Sumner did not recognize Brooks, having never met him before. He was rising in greeting when the first blow struck him on top of his head. Trapped by his desk, Sumner suffered a dozen strikes of Brooks’s gold-tipped cane on his head, face, and hands. Blinded by blood, he roared, and applying all his strength, he wrested his desk from the iron fasteners that had bolted it to the floor. He staggered down the aisle, hands outstretched in defense, but the blows kept coming.
The younger Brooks required a cane for his limp, ever since taking a bullet in his thigh in a duel. He later said that he chose to use a cane to punish Sumner rather than a whip, which could have been wrested from his hand. Sumner was the stronger man, Brooks told his brother, though they were both six feet tall. He wished “expressly” to avoid taking Sumner’s life, but he carried a pistol just in case.
As you will learn by Telegraph that I have given Senator Sumner a caning and lest Mother should feel unnecessary alarm I write to give a more detailed statement of the occurrence. Sumner made a violent speech in which he insulted South Carolina and Judge Butler grossly. The Judge was & is absent and his friends all concurred in the opinion that the Judge would be compelled to flog him. This Butler is unable to do as Sumner is a very powerful man and weighs 30 pounds more than myself. Under the circumstances I felt it to be my duty to relieve Butler & avenge the insult to my State. I waited an hour and a half in the grounds on the day before yesterday for S when he escaped me by taking a carriage. Did the same thing yesterday with the same result.
I then went to the Senate and waited until it adjourned. There were some ladies in the Hall and I had to wait a full hour until they left. I then went to S’s seat and said, “Mr. Sumner, I have read your Speech with care and as much impartiality as was possible and I feel it my duty to tell you that you have libeled my State and slandered a relative who is aged and absent and I am come to punish you for it.” At the concluding words I struck him with my cane and gave him about 30 first rate stripes with a gutta percha cane which had been given me a few months before by a friend from N. Carolina named Vick. Every lick went where I intended. For about the first five or six licks he offered to make fight but I plied him so rapidly that he did not touch me. Towards the last he bellowed like a calf. I wore my cane out completely but saved the Head which is gold. The fragments of the stick are begged for as sacred relics. Every Southern man is delighted and the Abolitionists are like a hive of disturbed bees. I expected to be attacked this morning but no one came near me. They are making all sorts of threats. It would not take much to have the throats of every Abolitionist cut. I have been arrested of course & there is now a resolution before the House the object of which is to result in my expulsion. This they can’t do. It requires two-thirds to do it and they can’t get a half. Every Southern man sustains me. The debate is now very animated on the subject. Don’t be alarmed it will all work right. The only danger I am in is from assassination, but this you must not intimate to Mother.
Love to all. I am glad you have all paid our Brother James a visit.
Your affectionate brother
—Preston Brooks to James Hampden Brooks, May 23, 18565
The sound of Sumner’s desk overturning had caught the attention of the chamber. New York congressmen Ambrose Murray and Edwin Morgan had been talking to New-York Daily Times reporter James Q. Simonton at the south entrance of the Senate chamber when they heard “a noise, thumps, pounding and a rustling disturbance”—the sound of blows. They rushed from the gallery to Sumner’s aid, calling for help, “crying for those who were around to take him off.”6 They were stopped by a representative from South Carolina, Laurence M. Keitt, who held his cane over his head and his hand on his holstered pistol. Accounts were conflicting, but Keitt may have been yelling, “Let them alone! Goddamn, let them alone!” Senator John Crittenden from Kentucky, the only man close enough to Brooks to interfere, tried to call him off, once Brooks was beating a senseless man. “Don’t kill him,” Crittenden said.
“I did not intend to kill him, but I did intend to whip him” was the response.7 Brooks exerted his full power—he could not have hit Sumner with any greater force or rapidity. The gutta-percha cane had splintered on the fourth blow. Then Brooks beat Sumner with the broken piece, about eight inches long. “Oh Lord!” Sumner cried, “Oh! Oh!” He was like a person in convulsions, “his arms were thrown around as if unconsciously. There was no resistance, as I should judge,” said Senator L. F. S. Foster of Connecticut.8 “Every effort Mr. Sumner made was merely spasmodic, and I do not believe he was conscious from the first blow,” said Edwin Morgan.9 Sumner took out another desk as he fell.
Brooks pulled Sumner from the floor by the sleeve, as memorialized in illustrations of the event, and raised Sumner’s head so he could continue to beat it, intending to deliver “about 30 first-rate stripes.” Sumner fell unconscious to the sound of one of his fellow senators calling, “Give the damned Abolitionist hell!” and “It is all fair.” There were twenty or twenty-five men in the room, “standing around,” said Ambrose Murray.10
“Mr. Murray and myself arrived there at the same instant of time.” Morgan remembered. “I was nearer Mr. Sumner, and he was nearest Mr. Brooks. We started from the same point, but went different routes; he caught the arm of Brooks, and I the falling body of Sumner.” Murray caught Brooks by the right arm and drew him back, turning him to face the exit, away from Sumner. Brooks stopped and dropped his grip, satisfied.
“Southern Chivalry—Argument Versus Clubs,” lithograph by John L. Magee showing Preston Brooks’s 1856 attack on Charles Sumner.
At the same moment, Edwin Morgan caught Sumner as he slid senseless into the center aisle. With his head cradled on Morgan’s knee, his blood pooled on the Senate floor. Morgan begged for someone to call a surgeon. Someone already had. Morgan’s coat was soaked with blood.
Brooks walked out with Keitt into the sunny afternoon unchallenged, his duty discharged. He would later pay a fine of three hundred dollars for assault and battery. Brooks and Keitt both resigned their congressional seats in July, but both were reinstated by popular vote in the next election.
Sumner came to. Many hands helped him to his feet. He mumbled that he would need his hat. “I think I can walk.” He told the page to collect the documents on his desk. He was escorted to a sofa. The doctor arrived. Dr. Cornelius Boyle found that Sumner’s skull was exposed by the gashes across his head. He was still bleeding profusely. Dr. Boyle stitched up Sumner’s wounds, on a sofa in an anteroom to the Senate chamber. Sumner’s suit jacket, stiff with blood, was carefully pulled off to relieve the swelling across his shoulders and forearms.
Someone caught Henry Wilson, as he was heading down the street for home, and told him of the assault. His fears realized, he ran back to the Senate chamber and found Sumner in the anteroom having his head wounds dressed. He helped Sumner into a carriage. As his friends undressed him and settled him into his room, Sumner was speaking. Wilson remembered him saying defiantly, “When I recover I will meet them again, and put it to them again.” Dr. Boyle remembered a more incredulous Sumner saying: “I could not believe that a thing like this was possible.”
The following day Wilson told of Sumner’s assault to a convened Senate, and he called for decisive action protecting its members from assault “for words spoken in debate.” William Seward introduced a resolution that the president of the Senate appoint a committee of five to investigate the circumstances behind the “violent assault upon the person of the Hon. Charles Sumner.” Committeemen were selected from both the House and Senate immediately, by ballot. The chairman, Representative Lewis Campbell of Ohio, wrote to inform Preston Brooks of the formation of this committee and to make a request for witnesses. Brooks responded, “I know of no witness to the affair but Hon. Mr. Winslow, of North Carolina.”11
Committee member Alexander C. M. Pennington of New Jersey had visited Sumner’s rooms that morning and found him in too critical a condition to attend the committee to testify. Sum
ner could not be moved, but Dr. Boyle thought the committee might come to him. “And the committee thereupon proceeded to the lodgings of Mr. Sumner; Mr. [Lewis] Campbell having first invited Mr. Brooks to proceed with them, and Mr. Brooks having declined.”12
Question. What do you know of the facts connected with the assault alleged to have been made upon you in the Senate Chamber by Hon. Mr. Brooks of South Carolina, on Thursday, May 22, 1856?
Answer. Instead of leaving the Chamber with the rest on the adjournment, I continued in my seat, occupied with my pen. While thus intent, in order to be in season for the mail, which was soon to close, I was approached by several persons who desired to speak with me; but I answered them promptly and briefly, excusing myself for the reason that I was much engaged. When the last of these left me, I drew my arm-chair close to my desk, and, with my legs under the desk, continued writing . . .
While thus intent, with my head bent over my writing, I was addressed by a person who had approached the front of my desk, so entirely unobserved that I was not aware of his presence until I heard my name pronounced. As I looked up, with pen in hand, I saw a tall man, whose countenance was not familiar, standing directly over me, and, at the same moment, caught these words: “I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine—.” While these words were still passing from his lips, he commenced a succession of blows with a heavy cane on my bare head, by the first of which I was stunned so as to lose sight. I no longer saw my assailant, nor any other person or object in the room. What I did afterwards was done almost unconsciously acting under the instincts of self-defense. With head already bent down, I rose from my seat, wrenching up my desk, which was screwed to the floor, and then pressed forward, while my assailant continued his blows. I have no other consciousness until I found myself ten feet forward, in front of my desk, lying on the floor of the Senate, with my bleeding head supported on the knee of a gentleman, . . . Mr. Morgan, of New York. Other persons there were about me, offering me friendly assistance; but I did not recognize any of them. Others were at a distance, looking on, and offering no assistance, of whom I recognized only Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, Mr. Toombs, of Georgia, and I thought also my assailant, standing between them. . . .
I desire to add that, besides the words which I have given as uttered by my assailant, I have an indistinct recollection of the words “old man”; but these are so enveloped in the mist which ensued from the first blow, that I am not sure whether they were uttered or not. . . .
Question, Did you at any time between the delivery of your speech referred to, and the time when you were attacked, receive any intimation in writing, or otherwise, that Mr. Brooks intended to attack you?
Answer. Never, directly or indirectly; nor had I the most remote suspicion of any attack, nor was I in any way prepared for an attack. . . . I was, in fact, entirely defenseless at the time, except so far as my natural strength went. . . . Nor did I ever wear arms in my life. I have always lived in a civilized community where wearing arms has not been considered necessary.
—Charles Sumner, testimony, May 26, 185613
Senator Butler explained that when the “Crime Against Kansas” speech hit the papers, Preston Brooks was chided everywhere he went. “He could not go into a parlor, or drawing-room, or to a dinner party, where he did not find an implied reproach. . . . It was hard for any man, much less for a man of his temperament to bear this.”14 Brooks had looked for an opportunity to confront Sumner each day that week. He decided not to formally challenge him to a duel, as was custom, feeling that Sumner was unlikely to accept. More likely Sumner would counter with legal charges. Butler was not able, due to his age and a recent stroke, to perform this office on behalf of South Carolina. Brooks would later say, “I felt it to be my duty to relieve Butler and avenge the insult to my State.” In South Carolina, it was customary to flog a rival who made a public insult. Brooks performed his duty thoroughly.15
On the Thursday following his attack, Brooks wrote to the president of the Senate, “I had reason to believe that the Senator from Massachusetts did not acknowledge that personal responsibility for wrongs in personal deportment which would have saved me the painful necessity of the collision which I sought; and in my judgment, therefore, I had no alternative but to act as I did.” He apologized, not for the “collision” but for where it took place.16 He did not wish to be considered in breach of the privileges or dignity of the Senate.
Immediately after the attack, Southern congressmen had collected pieces of the cane that littered the sticky floor of the Senate chamber and took them home to be made into commemorative rings. The gold head of the cane was saved for Brooks. He would receive a hero’s welcome in much of the South, while the North vilified him. For the one hundred canes gifted to Brooks, South Carolina’s avenger, there were one hundred effigies of him burned in answer.
In the North, this shocking act irrevocably charged the tone of the antislavery debate. The press moved away from sympathetic appeals, such as those represented by the image of young Mary, to talk of war. Southerners who thought Brooks manly and his action justifiable considered Sumner feminine, ridiculous, and undefended. Northerners who saw Sumner as a “restrained, manly intellectual” considered Brooks “an uncontrolled brute.” As abolitionist historian Manisha Sinha has explained, reactions to the caning represented, with respect to “manliness,” a clash of distinct civilizations within one nation. Massachusetts and South Carolina harbored two distinct social codes, two codes of gender performance, two visions of progress, and two approaches toward injury and honor.17
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher announced, “The symbol of the North is the pen; the symbol of the South is the bludgeon.”
“Blow must be given back for blow!” wrote the editor of the Pittsburgh Gazette.18
William Cullen Bryant called on his fellow abolitionists to join the fight: “Violence is the order of the day; the North is to be pushed to the wall by it, and this plot will succeed if the people of the free states are as apathetic as the slaveholders are insolent.”19
Harriet Beecher Stowe was “so indignant at the outrage” that in her new novel, “instead of carrying out some of her characters and making them like Little Eva, charming and tender, she introduced this spirit of revenge under the name of the negro Dred.”20 The South had escalated the debate to blows, not against the slave but against the senator, and in the face of this new aggression, abolitionism now called for violence, not sympathy.
In every city Sumner had visited the previous year in peace, “indignation meetings” cropped up. Four thousand gathered in New York’s Broadway Tabernacle, and five thousand in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. He was reelected in 1856, even though he could not return to his Senate seat for fifty months.
The bloody climate required a new icon, and his name was John Brown. In Kansas on May 24, 1856, two nights after Brooks caned Sumner, Brown, five of his sons, and two other men rode out to Pottawatomie County to attack slaveholders directly. They pulled five men from their cabins, settlers who were known to support slavery, and hacked them to death with broadswords.
Brown had the support of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the most radical member of the “Secret Six,” a group of abolitionists whose provided Brown with funds, strategy, and philosophy.21 Brown also had the support of Henry David Thoreau, who knew him from the preparation time Brown spent in Concord. Brown had the support of Frederick Douglass, who felt that the time for pacifism had passed. On October 16, 1859, Brown and twenty-one men attacked the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the intent of instigating a slave insurrection. Brown was captured and charged with murder, conspiracy, and treason.
After the raid on Harpers Ferry, Douglass had to leave the country for a time to secure his own safety. Thoreau volunteered to speak in Douglass’s stead, making a plea for Brown’s life.
A man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man
of ideas and principles, that was what distinguished him. Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life. I noticed that he did not overstate anything, but spoke within bounds. . . .
If [David] Walker may be considered the representative of the South, I wish I could say that Brown was the representative of the North. He was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood. No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all. . . .
I do not believe in erecting statues to those who still live in our hearts, whose bones have not yet crumbled in the earth around us, but I would rather see the statue of Captain Brown in the Massachusetts State-House yard, than that of any other man whom I know. I rejoice that I live in this age, that I am his contemporary.
—Henry David Thoreau, October 30, 185922
Brown was found guilty on all three charges and hanged on December 2, 1859. Having died for the Union cause by striking its first blow, transcendentalists made him a martyr.
19
Frederick Douglass
Boston, 1860
The 1860 Federal census records “Mary M.” as age twelve, Oscar as fifteen, and Adelaide R. as ten. Oscar would not live to see the end of the year. Their Boston neighbors are tradespeople: a baker, a pattern maker, and two “piano forte workers.” The census noted the value of Henry Williams’s personal estate was $600. The Williamses had the means to reside in a single-family residence and take in another family as boarders. Fugitives from Virginia—Nathaniel and Fanny Booth—and their infant daughter, Ida, are recorded as living with the Williams family in 1860.
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