In death, Preston Brooks had finally realized the crowning glory that had eluded him on the battlefields of Mexico and elsewhere. He was not slain by bullet or bayonet, but he died for the South nonetheless, defending causes greater than all others—the protection of slavery, family, sectional honor, and his region's way of life.
Ironically, too, when Preston Brooks expired on a blizzard-choked, bone-chilling January night in Washington D.C., he snatched the martyr's mantle from Charles Sumner. Suddenly it was Brooks, not Sumner—the attacker, not the victim—who elicited deep and powerful sympathy from his region. Suddenly, it was the South that felt victimized and deprived of one of its strongest, unwavering voices, just as the North had during the previous eight months, when Sumner's injuries prevented him from taking his seat in the Senate.
For Brooks, death also brought a measure of peace. Branded by the North as the epitome of Southern barbarism, anointed by the South as its quintessential proslavery representative, Brooks had wilted under the pressure from both sections. He was a changed man during his last few months in Congress, less out-going, more furtive, skittish, and withdrawn, reviled by half the country and glorified by the other half. With all eyes upon him, the intensity of the scrutiny filled him with unease and the heavy burden disrupted and all but unraveled his orderly life.
There is no hard evidence that any of this stress contributed directly to Brooks's fatal illness, but there is no doubt it took a heavy toll on his daily existence. In many ways, Preston Brooks was the South's first casualty of a civil war that loomed, a war that, fittingly enough, his actions had drawn perilously close to reality.
TWENTY-TWO
A MISCAST PRESIDENT
Two weeks after Preston Brooks was buried, a fatigued and unsteady Charles Sumner arrived in Washington with every intention of resuming his duties in the United States Senate. He would last less than one day.
There was some question about whether Sumner should have ventured into the nation's capital at all. He had received tremendous support in Massachusetts and across New England after his reelection—even the Vermont legislature had approved an early February resolution fully, if belatedly, supporting his “Crime Against Kansas” speech and calling him a “fearless advocate of the rights of man”—but the mood was vastly different in the Southern-leaning District of Columbia. Sumner's friends and colleagues had urged him to stay away from Washington in the immediate days following Brooks's funeral, suggesting that his presence would further heighten tensions and perhaps precipitate violence. A. B. Johnson even suggested that Sumner absent himself “for some weeks” to allow the highly charged emotions that accompanied Brooks's funeral to dissipate. A newspaper reporter who visited him in Boston commented on Sumner's “sad weakness,” though he was heartened by the senator's ability to bear up and put his condition in perspective, quoting Sumner as saying: “The poorest slave is in danger of worse out-rages every moment of his life.”
Finally, Boston and New England manufacturers had prevailed on Sumner to return to the Senate sooner to vote on a tariff bill that would reduce the duty on manufactured woolens and eliminate a duty on the raw wool they needed for their factories. Sumner took his seat at 2:00 P.M. on February 26, 1857, for the first time since May 22 of the previous year. Republican colleagues greeted him warmly, but most Democratic senators ignored him completely. “God be thanked you are in your place once more!” declared Theodore Parker in a letter. “There has not been an antislavery speech made in the Congress…since you were carried out of it—not one. I hope to hear a blast on that old war trumpet which shall make the North ring and the South tremble.”
However, Sumner lacked the energy and spirit that Parker longed for, and in fact, quickly suffered another relapse. Too weak to remain in his seat—he nearly passed out—he returned to his lodgings, leaving instructions to be called as votes came up on the tariff bill. Sumner returned to the chamber at 9:00 P.M. and cast seven votes on various amendments before leaving the Capitol at 2:00 A.M., completely exhausted.
On March 1, Sumner wrote despondently to Parker: “I have sat in my seat only on one day. After a short time the torment of my system became great, and a cloud began to gather over my brain. I tottered out and took to my bed.” Sumner confided that he desperately longed to speak, but was not capable of doing so. He also noted that his Boston-based physicians warned him against public speaking and exertion, lest he face further brain injury and possibly paralysis. He would heed their warnings, since it was clear to him that, while he had improved, the “complete overthrow of my powers organically” meant he could hope to recover “only most slowly.” His pent-up desire to speak “must stand adjourned to another day. Nobody can regret this so much as myself.” For one of the first times, Sumner mentioned the current state of his health and his own mortality in the same breath. “I may die,” he wrote Parker, “but if I live a word shall be spoken in the Senate, which shall tear Slavery open from its chops [cheeks or jowls] to its heel.”
Sumner decided to travel to Europe to restore his health, believing that further rest and relaxation, rather than medical treatment, would make him well. He remained in Washington only until March 4 to take the oath as senator for his second term, the same day James Buchanan was sworn in as America's fifteenth president. Three days later, in New York, the forty-six-year-old Sumner boarded the steamship Fulton bound for Paris, a city he had visited as a young man twenty years earlier. As the vessel departed, a large crowd of friends and political acquaintances cheered Sumner, and the New York Young Men's Republican Club fired a gun salute in his honor.
The last two letters Sumner had written before leaving—one to the governor of Vermont and the other to an attorney friend—both focused on his fervent desire for a free Kansas. “With a farewell to my country… I give my last thoughts to suffering Kansas,” he wrote to lawyer James Redpath from the Fulton's pilot house, “that she may be lifted into the enjoyment of freedom and repose.”
For now, though, Charles Sumner would hold no direct political influence over events in Kansas or anywhere else. As it had been for nine months, his Senate chair was vacant once again.
Unlike the mood of the country, the weather for James Buchanan's March 4 inauguration was calm and sunny, and for a short time, at least, the cheering thousands who lined Pennsylvania Avenue to witness the inaugural procession appeared united in both spirit and hope. After a brutally divisive 1856, during which the caning and its aftermath had split North and South, perhaps a new president could patch together some semblance of peace, however strained and fragile.
Proslavery Congressman John A. Quitman of Mississippi led the procession, which included an open carriage carrying outgoing President Franklin Pierce, to the National Hotel, where president-elect Buchanan lodged. Buchanan and his niece, Harriet Lane (Buchanan was the only president never to marry), joined Pierce in the carriage and rode toward Capitol Hill amid hearty approval from the crowd.
Hailing from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, sixty-five-year-old James Buchanan (he would be America's last president born in the eighteenth century) within moments would become a Northern president with Southern sympathies, or perhaps more accurately, with a view on slavery that favored the South. While he personally opposed the institution (“I believe it to be a great political and a great moral evil”), at one time in his political life going so far as to purchase slaves in Washington, D.C., so he could bring them home to Pennsylvania and set them free, Buchanan firmly believed slavery was rooted in the Constitution and could not be legislated out of existence. States and territories could and should decide for themselves whether slavery would be permitted. “I thank God my lot has been cast in a state where it does not exist,” he once wrote.
When Buchanan arrived on the stand in front of the east portico of the Capitol, he stood in the shadow of a spiderweb of construction scaffolding that encased the building's unfinished great dome. It was a perfect metaphor for an America still unfinished, a country consumed an
d divided by a debate over slavery that had been part of the national dialogue since the Constitution's ratification nearly seventy years earlier. In various periods over the past seven decades, anger had bubbled up from one region or another, to one extent or another, but never had it heated to the point it reached in 1856. Buchanan was assuming the country's highest office in the midst of a firestorm.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney administered the oath of office to the new president. Legend has it that Taney, who would become the center of another national controversy within days, whispered to Buchanan how the Supreme Court would soon decide in the highly anticipated case in which a slave named Dred Scott was fighting to be declared free. In truth, Buchanan had known about the decision a week earlier when Justice Robert C. Grier, who was also from Pennsylvania, sent him a confidential letter in response to Buchanan's query on the leanings of the Court. Though worried about Buchanan's meddling in the Court's affairs, Grier informed the president-elect of the way the Court—which was dominated by Southerners, including the fiercely anti-abolitionist Taney—would rule: that slavery was constitutional and that the federal government had no authority to dictate whether states or territories allowed it. Sharing those same beliefs, Buchanan had urged Grier and other justices to go along with the majority, further interference that would prove detrimental to his presidency.
Buchanan began his inaugural address with another damaging move. At the outset of his remarks, he announced that he would serve only one term. He believed this would convince the nation that he had “no motive to influence my conduct…except the desire to ably and faithfully serve my country.” It was a terrible miscalculation. His declaration that he would not seek reelection in 1860 immediately weakened him politically, just when the country needed a strong leader to bring it together.
Following the surprising remark about his political future, Buchanan labored through a largely pedestrian and uninspired inaugural address, though Southerners were pleased with its tone and it was not without controversy. He decried the “long agitation” against slavery, expressed his desire to see the agitation end, and hoped that the “geographical parties to which [the agitation] has given birth…will speedily become extinct.” Indeed, he said, the antislavery extremism of Republicans and abolitionists had produced “no positive good to any human being; it has been the prolific source of great evils to the master, the slave, and to the whole country.” The activities of antislavery zealots had “alienated and estranged the people of the sister States from each other, and has even endangered the very existence of the Union.”
In addition, Buchanan warned, this continued agitation could eventually endanger the personal safety “of a large portion of our countrymen where the institution exists.” It was the job of every Union-loving man to suppress antislavery agitation. He foreshadowed the Dred Scott decision in his remarks, feigning ignorance of the Supreme Court's deliberations, but promising to adhere to the Court's will. “To their decision,” he told the crowd at the inauguration, “I shall cheerfully submit,” adding that he firmly believed “nothing can be fairer than to leave the people of a Territory free from all…interference, to decide their own destiny for themselves, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.”
While Southerners may have applauded, the New York Tribune blasted Buchanan in an editorial the following day: “You may ‘cheerfully submit’…to whatever five slaveholders…on the bench of the Supreme Court may be ready to utter on this subject. But not one man who really desires the triumph of Freedom over Slavery in the Territories will do so.”
Buchanan's inaugural plea for an end to agitation about slavery illustrated not so much his moderate temperament as his tone-deafness about the mood of the nation; indeed, he was exactly the wrong man for the presidency in March 1857.
Though he was an experienced politician, he had been away from the country for much of the previous two years as minister to Great Britain. Thus, he did not possess a clear, hands-on understanding of the fundamental change that the caning had brought to the tenor of the slavery debate. When he spoke of “agitation” against slavery, he seemed oblivious to the new Northern reality that had emerged in the wake of Sumner's beating; moderates, even conservatives, no longer considered “agitation” a dirty word. Indeed, the vast majority believed the agitation Buchanan cautioned against was the only way to combat the unchecked aggressiveness of the South. Even the meteoric growth of the Republican Party seemed to elude Buchanan, despite the election he had just survived and the large number of Northern states he had failed to carry.
In addition, Buchanan was a deliberative consensus builder at a time when the country needed boldness and certitude. He was often hesitant to lead decisively and forcefully on policy matters. A longtime friend recalled that “even among close friends he rarely expressed his opinions at all upon disputed questions, except in language especially marked with a cautious circumspection almost amounting to timidity.”
All of this, coupled with his own self-imposed lame-duck status that he announced in his inaugural address, meant that Buchanan's administration was shaky from the start. As though to foreshadow the difficulties he would have, immediately after his inauguration, he was victimized by a malady that again would serve as a metaphor for his presidency. Buchanan, his niece's brother Elliot Lane, John Quitman (who led the inaugural procession), and hundreds of other people, mainly Southern sympathizers, who had lodged at the National Hotel in the days and weeks prior to the inauguration all became extremely ill. Rumors abounded that abolitionists had tried to poison Buchanan.
The National Hotel, a large, rectangular, five-story, two-hundred-room structure on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, was one of the District's most luxurious hotels, and had long been a favorite venue for Southerners. Buchanan had stayed there in January, became ill, and was urged by his physician to avoid the hotel when he returned in the weeks prior to the inauguration. Buchanan ignored the advice, and late on Inauguration Day, he and other hotel guests began suffering diarrhea, fever, chills, and terrible gastric pain—all symptoms of heavy-metal poisoning. Buchanan's physician, Dr. Jonathan Messersmith Foltz wrote that there were “intimations of a deliberate attempt to poison ‘by some fanatical abolitionists.’” The New York Times published a story weeks later saying that the outbreak, which became known as National Hotel Disease, was part of the most “gigantic and startling crime of the age…there is abundant ground for suspecting that the disease is the result of poison administered in the food of guests of the hotel.”
Beyond the symptoms, evidence of a murderous plot was lacking, but the combination of the National Hotel's pro-Southern clientele, a president-elect with proslavery sympathies, and the North-South tensions of the past year kept the story alive. Even when the Washington Board of Health investigated the outbreak and concluded it was the result of a combination of “trash and filth” near the building, “rat droppings” near the hotel's water supply, and “foul air and noxious gases” in the sewer pipes under the hotel, rumors of the devious abolitionist plot persisted. Several years later, the Confederate spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow described how Union troops confiscated her private papers when she was captured. Among those documents her captors examined was “a full and detailed account…of the appalling attempt of the Abolition party to poison President Buchanan, and the chiefs of the Democratic party at the National Hotel.” Greenhow noted that “one story [was] that rats, which were very troublesome, had been poisoned and had fallen into the tanks which supplied the hotel with water.” She discounted the theory, pointing out that the tanks were all emptied of water, “and no rats could be found.”
Whatever the cause of the outbreak—modern accounts suggest the disease was caused by a bacterial infectious agent—its effects were devastating. Quitman never recovered and died the following year. Eliot Lane died the same month, and newspaper accounts estimated that between thirty and forty others also died within weeks. Buchanan remained ill unti
l mid-April, and spent numerous days in serious condition. Greenhow wrote that Buchanan later told her “that he was obliged to drink several tumblers of unadulterated brandy, to keep himself from entire physical exhaustion.”
Though Buchanan fully recovered, his presidency never experienced good health, let alone vitality. He would deal with continued struggles in Kansas that exacerbated sectional tension, a near-crippling economic recession in 1857, corruption and disloyalty in his cabinet, Southern secession near the end of his term, and a general miasma that gripped his administration and rendered him nearly paralyzed to deal with the great events facing the country. “My dear sir,” he said to his successor Abraham Lincoln in the White House in 1861, “if you are as happy on entering this house as I on leaving, you are a very happy man indeed.”
And Buchanan's woes started immediately. The Supreme Court, led by the pro-Southern majority, spoke loudly and broadly on the Dred Scott case on March 6, 1857, just two days after the new president took the oath. Buchanan knew what was coming, had surreptitiously lobbied for it, in fact, and felt sure that the Court's ruling would put an end to the “slavery agitation” he had spoken of in his inaugural address. It was the greatest, most naïve miscalculation Buchanan would make during his presidency, and it—and the events that followed—assured that his administration would be branded an utter failure by contemporaries and historians alike.
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