Butler did not say who those “others” were who told him about Brooks’s feverish state of mind. The “rumors” and “commentaries,” coming even from unidentified “ladies,” were pointed at Brooks, who would be guilty of “unmanly submission.” If he did not act he would betray his family, his state, his people, and Southern womanhood.
Butler dismissed Brooks’s legal options and even the Code Duello. “What was my friend to do? Sue him? Indict him? If that was the mode in which he intended to take redress, he had better never go to South Carolina again. Was he to challenge him? That would have been an exhibition of chivalry having no meaning. . . . He would have made himself contemptible, and perhaps might have been committed to the penitentiary for sending a challenge.” If Brooks had taken these courses, according to Butler, he would have been shunned or imprisoned.
Butler described Brooks’s “temperament” as something with which he was closely familiar. “I have known him from childhood,” he said. “I used to have some control over him. . . . Sir, I will tell you who Mr. Brooks is, and why he felt so deeply in reference to these abominable libels.” Butler assumed onto himself the patriarchal role of the late Whitfield Brooks, but the would-be father justified the son’s rashness that the real father had frowned upon. Butler described Brooks as a decorated soldier whose reputation as a warrior would be tarnished if he were not true to his manly code. He “marched under the Palmetto banner, and his countrymen have awarded to him a sword for his good conduct in the war with Mexico. That sword was in some measure committed to him, that he might use it, when occasion required, to maintain the honor and the dignity of his State. When he heard of this speech first, and read it afterwards, this young man, in passing down the street, heard but one sentiment, and it was, that his State and his blood had been insulted. He could not go into the drawing room, or parlor, or into a reading room, without the street commentary reproaching him. Wherever he went, the question was asked, ‘Has the chivalry of South Carolina escaped, and is this to be a tame submission?’ ”
But Butler would surely have known that Brooks’s experience in the Mexican War was a humiliating embarrassment to him, that Brooks had notably been prevented from being honored with its veterans, and that he had staged a ridiculous public feud with his cousin that required the intervention of the governor to stop. There was no award for valor. There was no sword. There was only a man susceptible to taunts.
Since he had been expelled from South Carolina College, Brooks’s temperament had been consistent. He was constantly anxious to prove his manhood, sensitive to his shortcomings in asserting them, given to impulsive actions based on poor judgment, plagued by a lack of self-discipline and self-doubt about it, and possessed by wishful thinking distorted into a romantic ideal that he could gain glory, fame, and redemption in a single decisive stroke—a duel or a battle. Time after time, he had proved himself less the chivalrous knight and more the knave. His disgraces only deepened his urge to achieve honor.
Brooks later told a friend in private conversation that he would “quickly put Douglas’s suggestion to practice” about Sumner. (“Is it his object to provoke some of us to kick him as one would a dog in the street?”) “Gentlemen would understand the significance of a caning.”
For all the reasons Brooks and others would eventually offer to justify striking Sumner they would skirt Sumner’s recurrent theme of the debased morality of slavery exemplified by masters’ rape of their female slaves. Yet sex was on Brooks’s brain. He was obsessed with slights to manliness, even when they were not made. Edmundson, in his testimony to the congressional inquiry, stated that Brooks bitterly complained to him on the second day of Sumner’s speech about a specific remark he supposedly made the day before about South Carolina: “Disgracefully impotent during the Revolution, and rendered still more so since on account of slavery.” Congressman Howell Cobb of Georgia immediately corrected Edmundson. “The language used in his reported speech is, ‘shamefully imbecile.’ ” Brooks, in fact, had not been present during the speech; nor had it yet been printed in the Congressional Globe. But he must have heard an account, interpreted it as a sexual affront, and angrily blurted it out.
While there are no firsthand narratives from masters or slaves on the Brooks family’s plantations of what was euphemistically called “amalgamation,” the 1850 federal census recorded the presence of a number of mulattos. On Whitfield Brooks, Sr.’s, plantation resided three mulatto males, thirty, sixteen, and one year old, and two females, three and one. Preston Brooks’s plantation listed one female aged three. They were not immaculately conceived. The identity of these individuals’ white fathers remains unknown, but it is likely they were nearby.
Brooks was tapped to enforce the submission of the “degenerate son,” as Butler called Sumner, according to the Washington correspondent for the New York Times, who reported on May 24: “A well known personal friend of Mr. Brooks publicly stated, tonight, before a dozen gentlemen, that the assault was premeditated and arranged for at a private conclave, held last evening, at which the individual who made the statement was present. Mr. Brooks then agreed to do this ruffian work which today he has consummated.”
Brooks had done his work thoroughly. Sumner’s gaping head wounds sewn together, his coat and shirt drenched with blood, Sumner’s colleagues brought him in a carriage to his lodging about a half mile from the Capitol. He had rooms in the house of Reverend George W. Samson, pastor of the First Baptist Church. Lying on his bed, one of Sumner’s friends recalled that “he presented a ghastly spectacle.” But the orator was able to speak a few words. Sumner looked up at those gathered around him and addressed them. “I could not believe that a thing like this was possible,” he said.
CHAPTER TEN
ARGUMENTS OF THE CHIVALRY
After leaving Sumner in his bed, the Republican senators gathered that night at Seward’s house to agree upon a strategy. Some felt themselves physically endangered by “incensed and inexorable leaders of the Slave Power,” according to Henry Wilson. “What new victims would be required, who they should be, and whom their appetite for vengeance, whetted by this taste of blood, would select, they knew not.”
Arguments of the Chivalry, lithograph by Winslow Homer, 1856. Right to left: Charles Sumner (seated), Preston Brooks, Laurence Keitt, John J. Crittenden (being restrained), Stephen A. Douglas (hands in pockets), Robert Toombs. “The symbol of the North is the pen; the symbol of the South is the bludgeon”—Henry Ward Beecher.
The next morning, Wilson rose to speak. “The seat of my colleague is vacant today,” he said, and described the basic facts of the assault. “Sir, to assail a member of the Senate out of this Chamber, ‘for words spoken in debate,’ is a grave offense, not only against the rights of the Senator, but the constitutional privileges of this House, and assault a member in his seat until he falls exhausted and senseless on this floor, is an offense requiring prompt and decisive action of the Senate.” He called upon “older Senators” to come up with the proper means “to redress the wrongs of a member of this body and to vindicate the honor and dignity of the Senate.”
His appeal was greeted with a prolonged silence until the president pro tempore, Senator Jesse Bright of Indiana, who was himself the slave owner of a plantation in Kentucky, began moving on to other business: “The Chair will lay before the Senate a communication . . .” “Mr. President,” interjected Seward, leaping to his feet, “I beg leave to offer the following resolution”—a committee of inquiry. Mason immediately offered an amendment that the Senate should elect its members. At once, a vote was taken. Wilson and Seward were excluded; five Democrats were chosen to fill the five positions.
Five days later, on May 28, the committee chairman, Senator James Pearce, of Maryland, a slaveholder who had recently switched from the Whig to the Democratic Party, read a report blaming Sumner for the incident into the record. “The cause of this assault was certain language used by Mr. Sumner in debate,” it stated, and concluded that the Sena
te had no authority “for a breach of its privileges” because it could not “arrest a member of the House of Representatives,” or “try and punish him.” That authority rested “solely upon the House of which he is a member.” Thus the Senate condemned Sumner and washed its hands of the matter.
On the same day that the Senate committee was formed, the House, in a vote over the objection of nearly all the Democratic members, approved creation of a Select Committee on the Alleged Assault upon Senator Sumner. Its first witness, Charles Sumner, was interviewed in his bedroom on May 26, and gave his account, although his head had a “pulpy feeling,” according to a doctor, and was draining pus. Interviewing witness after witness, the Select Committee sought to uncover who had encouraged and assisted Brooks.
“The feeling is pretty much sectional,” Keitt wrote his fiancée a week after the assault. “If the northern men had stood up, the city would now float with blood. The fact is the feeling is wild and fierce. . . . Everyone here feels as if we are upon a volcano.”
“This is not an assault, sir, it is a conspiracy; yes, sir, a conspiracy,” Thomas Hart Benton told James S. Pike, the New York Tribune correspondent. “These men hunt in couples, sir. It is a conspiracy, and the North should know it.” Pike wrote: “To what extent the allegation is true may be partially discovered by the investigations of the House Committee, though, of course, all secrets that should not be disclosed it will be impossible to come at, except inferentially and by indirection. The tone of the Southern press, which is really the best exponent of Southern opinions, and the bold avowal of Mr. Toombs on the floor of the Senate, are alike indicative of unity of feeling and purpose on the part of the slavery men, and imply very conclusively that the attempt to abridge the freedom of speech in Congress is no merely individual affair. The work, it is fair to presume, is done with concert and knowledge.”
Brooks was acclaimed as a hero across the South. He boasted, “fragments of the stick are begged for as sacred relics.” He was overwhelmed with gifts of canes. Prominent citizens of Charleston gave him one inscribed, “Hit him again.” Describing it as “a suitable present,” the Columbia South Carolinian editorialized, “Well done!” Students at the University of Virginia bought Brooks a cane topped with a gold head in the shape of a cracked human skull.
“The whole South sustains Brooks, and a large part of the North also,” the Charleston Mercury stated. “All feel that it is time for freedom of speech and freedom of the cudgel to go together.” “Sumner and Sumner’s friends must be punished and silenced,” the Richmond Enquirer declared—“with their runaway negroes and masculine women.” Elaborating on the theme in another editorial, the newspaper stated:
In the main, the press of the South applaud the conduct of Mr. Brooks, without condition or limitation. Our approbation, at least, is entire and unreserved. We consider the act good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence. The vulgar Abolitionists in the Senate are getting above themselves. They have been humored until they forget their position. They have grown saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen! Now, they are a low, mean, scurvy set, with some little book-learning, but as utterly devoid of spirit or honor as a pack of curs. Intrenched behind “privilege,” they fancy they can slander the South and insult its representatives with impunity. The truth is, they have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission. Sumner, in particular, ought to have nine-and-thirty early every morning. He is a great strapping fellow, and could stand the cowhide beautifully. Brooks frightened him, and at the first blow of the cane he bellowed like a bull-calf. There is the blackguard [Henry] Wilson, an ignorant Natick cobbler, swaggering in excess of muscle, and absolutely dying for a beating. Will not somebody take him in hand? [Senator John P.] Hale is another huge, red-faced, sweating scoundrel, whom some gentleman should kick and cuff until he abates something of his impudent talk. These men are perpetually abusing the people and representatives of the South, for tyrants, robbers, ruffians, adulterers, and what not. Shall we stand it? Mr. Brooks has initiated this salutary discipline, and he deserves applause for the bold, judicious manner in which he chastised the scamp Sumner. It was a proper act, done at the proper time, and in the proper place.
Southern newspapers boldly made the threats that antislavery Northern newspapers warned against. In its first report on Sumner’s assault, the New York Tribune wrote that “as the South has taken the oligarchic ground that Slavery ought to exist, irrespective of color—that there must be a governing class and a class governed—that Democracy is a delusion and a lie—we must expect that Northern men in Washington, whether members or not, will be assaulted, wounded or killed, as the case may be, so long as the North will bear it. . . . If, indeed, we go on quietly to submit to such outrages, we deserve to have our noses flattened, our skins blacks, and to be placed at work under task-masters; for we have lost the noblest attributes of freemen, and are virtually slaves.”
Douglas’s purported threat against Sumner on the Senate floor in March—“We will subdue you”—was revived as the subject for an editorial on May 26 in the Illinois State Journal, an article possibly written by Lincoln and undoubtedly receiving his approval. Days after the attack on Sumner, under the headline, “We Mean to Subdue You,” the Journal wrote, “That seems to have been no idle threat which Senator Douglas made to Senator Sumner some time since, in the Senate Chamber—‘We mean to subdue you, sir.’ On Saturday, we published an account of a cowardly assault made by Preston S. Brooks,—a ruffian from South Carolina, and a member of the Douglas faction,—on the person of Senator Sumner, while occupying his seat within the sacred precincts of the Senate chamber. This outrage is of a piece with those in Kansas, with the additional merit of being bolder and having a more distinguished person for its victim.”
Across the North, in city after city, town after town, within several weeks after the assault, packed meetings were held to express “Public Indignation.” At New York’s Tabernacle, a “jammed up” gathering on May 30 heard Edwin Morgan describe the “undeniable facts” of the beating. “Shame! Shame!” cried the crowd. Henry Ward Beecher, of the Plymouth Church, declared, “Ah, there we have it. “The symbol of the North is the pen; the symbol of the South is the bludgeon. . . . Brooks is not the hero of the cane, but he is Cain himself.” The governor of New York, Myron Clark, wrote Sumner to condemn “the sneaking, slave-driving scoundrel Brooks.” The Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution to the Congress against the “ruthless attack . . . an outrage of the decencies of civilized life, and an indignity to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” and “demands for her representatives in the National Legislature entire Freedom of Speech.”
On the Sunday after the attack on Sumner, Theodore Parker, paragon of Moral Philosophy, pastor of Transcendentalists, and cochairman with Sumner of the Boston Vigilance Committee, mounted the pulpit. “America is now in a state of incipient civil war,” he pronounced.
We also have a Despotic Power in the United States. There is a Russia in America, a privileged class of three hundred and fifty thousand slaveholders, who own three million five hundred thousand slaves, and control four million poor whites in the South. This despotism is more barbarous than Russia; more insolent, more unscrupulous, more invasive. It has long controlled all the great offices in America. The President is only its tool. . . . At Washington, on a small scale, this despotic power wages war against freedom. There it uses an arm of a different form,—the arm of an Honorable Ruffian, a member of Congress, a (Southern) “gentleman,” a “man of property and standing,” born of one of the “first families of South Carolina.” . . . He skulks about the purlieus of the Capitol, and twice seeks to waylay his victim, honorable, and suspecting no dishonor. But, failing of that meanness, the assassin, a bludgeon in his hand . . . watches in the Senate Chamber till his enemy is alone, then steals up behind him as he sits writing, when his arms are pinioned in his heavy chair and his other limbs are under the desk, and on his na
ked head strikes him with a club loaded with lead, until he falls, stunned and bleeding, to the floor, and then continues his coward blows. South Carolina is very chivalrous!
“It is the best whom they desire to kill,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, another of Sumner’s friends, at a meeting at the Concord, Massachusetts, Town Hall on May 26. “It is only when they cannot answer your reasons that they wish to knock you down. If, therefore, Massachusetts could send to the Senate a better man than Mr. Sumner, his death would be only so much the more quick and certain.” But Sumner was merely the object and the victim. “I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one State,” said Emerson. “I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.”
“You can have little idea of the depth and intensity of the feeling which has been excited in New England,” Robert C. Winthrop, Sumner’s old rival, wrote John J. Crittenden, who had helped restrain Brooks. For many New Englanders, the assault on Sumner was Lexington and Concord. But the feeling encompassed the whole North. The train of events that began with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act seemed to have reached a climax. “The Northern blood is boiling at the outrage upon you,” George E. Baker, Seward’s protégé and close aide, wrote Sumner. “It really sinks Kansas out of sight.” The “Public Indignation” meetings were an uprising of the Republican Party before its first convention, its first national demonstration, the first appearance of its breadth and depth.
The Nebraska Act had broken the political consensus; escalating conflict in Kansas accelerated the chaos. But the news reports published day by day in partisan papers from a distant territory were patchy and confusing. Part of Sumner’s motive in delivering his speech on “The Crime Against Kansas” was to put these fragmentary pieces into an overarching narrative and to explain their political meaning. Brooks’s minute-long fury did more than lend credibility to Sumner’s case. The debate over the extension of slavery bursting into violence within the chamber of the Senate obliterated the normal political boundaries. This was no longer a skirmish on the frontier between roughnecks.
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