The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  In fact, just ten minutes before he expired, Brooks had told the group that he was feeling better. But suddenly, McQueen noticed the “violent heaving of [Brooks's] chest and lungs,” as Brooks seemed to be suffering a “perfect stoppage of the wind-pipe” that allowed “not one particle of breath” into his body. His doctors quickly applied poultices of mustard and cornmeal, but to no avail. One South Carolinian angrily wrote later that some in the room advised doctors to try a treatment of “leeching and blistering his throat” to clear his breathing passages, but the medical men declined. He added: “Brooks ought not to have died; my own opinion is that leeches freely applied would have saved him.” Instead, in the last moments of Brooks's life, his doctors called for warm water and salt, presumably to induce vomiting in an effort to relieve pressure on his throat, but it was too late. No one could help Brooks, who, in his final seconds, “endeavored to tear his own throat open to get breath,” seized violently, and died.

  Boyle later ruled the cause of death as acute inflammation of the throat (probably some kind of esophageal infection), which resulted in Brooks's near strangulation in the final moments of his life. “He died a horrid death, and suffered intensely,” noted the official telegram announcing his demise.

  Shortly after Brooks died, McQueen watched as Senator Andrew Butler, the object of Charles Sumner's scorn and Preston Brooks's vengeful chivalry, came into his second cousin's bedroom, threw himself on top of Brooks's body, “and wept like a child, until a heart of stone might bleed.” Like Butler, presumably, McQueen could not come to grips with his friend's death. “I never saw a death so sudden and difficult to realize,” he said, wondering how Brooks's wife and mother would handle the news.

  Brooks's initial illness was not made public, which made his sudden death a complete surprise to the nation. Orr told Martha Brooks that his friends were “appalled” as word spread through-out Washington that Preston was dead. “Not one in five hundred knew of his illness,” Orr points out. “He was in the House on Saturday last.” Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson wrote to Sumner on January 27: “A few moments ago the city was startled by the announcement of the death of Brooks. It came upon us all unexpectedly, and it will startle the country.” Referring to the caning, Wilson added, “He has gone to his Maker to render an account for his deeds,” and pointed out that “his enemies cannot but feel sympathy for his fate. What a name to leave behind him!”

  Just eight months after Preston Brooks's brutal attack on Charles Sumner had shocked a nation, the announcement of Brooks's death did the same. “If he had been struck by lightning,” one Northern correspondent noted, “the announcement could not have been more unexpected.”

  Still recuperating at Longfellow's, Sumner did not comment publicly on his assailant's death. Longfellow wrote in his journal: “I do not think Sumner had any personal feelings against him. He looked upon him as a mere tool of the slaveholders, or…of the South Carolinians.”

  Years later, Sumner seemed to confirm Longfellow's 1857 assessment when he did finally speak of Brooks: “It was slavery, not he, that struck the blow.” In 1872, Sumner was walking with a friend in the Congressional Cemetery when his companion pointed out to him the cenotaph of Brooks, of which Sumner was not previously aware. Sumner stared at the monument for several moments and then uttered: “Poor fellow, poor fellow.” When his friend asked how he felt about Brooks, Sumner replied: “Only as to a brick that should fall upon my head from a chimney. He was the unconscious agent of a malign power.”

  Considering that less than one year before his death Preston Brooks was a backbench legislator, the elaborateness and pageantry of his funeral services were nothing short of extraordinary. The national notoriety he had achieved as a result of the caning accorded him hero and statesman status upon his demise. Southern members of Congress and other public officials with proslavery leanings mourned and eulogized Brooks with reverential obsequies and lofty hosannas more often reserved for deceased kings and other heads of state than two-term members of Congress. Ordinary people wept when they heard the news and craved as many details as possible about the circumstances of Brooks's death and the tributes planned for him.

  Brooks's friends dressed him in a black suit and braved the elements to move him to the Ladies Parlor at nearby Brown's Hotel. “Excepting for his palor [sic], his features [were] composed and natural,” Orr wrote to Brooks's widow. “He looks as if he was sleeping a gentle sleep.” A wreath of white flowers encircled Brooks's head and a bouquet was set upon his chest. “He looks so natural,” Orr wrote, “that I felt as if he would speak.” Orr assured Martha Brooks that friends had clipped a few locks of her husband's hair to send to her. While laid out at Brown's, hundreds of mourners visited “to take a last look at the face of their departed friend.”

  On January 29, two days after his untimely death, despite horrible weather conditions in Washington, thousands made their way to the Capitol to attend the funeral. The galleries and rotunda leading to the House and Senate chambers were “almost blocked up by the living mass” of people who came to view Brooks's body, which lay in the Capitol. The House chamber and galleries were so full that the House set aside its rules to allow women on the floor. Virtually all of the country's leaders were in attendance, including President Franklin Pierce, President-elect James Buchanan, members of the cabinet, and members of the Supreme Court.

  McQueen was impressed with the intrepid nature of visitors who somehow “got into the Capitol notwithstanding the depth of the snow” and the freezing temperatures, which had plunged to five degrees below zero. The turnout provided some consolation to his friends, as did the fact that Brooks's suffering was short-lived. “Still,” McQueen wrote, “the fact stands up too truly that we shall see him again no more.” McQueen had paid for the undertaker to travel to Baltimore to retrieve the “handsomest metalic [sic] coffin there, the longest in Baltimore…plenty long for the body,” sturdy enough to withstand the long trip back to Edgefield that Brooks's family had planned.

  Both the House and Senate agreed to forego business for the day in honor of Brooks's memory, and in both chambers, members recounted their affection for the South Carolinian. Most were stunned and deeply affected by his sudden death. “Had he fallen in the evening of life, or had he even sunk down under the gradual inroads of disease,” Keitt said he could have accepted Brooks's death more readily. “But for his sun to set while in its noonday blaze, it is hard to feel that it will rise no more.” Georgia Senator Robert Toombs acknowledged that “many of us have lost a friend [and] the country a patriot statesman,” and when Toombs reached the point in his remarks where he referred to Brooks's grieving mother, wife, and children, the senator was overcome with emotion. He signaled a colleague that he was unable to proceed. South Carolina Senator Josiah Evans said that the more he had worked with Brooks “the higher has he risen in my regard, and the deeper is the distress and affliction which I feel for his early death.” Like Keitt, Evans focused on the suddenness with which Brooks died. “When a man, in the prime of life, in the midst of his hopes, is suddenly cut down…it is an event which strikes deep into the human heart,” he said.

  Even Northern representatives spoke favorably of Brooks, most notably Ohio's Lewis Campbell, who had been a member of the House committee investigating the caning. Campbell called Brooks both “generous and brave” and said he merited the confidence of his constituents “because he was the faithful advocate of their political sentiments, and the jealous guardian of their interests and their honor.”

  Virtually everyone avoided references to the caning. The tearful Toombs alluded to it in the Senate when he said that Brooks “had come among us in evil times,” when the leaders and ideas of one section “were objects of the bitterest vituperation and invective by the representatives of the other.” Only one Southern House member, Representative John Savage of Tennessee, overtly mentioned the attack, favorably equating Brooks's caning of Sumner to that of Brutus assassinating Julius Caesar. Outrage
d Republicans left the House in protest as soon as Savage stopped speaking. “To prevent further controversy, Senator [Andrew] Butler had Savage's remarks omitted from the published proceedings,” historian T. Lloyd Benson noted. Nonetheless, the damage was done. Henry Wilson wrote to Sumner: “Savage uttered the secret feelings of the Southern gang of Negro decriers.”

  After the eulogies, at just before 2:00 P.M., Brooks's body was brought into the House, the coffin placed immediately in front of the clerk's desk. With the full array of political dignitaries gathered solemnly, Rev. Daniel Waldo conducted services. When he finished, the remarkable procession made its way out-side in the freezing cold to the Congressional Cemetery—led by the chaplains of both houses of Congress and followed by Brooks's attending physicians, the pallbearers carrying Brooks's coffin (including his friend Rep. Henry Edmundson), Brooks's family and friends, House and Senate officers, President Pierce, cabinet members, the Supreme Court, the diplomatic corps, officers of the Army and Navy, and even the mayor of Washington, D.C. Hundreds of “citizens and strangers” brought up the rear of the procession.

  Additional prayers were recited at the cemetery, and a cenotaph placed, but Brooks's body was then transported to the Congressional mortuary to await a contingent from Edgefield who would carry him to his final resting place.

  If the pageantry of Brooks's Washington funeral was remarkable, what followed was the stuff of legend, a pilgrimage during which the name and historical standing of Preston Brooks was elevated in the South from revered icon to a giant figure of Shakespearean, even mythical proportions, a reputation he enjoys to the present day.

  His attack on Charles Sumner, coupled with his sudden death at such a youthful age, branded Brooks a tragic hero and endowed him with a status that few Southerners have ever attained. Some historians may argue that John C. Calhoun or Robert E. Lee approached or even exceeded Brooks's exalted position, but a powerful argument can be made that the long, mournful return of Brooks's body from Washington, D.C., to Edgefield solidified a unique place for Brooks in the vast pantheon of Southern antebellum and Civil War history. It was a journey that was documented, almost breathlessly, by virtually every newspaper in the South, and in dozens of letters and diaries. It inspired poetry, tears, editorials, homilies, and the sad gathering of thousands of citizens at large cities and small towns across the South. “Our village bells are now tolling…their slow and melancholy tones,” the Edgefield Advertiser wrote. “Never have we witnessed such a deep gloom over our community.”

  Edgefield quickly organized a committee of twenty-six men—“intelligent and substantial men,” according to one account—to travel to Washington to retrieve Brooks's body. The arduous journey took ten days, eighty-eight hours by train from Charleston alone, but all along the way the South Carolina committee was treated to hospitality and generosity from hotel proprietors, tavern owners, and train conductors. The committee was touched to its “heart's core,” for example, when the adjutant of Newton's Hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, treated members to “bed and board” on the evening of February 9, while expressing his admiration for citizens of the Palmetto State as they “[paid] the last worldly honors to one of her most favorite sons.” The owner of the carriage line between Alexandria and Washington also transported the South Carolinians free of charge.

  Once in Washington, the committee collected Brooks's remains and set out quickly, beginning their return trip at just after 5:00 P.M. on February 10. The steamer took more than five hours to plow through the ice in Acquia Creek and into northern Virginia, which delayed its eventual arrival in Richmond, causing it to miss the train that would take members deeper South. The Richmond mayor, James Mayo, urged the committee to allow the city to pay homage to Brooks with a brief ceremony, and then transported the body to the state capitol for safekeeping. The city then paid for meals and lodging for the South Carolina committee.

  At 5:00 A.M. the following morning, a detachment of the Virginia militia, accompanied by a military band, escorted the hearse that carried Brooks's body to the railroad depot to board the train that would carry the group into the Carolinas. The Edgefield committee and Brooks's body stopped in the North Carolina communities of Goldsborough, Wilmington, Charlotte, and Raleigh, before moving into South Carolina and stopping at Branchville, Charleston, Abbeville, and Hamburg, crossing over into Georgia to allow the citizens of Augusta to view Brooks's body, before moving to the final stop—Brooks's home of Edgefield.

  All along the way, mayors and townspeople paid tribute with speeches and prayers and eulogies and remarkable symbolic gestures; church bells were rung, regular business stopped, and stores closed. In Charleston, the harbor master requested that all vessels in port lower their flags to half-staff (every ship complied), guns were fired when Brooks's train arrived, and church bells tolled throughout the city as the procession wound its way through the city streets. In Augusta, officials removed Brooks's body—still virtually frozen—and placed the remains in the Council Chamber at City Hall, where it was viewed by “hundreds of…citizens, anxious to testify…their respect for the memory of the lamented dead.”

  Even in places where Brooks's body did not pass through, Southerners commemorated his death. In Columbia, where citizens were disappointed when a failure to make a train connection caused the Brooks procession to skip the capital city, hundreds still gathered to hear Mayor E. J. Arthur express “the sorrow that pervaded the whole state,” and mourn a man who was “known and loved” throughout South Carolina. In Milton, Florida, residents gathered and passed resolutions honoring Brooks, saying that his death “cast a gloom, not only over his native state, but upon every portion of this Confederacy.” These events occurred as the Edgefield contingent escorted Brooks's corpse home.

  Finally, after the Augusta ceremonies, a hearse drawn by four large horses began the final leg of the journey, transporting Brooks's body to nearby Edgefield, just across the state line; along the way the streets were jammed with people anxious to view the procession and pay their respects. On Friday, February 12, Brooks's funeral procession took place in Edgefield. A signal gun was fired to announce the assembly of the procession on a vacant lot at the fork of the Columbia and Hamburg Plank roads. A slew of military, fraternal, municipal, legal, congressional, and university dignitaries—followed by “strangers and citizens generally”—formed under the command of Major S. S. Tompkins. The solemn line of marchers, accompanied by the mournful toll of church bells, moved up Main Street to the Edgefield Court House. “There the body lay in state, uncovered, that his friends, relatives, and devoted slaves might look their last on the beloved form,” one reporter noted. He also described the beatific condition of Brooks's body, “frozen for more than two weeks and perfectly preserved,” which gave his “noble, youthful face” the appearance of being “celestially beautiful.”

  Afterward, Brooks was delivered to a guard of honor at the Episcopal Church and carried to Willowbrook Cemetery. Brooks was buried beneath a fourteen-foot-tall marble obelisk-shaped tombstone, a favorite shape for recognizing heroes, especially after the geometric shape was adopted for the Washington Monument in the 1840s. The stone, which had been crafted in Charleston and transported to Edgefield, was adorned with laurel wreaths, long-time classical symbols of honor and distinction. Part of Brooks's epitaph read:

  Ever Able, Manly, Just and Heroic

  Illustrating true Patriotism

  By his devotion to his Country;

  The whole South unites

  With his bereaved family

  In deploring his untimely end.

  And further along, the inscription promised:

  Preston S. Brooks will be Long, Long Remembered;

  As one in whom the virtues loved to Dwell

  Tho' sad to us, and dark this dispensation.

  We know God's wisdom

  Orders all things well.

  Seventeen days after suffering a sudden and agonizing death, Preston Brooks, Southern hero, finally rested in his belov
ed Edgefield.

  For many Republicans, abolitionists, and Northerners, Brooks's death was regarded as a providential act. Charles Francis Adams wrote in his diary that while some believed Brooks's death was a “just visitation” from the Almighty, he felt Brooks had been “a simple, good natured creature” who had been brutalized through his association with slaveholders. While he found any attempt to “canonize an assassin” distasteful, he wished “peace to his ashes.” In a speech at Boston's Faneuil Hall, Massachusetts Congressman Anson Burlingame said Brooks had a “larger heart than many in the North…and was a braver man than the men that incited him” to attack Sumner. “Let all the hostility of the past go down into the grave, where he sleeps his last sleep,” Burlingame urged the crowd. “He is with his God, who will deal mercifully with him. Let us try to be merciful here.”

  Sumner's correspondents were not so forgiving. In addition to Senator Henry Wilson's assessment that Brooks would be held accountable for his deeds by his maker, the Massachusetts lawmaker spent time during Brooks's funeral thinking of Sumner's long suffering. “I could not but feel…that God had avenged the blows of last May,” Wilson wrote of Brooks's death. Others adopted similar tones of divine righteousness. “God has caused judgment to be heard from heaven,” one man wrote. “Everybody (north) was quoting scripture…‘Vengeance is mine saith the Lord: I will repay.’” One abolitionist editor eschewed any heavenly references or charity for the deceased when he simply branded Brooks a symbol of an ever-decaying Southern society: “treacherous, insolent, imbruted and tryrannical.”

  Conversely, the South, and South Carolina in particular, treated Brooks's death as a sectional catastrophe. “The arm that was so lately raised in defense of his beloved state, is rigid in death,” the Advertiser noted. “Sad is the mournful event that has deprived the State and the South of such a champion.” The Sumter Watchman noted “the sensation of burning regard” for Brooks, as well as the “affection, and almost…worship.” The Yorkville Enquirer declared that Brooks would be mourned “as nations lament the death of the great,” and the citizens of Abbeville greeted Brooks's body as it passed through on the train to Edgefield with the reverence “awarded to a Roman General.” Women across the South penned poems and submitted them to local papers, stanza after stanza of grief-filled verse filled with religious allusions and tributes to Brooks's valor and honor as a statesman.