The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  President Ulysses S. Grant, senators and representatives, members of the Supreme Court, and a contingent of army officers led by William T. Sherman, all gathered in the Senate chamber for services, while wives, friends, and other dignitaries packed the gallery. Every chair in the chamber was filled, save for Sumner's, which—as it had for three years after the caning—remained vacant, though this time it was draped in black.

  At just before 12:30 P.M., pall bearers brought the coffin into the Senate chamber, and the entire assemblage watched in silence as it was carried to the front and placed before the main desk. “The nation in its three branches—legislative, executive, and judicial—stood around the coffin, and the people from all quarters of the land looked down upon it,” one Boston newspaper reported. Religious services lasted for about a half hour, and Sumner's friend, Senator Matt Carpenter of Wisconsin, then entrusted Sumner's remains to the sergeant-at-arms “to convey them to his home, there to commit them, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the soil of Massachusetts. Peace to his ashes.”

  Sumner's body had been transported north by special train that left Washington around 3:00 P.M. on March 13, bound nonstop for New York (much to the disappointment of crowds that had gathered in Wilmington, Delaware, and Philadelphia), where, arriving at midnight, it halted.

  The next morning it continued through Connecticut, where, one news account noted, “At New Haven and other cities, the whole population seemed to pour out to pay their last tribute to the dust of the great Statesman.” And then the train crossed into Massachusetts, where, beginning in Springfield, throngs gathered at every station to watch it rumble eastward, while church bells tolled along the entire route. Meanwhile, in Boston, thousands had filled Faneuil Hall for a public prayer meeting, and mourners poured onto the tracks to greet the train when it arrived in the early evening of March 14. Then a long procession followed the coffin, which was escorted by a mounted guard of honor from the Massachusetts First Battalion, up Beacon Hill to the State House, where Sumner's body was placed in Doric Hall “in sight of the memorials of Washington and the flags of Massachusetts regiments,” and guarded by black troops.

  The next day, Sunday, March 15, with an enormous crowd waiting outside—some women fainted in the tightly packed lines—the doors to the State House were opened at 10:00 A.M. for mourners to pay their respects, and the resulting turnout stunned even Sumner's greatest supporters. Somberly, silently, two or three abreast, somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 people passed by Sumner's casket during Sunday and the early hours of Monday. The people of Massachusetts—many of whom disagreed with Sumner's inflexible tactics, imperious manner, antagonistic language, and uncompromising antislavery views twenty years earlier—today recognized the profundity of his contributions as they filed through State House halls. “Under that roof,” noted the Boston Advertiser, “was uttered the summons of the State to him to go forth in her name to withstand the great wrong.”

  Those who filed by Sumner's coffin knew that America had endured a bloody civil war, the assassination of a president, a contentious and violent Reconstruction Era, and also required the passage of three constitutional amendments—the Thirteenth (in 1865, abolishing slavery), Fourteenth (in 1868, making all persons born in the United States citizens), and Fifteenth (in 1870, giving blacks and former slaves the right to vote)—to right the great wrong that Charles Sumner had fought against for most of his adult political life.

  On Monday, at around 2:30 P.M., church bells tolled once again, and since virtually all of Boston's businesses suspended operations, the downtown streets were jammed with spectators and mourners. Police had to clear the roadway to allow the funeral procession to travel the short distance from the State House to King's Chapel for the Episcopal service, so chosen because it had once been the place of worship for Sumner's mother; the senator belonged to no church.

  From there, the procession wound its way toward Cambridge and Mount Auburn Cemetery, closely followed by dignitaries and, perhaps more notably according to one reporter, “the representatives of the dusky race, for whom Charles Sumner battled and suffered, and in whose cause he laid down his life.”

  Charles Sumner is buried in a secluded spot in Mount Auburn Cemetery, far from the main entrance, on the southwest slope of a hill along what is today called Arethusa Path. His grave is marked by a coffin-shaped granite monument inscribed only with his name and the dates of his birth and death (January 6, 1811–March 11, 1874). Beside it are the graves of his family members, including those of his siblings, with whom Charles maintained little or no relationship for most of his life, marked with small white-gray rectangular stones. Sumner's marker is sturdy and significant, but relatively unpretentious compared with other large stones and obelisk-shaped monuments nearby. His gravesite certainly does not reflect the reputation, contribution, and impact of the towering nineteenth-century figure it honors.

  In 1874, though, his death was marked around the world. Publications such as Harper's Weekly and the New York Tribune ran full-length tributes. Longfellow and Whittier commemorated him in poems. The New York Chamber of Commerce held a special service mourning his passing. Newspapers across the country recognized his loss as a national event and were almost united in the generous praise they offered him. And in Europe, where he had spent so much time, tributes and portraits appeared in Great Britain, France, and Sweden.

  Combative until the end, Sumner had been censured in late 1872 by the Massachusetts legislature, when, as part of a political dispute with President Ulysses S. Grant, Sumner introduced a Senate resolution to remove the names of Civil War battles from the Army Register or from regimental colors. The so-called “battle-flags resolution” insulted virtually every veteran, North and South, who had fought in the war, and caused a national uproar. Sumner disingenuously tried to portray the resolution as a way to put the fighting behind the nation once and for all. Ever perplexed by other people's reactions to his words and actions, Sumner wrote of the outcry: “I cannot comprehend this tempest.” The Massachusetts legislature rescinded its censure in February 1874, just weeks before Sumner died.

  The ideas that Charles Sumner had promulgated for so long were now more than part of mainstream opinion—they had been codified into law and written into the United States Constitution. Once derided, scoffed at, widely denounced, and beaten nearly to death, Charles Sumner could rest in peace knowing his ideas and ideals had triumphed. A deeply flawed man, Sumner's courage and leadership on the antislavery issue were indisputable and unrivaled, and in death, virtually universally acknowledged.

  And perhaps no tribute offered a more profound testament of how far the country's attitudes had changed in the decade following the terrible Civil War than one that occurred upon Sumner's death, eighteen years after the caning: the South Carolina flag was lowered to half staff in his honor.

  If the South Carolina tribute was startling, one other tribute to Charles Sumner bordered on the remarkable, this one occurring in Washington, D.C., a few weeks after his death.

  Mississippi Congressman Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar—whom Mary Chesnut nursed outside of Richmond in 1861 and who declared Preston Brooks's assault an “awful blunder”—stood in the House of Representatives on April 25, 1874, and asked to be heard. No one was quite sure what he was going to say, but what he said echoed across the country, stunned his colleagues, and touched the hearts of every listener. Lamar, a former rabid fire-eater and slaveholder from the deep South, offered a stirring eulogy to Charles Sumner and, in Sumner's memory, made a simple plea for lasting peace and justice between North and South.

  This was not an easy speech for Lamar to make. Both of his brothers and two of his law partners were killed in Civil War battles, a war that most Southerners believed was fought due to the radical antislavery policies favored by Sumner and those like him. For years, Sumner had been the South's bitter enemy, before the war, of course, but also during and after the conflict. For example, when Chief Justice Roger Taney, a
Southern icon, died in 1864, Sumner wrote to President Lincoln: “Providence has given us a victory in the death of [Taney]. This is a victory for liberty and the Constitution.” Later he said Taney's name should be “hooted down the page of history.” Sumner then argued vociferously against commissioning a sculpted bust of Taney: “I object to that; that now an emancipated country should make a bust to the author of the Dred Scott decision.” When the war ended, Sumner favored placing harsh and radical Reconstruction terms upon the South, part of a Northern-led federal government policy that made the postwar years a nightmare for the vanquished Confederacy. “Congress must assert jurisdiction of the rebel region & mould it into republican states,” Sumner wrote in August 1865, months after the South's surrender.

  And yet, despite all of this, Lamar believed it was time for North and South to heal. Lamar told his House colleagues that just before Sumner died, he believed that “all occasion for strife and distrust between the North and South had passed away, and there no longer remained any cause for continued estrangement between those two sections of our common country.” Lamar asked: “Are there not many of us who believe the same thing? Is that the common sentiment, or if not, ought it not to be, of the great mass of our people, North and South?”

  Americans from every region needed to view themselves as a single people, Lamar said, “bound to each other by a common constitution, destined to live together under a common government.” It was time for Americans to “endeavor to grow toward each other once more in heart, as we are indissolubly linked to each other in fortune.” The time was right, Lamar said, for a new understanding between the sections, especially in the aftermath of Sumner's death. Sumner was a “great champion of liberty…a sympathizer with human sorrow,” an “earnest pleader for the exercise of human tenderness and heavenly charity.” In his name, Northerners and Southerners should “lay aside the concealments which serve only to perpetuate misunderstandings and distrust, and frankly confess on both sides we most earnestly desire to be one…in feeling and in heart.” If Sumner could speak from the dead to both sides, Lamar declared, he would say: “My countrymen! Know one another and you will love one another.”

  When Lamar finished, the House sat for a moment in shocked silence, and then a loud and long burst of applause rolled across the floor. “My God, what a speech!” said New York Congressman Lyman Tremaine. “It will ring through the country.”

  Lamar's speech marked an important turning point in the relations between North and South, and it elevated the Mississippi congressman to statesman status. The Boston Globe called Lamar's speech on Sumner “evidence of the restoration of the Union in the South.” The Boston Advertiser declared it “the most significant and hopeful utterance that has been heard from the South since the war.” Some Southern newspapers vigorously criticized Lamar, but he was willing to bear it. To his wife, he wrote: “Our people have suffered so much, have been betrayed so often…that it is but natural that they should be suspicious of any word or act of overture to the North by a Southern man. I know for once that I have done her [the South] good. I shall serve no other interest than hers.” Still, if enough people disagreed with his actions, Lamar would abide by the will of his constituents and “will calmly and silently retire to private life if [the] people do not approve [of] me.”

  But his fellow Mississippians eventually came to understand and accept Lamar's message, or, if they still objected to it, at least respected him for speaking honestly about his feelings that Sumner's death should mark a new era in North-South relations. In 1876, Mississippi's Democratic state legislature elected him to the United States Senate; Lamar had strong support from blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats. In 1877, when he took his seat, he became the first former Confederate leader in the U.S. Senate.

  On January 29, 1887, thirty years after her husband's death, Martha C. Brooks received her widow's pension from the United States Bureau of Pensions for her husband Preston's service with the South Carolina Palmetto Regiment during the Mexican War. The total sum was eight dollars per month.

  Mrs. Preston Brooks collected the pension until her death from pneumonia on March 24, 1901; she had been a widow for forty-four years. One obituary made reference to her husband's congressional service and, in reference to the caning, noted only that Preston Brooks had “chastised Charles Sumner in the United States Senate for an unkind reference in regard to the venerable Senator Butler of this state.” Another called the caning “one of the thrilling episodes before the Civil War.” Martha Brooks was laid to rest in Edgefield beside her famous husband.

  ——

  The manner in which their two regions remember Sumner and Brooks is most intriguing. Sumner, a member of Boston's intellectual and social elite, a Harvard graduate and lawyer who traveled to most of the great cities in the United States and Europe, a Senatorial giant above and apart from the caning episode, became a living martyr to the rightness of the antislavery cause after his beating. Brooks, a respected planter and slave-owner, a son of Edgefield, South Carolina, who attended (but did not graduate from) the state university in Columbia, a backbench legislator before May 1856 who afterward was defined by the caning, became the defender of the Southern way of life and of the states' rights supporters who argued that they had the framers of the U.S. Constitution on their side.

  In South Carolina today, tributes to Brooks can be found. The South Carolina State Museum at McKissick maintains in its collection the commemorative goblet, several gold-lined rings fashioned from pieces of Brooks's splintered cane, and many of the canes Brooks received from Southern well-wishers. Brooks's burial site in Edgefield is marked with a tall obelisk, and inscribed with a lengthy epitaph summarizing his virtues. His two homes, both of which I was privileged to visit, are now privately owned, but meticulously maintained and part of the historic fabric of Edgefield.

  And at the South Caroliniana Library, a short walk from the McKissick Museum on the famous University of South Carolina campus “Horseshoe,” a plaque honoring Brooks adorns the main lobby, across from the manuscript room in which his papers are located. The plaque, commemorated upon Brooks's premature death in 1857, had hung in the chapel on the Brooks family plantation until the church was razed around 1940. Its inscription states in part:

  Gallantly has he borne himself upon the Battle Field,

  And in the Council Chamber of the Nation,

  Won the applause of his constituents.

  The State has lost one of her most gifted and cherished sons

  And his family their pride and boast.

  There is no question that the applause Brooks received in 1856 and 1857 was due almost entirely to his beating of Charles Sumner. Today, while Brooks's home state acknowledges his fame and the heroic status he attained in the years prior to the Civil War, South Carolina still seems to wrestle with exactly how to treat his controversial legacy within the context of its rich historical pantheon. Other areas of the South also pay tribute to Brooks: Brooksville, Florida, and Brooks County, Georgia, are just two places named in his honor.

  In Massachusetts, Sumner's legacy is mixed. Monuments certainly celebrate the Senate giant in a stately and dignified way. In Boston and Cambridge, two statues honor the former United States senator. The first, erected just a few years after his death, is located in the Public Garden in the heart of the city. It depicts Sumner standing, overcoat askew behind him, a scroll in hand, gazing into the distance. The statue's pedestal is engraved with one word: “Sumner.” At the time, no further explanation was needed. In 1902, a second bronze statue was erected in Harvard Square, near Sumner's alma mater. This visage is of a brooding, seated Sumner, coat draped over the chair, book in hand, sitting atop a pedestal that is also simply inscribed with his name.

  Sumner's home on narrow Hancock Street, on the back side of Boston's Beacon Hill, is similarly easy to pass by without notice: it bears a plaque that merely lists the years (1830–1857) Sumner lived there. His monument stone in Mount Auburn Cemetery in C
ambridge also lists only his name and years of birth and death. Neither his home nor gravesite bears any further inscription honoring Sumner. Again, there was a period when little else needed to be said about Charles Sumner in Boston—virtually everyone knew of his reputation and accomplishments.

  That is not the case today. Aside from historians and academics, few Bostonians recognize the full extent of Sumner's achievements and influence, if they recognize him at all. His home is part of a tour of Boston's Civil War and abolitionist places of interest, and an elementary school in Boston's Roslindale section is named for him, but exactly who he was and why he was important eludes most Bostonians. Some mistakenly believe that the Sumner Tunnel, which connects mainland Boston with East Boston across the harbor, was named for the Massachusetts senator (it was actually named for William Sumner, a lawyer, legislator, and general who served in the War of 1812). In 2011, the bicentennial of Charles Sumner's birth, several Boston academic and historical institutions sponsored readings, seminars, and workshops designed to rekindle interest in Sumner, but few of these events excited the imagination of the general public. Even Sumner's massive fifteen-volume Works, which contains his most important writings, and whose completion he described as his reason for living in 1873, could not fully cement his legacy or sustain for him in history the celebrity status he once enjoyed.

  This is regrettable and understandable at the same time. Boston prides itself on its history, of course, but mainly on being a city of the American Revolution and the emergence of the Irish politician—eighteenth-century founders John Hancock, John Adams, and Paul Revere, as well as John F. Kennedy in the twentieth century, are far better known than Sumner, though Sumner's contributions to the nation's history are comparable to theirs.