they liked it.92 Having witnessed Southern bullying in Congress and in Kansas, they found resistance “refreshing.”93 This was a lesson that Northern voters and congressmen would take to heart in years to come. Thus the Richmond Whig’s half-joking plea to Southern senators not to cane, kick, or spit on Henry Wilson (R-MA), who seemed “fatally bent” on sparking a fight to ensure his reelection.94
Southerners learned equally powerful lessons. Sumner’s speech, and to an even greater degree the tirades by Republican congressmen after his caning, schooled Southerners in the emotional power of Northern aggression. Reading the Northern hail of accusations and insults against the South, and seeing in newsprint the red-faced fury of their representatives as they absorbed those blows, they learned what that aggression felt like as never before, and they wanted it put down. Indeed, it had to be put down. As a Southern paper put it two years later, in the name of Southern security, interests, and honor, any such aggressors should be “Sumnarized.”95 Had Sumner not been caned, wrote one Southerner, “the impression would have been confirmed, that the fear of our slaves had made us such cowards that we could be kicked with impunity.”96
Brooks was also of this mind, as his last speech in Congress made clear. Although the House ultimately voted against his expulsion, he resigned his seat and went home—but not before having his say. He had caned Sumner to defend his state and his kinsman, he declared, nothing more. He didn’t want to set a precedent that would end in “drenching this Hall in blood.” But a blow struck at him by a Northerner could result in revolution, he warned. Sectional tempers were high, and the South would defend him with bloodshed if necessary. (And indeed, at this point in Brooks’s speech, Southerners in the visitors’ gallery cheered.) Brooks was calling for a cease-fire but issuing a threat. He then left the House and went home, as did Laurence Keitt two days later when he was formally censured. Both men were immediately reelected.97
Given the ongoing congressional floor show, public perceptions of Congress became increasingly dark and dire. Writing home from Harvard a few days after the caning, French’s son Frank called Congress “a slaughter house.”98 In a letter to Sumner, his fellow Bay State abolitionist Reverend John Turner Sargent described the floor of Congress as a “field of blood.” He had fully expected that “blood would flow,—somebody’s blood, either yours or Wilsons, or Hales, or Giddings before the expiration of your present session on that field of blood, the floor of Congress.”99 Former Massachusetts congressman Edward Everett echoed that thought. He had long foreseen that “the crisis in our political relations at home would be brought on by some personal collision at Washington.”100
Admittedly, such feelings were extreme. In years to come, violence would rise and fall in Congress. The extreme emotion in the wake of the caning didn’t—indeed, couldn’t—last forever; by the end of July it had passed.101 But the “Sumner outrage” and the rise of the Republican Party fundamentally changed public expectations of their congressmen, and in so doing, changed the nature of Congress. Violence would be more than a parliamentary ploy in years to come. It would be a declaration of rights, a banner struck for the cause, a battle cry played for the rafters, and Congress would come to seem more like a battleground than ever before.
Given the extreme emotion, it’s easy to forget that not everyone shared it. But even in the midst of the uproar, some moderate people remained moderate, at least in private; the din of sectional battle cries silenced most such voices in public. “Nothing but denunciation & defiance seem to be tolerated by the masses,” moaned the former Massachusetts congressman Robert Winthrop, commiserating with his former Virginia colleague William Cabell Rives.102 “Timid men” fear speaking out “for fear of being stigmatised … as disloyal to the South,” said Virginian Alexander Rives. Edward Everett said much the same. “No one dares speak aloud on the subject except to echo the popular voice.” Even failing to be angry enough was dangerous; Everett was assailed in the press when he didn’t attend a large indignation meeting in Boston.103 Ironically, in their fervor to defend free speech, Northerners were stifling it.
French was one such moderate man, but by 1856, the nature of moderation had changed. For many Northerners, preserving the Union meant defending Northern rights. As much as French urged compromise and conciliation, his hunger to champion Northern rights didn’t waver. Neither did his commitment to the Republican Party. At its first national convention, in June 1856, French played an active role, just as one would expect of a clerk assisting in the launching of a national organization. He was on the committee that confirmed delegate credentials, and when the convention created a committee composed of a member from ea
ch state to draft the party’s platform, it was French who reminded the gathering to include someone from Kansas, which was not yet a state.104
But even French was getting swept up in the tide of emotions. In January 1857, when thirty-six-year-old Preston Brooks died of suffocation from an acute sore throat—an event that Northerners deemed providential—French thought back to his first encounter with Brooks a few years back. He had liked the man immediately, and liked him more over time. Months before the caning, spotting Brooks seeking votes for a pension for a “poor old soldier friend,” French had introduced him to Amos Granger (R-NY), who helped get Brooks’s bill passed. French’s congratulations were his last words to the South Carolinian. When they next met about ten days before Brooks’s death, French and a friend were strolling down the Avenue, but although Brooks chatted with French’s friend for several minutes, Brooks and French refused to acknowledge each other.105 As much as French liked Brooks, in the context of the times he was unable to speak with him, almost despite himself.
In this sense, the crisis of the Union was a crisis of communication. Northerners were waging war against the South with dangerous words; Southerners were trying to stifle those words with force, and the cross-fire was cutting off conversation, particularly in Congress, an institution grounded on open debate and free speech. The Constitution granted congressmen immunity for their words for a reason, though that right had long been violated by bullies inflicting gags and by their victims spurning privilege of debate in honor disputes. The slavery crisis of the 1850s made this gap between ideals and realities glaringly apparent.106
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