The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  In addition, while Taney may have had misgivings about slavery at certain points in his career, he believed strongly in its legality because it was not forbidden by the Constitution. Indeed, he pointed out more than once that when the federal Constitution was published in Massachusetts, the paper in which it was printed also contained an advertisement of a Negro for sale. He harbored particular hostility toward Massachusetts, a state that was once the center of the triangle slave trade and was now the home to fanatical abolitionists; Taney viewed the Commonwealth's position as selfish and hypocritical. As historian Don Fehrenbacher noted: “Taney, above all in the late 1850s, was fiercely anti-antislavery.”

  While some of these feelings could be inferred from his public writings, his fierce hostility to the antislavery movement was more evident in his private correspondence. In October 1856—just five months after the caning, in the midst of that event's fall-out, and one month before the surging Republican Party hoped to win a presidential election—Taney wrote to his son-in-law: “The South is doomed to sink to a state of inferiority, and the power of the North will be exercised to gratify their cupidity and their evil passions, without the slightest regard to the principles of the Constitution.” Taney saw only one course: “Nothing but a firm united action, nearly unanimous in every state, can check Northern insult and Northern aggression.” Written shortly before the second round of arguments in the Dred Scott case, Fehrenbacher accurately pointed out that the letter would have caused a sensation if it had somehow fallen into the hands of a Republican journalist.

  The raw honesty of Taney's letter represents the opinions of an aging, grief-stricken man who likely believed he had little to live for. The preceding year, 1855, had been one of unimaginable personal pain and heartache for Roger Taney, and his biographer, Carl B. Swisher believes the ordeal may have seriously affected his judgment in the Dred Scott case and thereafter.

  Taney and his wife, Anne, to whom he had been married for forty-nine years, and to whom he pledged “a love as true and sincere as that I offered in…1806,” were accustomed to spending the summer months with their family at Old Point Comfort near Norfolk, Virginia. In 1855, Taney's youngest daughter, twenty-eight-year-old Alice, whom he adored, asked to accompany her sister and brother-in-law on their annual vacation to Newport, Rhode Island, a favorite retreat of Southerners looking to escape the summer heat. Her father disliked the idea, saying he looked upon the Southern flight to Newport “as nothing more than the unfortunate feeling of inferiority in the South, which believes everything in the North superior to what we have.” While he grudgingly consented to Alice's request, he attached strict financial conditions to her travel; exasperated, she abandoned the idea to go to Newport and traveled with her parents to Old Point as always.

  That summer, an outbreak of yellow fever struck across the channel in Norfolk and the Taneys found themselves in a dilemma. Should they remain on Old Point, essentially trapped if the disease made its way to their home? Or, should they risk exposure to possibly infected passengers by taking a boat back to Maryland? They remained on Old Point as the epidemic spread to other Virginia communities. In late September, Anne Taney fell ill, appearing to suffer first a mild stroke and then a more severe one. As a frantic Roger summoned a doctor from Baltimore to minister to his beloved wife, the dreaded yellow fever gripped Alice, whom Taney described as “made up of loveliness alone.”

  Mother and daughter died just five hours apart on September 29–30. Taney was devastated and guilt-ridden that he had opposed Alice's request to travel to Newport. A family friend who visited him later described him as “crushed and broken in spirit.” Another relative, attempting to capture the depth of Taney's grief, wrote: “He says he shall not live, that he can never take his seat on the bench again…. He has been in tears like an infant.” Taney, he said, had given way to the most “bitter self reproaches, for keeping his family at the Point in reliance on his own judgment that they were there free from danger.”

  Taney was in shock and made no pretense of how he expected his terrible loss to affect him. To one fellow jurist who expressed condolences, Taney wrote in November 1855: “It would be useless for me to tell you what I have passed through.” Although Taney planned to sit in the Supreme Court at the beginning of the term in December, he admitted, “I shall enter upon those duties with the painful consciousness that they will be imperfectly discharged.” The next time he saw his colleague, Taney warned: “I shall meet you with broken health and with a broken spirit.” Overwhelmed with grief, Taney sold his family house in Baltimore and established permanent residence in Washington, D.C. He never again visited Old Point. Friends, relatives, and perhaps Taney himself, questioned whether the chief justice wanted to live any longer.

  It is clear that Roger Taney's personal tragedy, the heartbreaking near-simultaneous deaths of a wife and daughter he could not save, made him more desperate to preserve the one thing they all cherished: the Southern way of life. His deep personal pain, coupled with his age and infirmity, tore Taney free from the moorings of judicial impartiality that serve as the foundation for any Supreme Court justice. He had lost the people dearest to him, and his great fear that his Southern way of life would also disappear as abolitionists continued their relentless attacks drove him to become more extremist in his writings and his opinions, and exert greater influence over his fellow Southern justices.

  The claims of Southern inferiority and fears of Northern superiority that he expressed to Alice when comparing Old Point and Newport had become even more starkly delineated in the aftermath of the caning. Preston Brooks's assault on Charles Sumner, while carried out in defense of Southern values, now threatened those values because of the caning's backlash. Northerners were furious and clamoring for revenge, the Republican Party was growing in influence, and even former moderates were now questioning the future of slavery. Taney was neither insulated nor isolated from these events, and even as he penned his majority opinion in Dred Scott, he was well aware of the national uproar that the caning had precipitated.

  Roger Taney's majority opinion in the Dred Scott case was a byproduct of all that was happening around him, most of it caused or affected by the caning—and that included the emotional postscript to the caning itself, the sudden death of Preston Brooks, a new Southern hero who had perished as quickly as Taney's wife and daughter. As historian Williamjames Hull Hoffer described it: “If we cannot conclude that the majority opinions in the Dred Scott case were a result of the caning of Charles Sumner, we can safely assume that they were part and parcel of the phenomenon the caning revealed and helped produce.” Clear parallels are evident between the actions of Taney and Brooks. Taney's extreme proslavery opinion was an attempt to stop the antislavery crusade in its tracks, much as Brooks's attack on Sumner had been, and yet, both men were deeply influenced by personal considerations: Brooks, by Sumner's attack on his kin, Senator Andrew Butler; Taney, by the hopelessness that engulfed him after his wife Anne and his daughter Alice died and the fear that the entire framework of Southern existence was crumbling.

  No longer capable of a balanced judicial temperament, distraught and fearful of losing all he held dear, Roger Taney chose extreme judicial activism in a desperate effort to save his beloved South. In so doing, he tarnished the Supreme Court's reputation for the remainder of the century—and his own legacy forever.

  More important, with their sweeping opinions in Dred Scott, Roger Taney and the Supreme Court majority—like Preston Brooks and the caning—had brought the country one step closer to civil war.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  FIRE TREATMENT

  “My whole system is still morbidly sensitive,” an exasperated Charles Sumner wrote from Paris on April 23, 1857, “and after a walk which would have been pastime once, I drag my legs along with difficulty.”

  Thus began a two-and-a-half-year ordeal for Sumner in a desperate effort to achieve full health, including two separate and lengthy tours of Europe, sandwiched around a frustratin
g and unproductive return to Washington for a four-month period at the end of 1857 and the beginning of 1858, during which he confided to a friend that he sometimes wished for death to take him.

  His European trips were a bizarre mixture of immense pleasure and excruciating pain, intellectual stimulation and physical debilitation, rugged adventurism and fragile timidity, pleasant social fraternization and utter loneliness. He toured museums, cathedrals, and libraries, attended receptions, lectures, and concerts, and dined with William Thackeray, William Gladstone, and Alexis de Tocqueville. He traveled to France, England, Scotland, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and Italy. He “plunged into the abyss of the Louvre galleries,” mingled with the intellectual elite in London, tromped through snow that was six inches deep on the streets of Munich, rode horseback in the snow-capped Pyrenees, and walked for miles through the streets of Paris and Rome. He rested a night with monks in Grand St. Bernard Pass in Switzerland on his way to Italy, admired the beauty of Lago Maggiore on the south side of the Italian Alps and Lake Leman in Geneva, and lodged with friends in a remote section of the Scottish Highlands where the hills stretched for miles and “no [other] family [lived] within 40 or 50 miles.”

  Yet, through all of it, his pain, his affliction, his “invalid” status as he so often referred to it, was with him virtually always. His ordeal began upon his arrival in Europe in 1857 when his injuries from the caning were exacerbated after he caught a bad cold that became influenza and “finally ripened into a furious Parisian grippe, which, finding my whole system sensitive, ransacked me.” For ten days, Sumner did not leave his room. The grippe subsided, but the symptoms from the caning persisted as they had since May 22, 1856. Physically, some days were better than others and some days were terrible; virtually none was pain free. Mentally, Sumner could not shake his feeling of foreboding even during the good physical times. The days he allowed himself to hope—“I am almost well, my disease spins out slowly, but surely,” he assured Salmon Chase in September 1857—were more than offset by despondency: “Sometimes I wish that death would come and close the whole case,” he confided to Theodore Parker in April 1858, after admitting that his pain had been so disabling for several days that he had been hardly able to walk.

  He sometimes derived relief from physical activities, but almost always suffered relapses when he attempted intense mental exertion. Worst of all was when he returned to Washington in December 1857 after his first European trip, despite the advice of friends who believed he was still not fully recuperated. He took his seat in the Senate, but his physical condition prevented him from participating in debates over the admission of Kansas to the Union. He attended sessions in the morning, but otherwise stayed away; protracted debates and confrontational language filled him with anxiety. “I am unhappy, and yesterday, after sitting in the Senate, I felt like a man of ninety,” he wrote to Theodore Parker on December 19. “When will this end?” Just being in Washington, close to the scene of his attack, once again surrounded by harsh arguments and feeling the polarization between North and South, Sumner was unable to cope. He admitted just before Christmas of 1857: “While in Europe, without care or responsibility… I was not conscious of the extent of my disability. But here it is presented to me most painfully. I cannot work with the mind, except in very narrow limits.”

  He acknowledged that sitting in the Senate was “exhausting” despite his removal from active debating. He spent his time inspecting improvements at the Capitol, reading newspapers, and sitting quietly in his room, “often much alone.” When he did try to engage in active work, he found it overwhelming. He tried his best to explain his condition to Samuel Gridley Howe: “At times I feel almost well, and then after a little writing or a little sitting in the Senate, I feel the weight spreading over my brain.” To Parker he acknowledged: “This is hard—very hard. It is hard to be so near complete recovery, & still to be kept back.”

  Charles Sumner was nowhere near a complete recovery. He remained in the Senate until April 1858, when he suffered another relapse in what he called his “calamitous illness” that left him weak and in great pain. “I have had a pull back, which makes me very unhappy—especially because it shews me that my infirmity has not yet left me,” he informed Longfellow. “I had flattered myself that I was near the end of my case.” He was wracked with severe back pain, “pressure on his brain,” and complete exhaustion. He could not rise from his chair or walk without pain, and, after a month with no improvement, his doctors advised him to leave Washington. “I grow old, inactive, and the future is dreary,” he wrote to Longfellow, citing his “most depressing sense of invalidism.” Worst of all, he wrote to Parker, his invalid status prevented him from speaking on the subject closest to his heart: “I wish I could breathe into every public servant, whether in Washington or in Massachusetts, something of my own hatred of Slavery, and of my own gulf-wide separation from its supporters.”

  Indeed, Sumner's anxiety and anger were heightened when he watched his Northern colleagues exchange political niceties with Southerners, the latter the very senators who gleefully celebrated his beating. “I do not believe in friendly courtesies with men engaged in murdering [a] colleague!” he declared in a letter to Parker. “All fraternize with my assassins.” Northern senators had short memories; only two years earlier they excoriated their slaveholding colleagues for creating an environment that led to Preston Brooks's assault. Now they chatted and joked amicably. And, in the House of Representatives, Sumner was shocked that one of his fellow Massachusetts lawmakers (whom he does not name) had invited the dastardly Keitt of South Carolina “to visit him on Plymouth Rock!” He expressed his bitterness at this perceived betrayal to Wendell Phillips, pointing out that he would never behave that way “if one of my associates had been brutally felled to the floor—almost murdered—and then, after a lapse of nearly two years, was still halting about…at each step reviving his pains.” Sumner vowed that he would never have even a “small truce” with “men who seem so inhuman” either before or after such an attack. Sumner repeatedly wrote that he would have nothing to do with either Southern slave-owning congressmen or his own alleged Republican friends who “fraternize most amiably” with them, and he awaited the day his health would allow him to speak his mind fully: “The happiest day in store for me will be when I can tell them what I think of them.” Acknowledging that his pain and suffering perhaps rendered him “too sensitive,” Sumner nonetheless again felt totally alone among his Senate colleagues, a complete stranger in Washington.

  At first unsure of what to do next, Sumner decided on a second trip to Europe in an attempt to get well. “I must regain my health or cease to cumber the earth,” he asserted to Wendell Phillips. “The vacant chair must be filled.” On May 22, 1858, exactly two years to the day after he was caned by Preston Brooks, Sumner sailed from New York, bound for France aboard the Vanderbilt; the same day, he issued an open letter to the people of Massachusetts. In it, Sumner lamented that he was struck down while in perfect health and “suddenly made an invalid.” He had learned from his relapse that he was “not yet beyond the necessity of caution.” He conceded that had he known the “duration of my disability,” he would have resigned his Senate seat. “I did not do so, because like other invalids, I lived in the belief that I was soon to be well,” he wrote. Thus, he was “reluctant to renounce the opportunity of again exposing the hideous barbarism of Slavery.” In addition, he assured them that he recognized the political power of his absence to the antislavery cause: “I was…encouraged to feel that to every sincere lover of civilization, my vacant chair was a perpetual speech.”

  Privately, he wrote to Parker that he despaired of taking another trip to Europe without the same “buoyancy of youth” he had felt on his initial trip twenty years earlier and without the “assured hope…of a speedy restoration” that he felt the previous spring. One thing he had learned was that recovery from afflictions of his type was painstakingly slow. “The gradations of a cerebral convalescence are in
finitesimal,” he said. “I am sure that I shall be well at last; but I am not sure that I shall be well in six months.” From the English Channel, he reiterated his thoughts to William Jay: “It is with real reluctance that I proceed on this pilgrimage, and nothing but the conviction that it is the surest way to regain my health would keep me in it.” Sumner said he missed his work so much that he had little choice but to try anything to get well. He had felt miserable for far too long. “The ghost of two years already dead haunts me,” he wrote to Jay.

  As Charles Sumner approached continental Europe, he did not know that within days, he would willingly submit to treatments that caused near unimaginable pain in his increasingly desperate effort to exorcise those ghosts and finally achieve full health—while, back in America, newspapers North and South would once again debate the magnitude of his suffering.

  The Paris physiologist and neurologist Charles Edward Brown-Séquard was a native of France who had spent time in the United States on the faculty of the Medical College of Virginia, until his strong antislavery positions forced him to leave. He specialized in treating diseases of the spine and nervous system.

  When eminent Boston surgeon George Hayward, who was also visiting Paris, introduced Sumner to Brown-Séquard, the French doctor was appalled at Sumner's condition. Writing for the New York Tribune years later, Dr. Brown-Séquard described a Sumner who could barely walk in 1858. “When he tried to move forward, he was compelled to push one foot slowly and gently forward but a few inches, and then drag the other foot to a level with the first,” the French doctor recounted, and all the while, Sumner was “holding his back…to diminish the pain that he had there.” Only after fifteen minutes or so of this labored movement did the pain sufficiently abate to allow Sumner to walk more normally.