29. John F. T. Crampton to Lord Clarendon, December 24, 1855, Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries in London, 1844–67, ed. James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1993), 144.
30. New-York Daily Tribune, January 31, 1856. See also National Era, February 7, 1856; New York Daily Times, January 30, February 13, and June 30, 1856; Saturday Evening Post, April 19, 1856; Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford, 1869), 348–50; L. D. Ingersoll, The Life of Horace Greeley (Philadelphia: E. Potter, 1874), 303.
31. Fessenden to unknown, ca. 1856, in Life and Public Service of William Pitt Fessenden, 78–79.
32. Greeley to Charles Dana, January 30, 1856, in Greeley on Lincoln with Mr. Greeley’s Letters to Charles A. Dana and a Lady Friend, ed. Joel Benton (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1893), 107; Robert Chadwell Williams, Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 183.
33. Globe, 34th Cong., 1st Sess., February 2, 1856, 342–43; Giddings to Laura Giddings, February 3, 1856, in Stewart, Giddings, 237.
34. NYT, February 6, 1856. For similar sentiments about the existence of “a North,” see Edwin Morgan to his brothers, January 26, 1856, in Hollcroft, “Congressman’s Letters,” 455.
35. John Swanson to Banks, undated, Nathaniel Banks Papers, LC.
36. Swanson to Brooks, May 30 1856, in Harlan Joel Gradin, “Losing Control: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Breakdown of Antebellum Political Culture” (Ph.D. dissertation, UNC, 1991), 31. Gradin misidentifies the writer as “Lawson.”
37. The best primary accounts of the caning of Sumner are the lengthy accounts of related debates in the Globe and the report of the congressional investigative committee: House Report No. 182, 34th Cong., 1st Sess., 1856, “Alleged Assault Upon Charles Sumner.” Particularly useful secondary accounts include David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 1:278–311; Gradin, “Losing Control”; Brooks D. Simpson, “‘Hit Him Again’: The Caning of Charles Sumner,” in Compromise of 1850, ed. Finkelman and Kennon, 202–220; T. Lloyd Benson, The Caning of Senator Sumner (Greenville, S.C.: Furman University, 2004); Williamjames Hull Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2010). For studies that use the caning as a thematic starting point, see for example Gregg M. McCormick, “Personal Conflict, Sectional Reaction: The Role of Free Speech in the Caning of Charles Sumner,” Texas Law Review 85 (May 2007): 1519–52; David Tatham, “Winslow Homer’s ‘Arguments of the Chivalry,’” American Art Journal 5 (May 1973): 86–89; James Corbett David, “The Politics of Emasculation: The Caning of Charles Sumner and Elite Ideologies of Manhood in the Mid-Nineteenth Century United States,” Gender and History 19 (August 2007): 324–45; Manisha Sinha, “The Caning of Sumner: Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War,” JER 23 (Summer 2003): 233–62.
38. Sumner to Henry Raymond, March 2, 1856, Charles Sumner Papers, LC. Interestingly, Sumner didn’t care what the topic of his attack would be, noting that “at this moment Kansas is the inevitable point.” But he was “smitten” by events in Kansas and eager to “expose this whole crime at great length, and without sparing language.” Sumner to William Jay, May 6, 1856; Sumner to Salmon P. Chase, May 15, 1856, ibid.
39. Sumner, “The Crime Against Kansas” (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856), 5, 17; Globe, 34th Cong., 1st Sess., May 20, 1856, 547 app. For Adams: Globe, 26th Cong., 2nd Sess., February 4, 1841, 322 app.
40. Le Baron Russell to Sumner, May 11, 1856, in The Works of Charles Sumner (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1873), 4:129.
41. Donald, Charles Sumner, 1:289.
42. Preston Brooks to John Hampden Brooks, May 23, 1856, in Robert L. Meriwether, ed., “Preston S. Brooks on the Caning of Charles Sumner,” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 52 (1951): 2.
43. Donald, Charles Sumner, 1:286; James Buffington testimony, Committee Report, 66–67.
44. Donald, Charles Sumner, 1:286; Globe, 26th Cong., 2nd Sess., February 4, 1841, 322 app. During the investigation of the caning, Representative John Bingham (O-OH) stated that Douglas’s comment was taken by many as a request for someone to cane Sumner. Committee Report, 44.
45. Globe, July 14, 1856, 34th Cong., 1st Sess., 832 app.
46. On Stanbery, see House Journal, April 21, 1832, 625, as well as ibid., April 16, 17, 19, 23 and May 11, 14.
47. Edmundson testimony, Committee Report, 59–60.
48. Wise to Edward Everett, May 26, 1856, Edward Everett Papers, LC. See also James Mason to George M. Dallas, June 10, 1856, in Gienapp, “The Crime Against Sumner,” 221.
49. Committee Report, 60. Edmundson argued that because the Senate had adjourned for the day, the attack wouldn’t be as objectionable.
50. Ibid., 3–4, 19. Howell Cobb (D-GA) and Alfred Greenwood (D-AR) signed the minority report; Lewis Campbell (O-OH), Francis E. Spinner (D-NY), and A.C.M. Pennington (O-NJ) signed the majority report.
51. NYT, May 23 and 27, 1856; New York Courier and Inquirer, reprinted in NYT, May 28, 1856; New York Commercial Advertiser reprinted in Richmond Daily Dispatch, May 30, 1856. See also Pierce, “Murder and Mayhem: Violence, Press Coverage, and the Mobilization of the Republican Party in 1856.”
52. New Hampshire Statesman, May 31, 1856. See also New-York Daily Tribune, May 24 and 25, 1856. On the linking of Sumner and violence in Kansas, see Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 295–303; Miner, Seeding Civil War. Years later, Albert Gallatin Riddle (R-OH) made the connection even more blatant: “The senate chamber was a part of Kansas.” Riddle, Life of Wade, 24. On the idea of a chain of Slave Power assaults, see Pierce, “Murder and Mayhem.”
53. NYT, May 22, 1856. On national press coverage of the caning, see Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., Fanatics and Fire-Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2003), chapter 2, 34–48; Donald, Charles Sumner, 303–307; Manisha Sinha, “The Caning of Charles Sumner,” 233–62; Michael D. Pierson, “‘All Southern Society Is Assailed by the Foulest Charges’: Charles Sumner’s ‘The Crime Against Kansas’ and the Escalation of Republican Anti-Slavery Rhetoric,” New England Quarterly 68, no. 4 (December 1995): 531–57; David, “The Politics of Emasculation”; Hoffer, Caning of Sumner, 85–95.
54. Reprinted in The Liberator, June 13, 1856.
55. From New York Courier and Enquirer, quoted in Daily Atlas (Boston), May 30, 1856. On the link between “Bloody Kansas,” “Bloody Sumner,” and the rise of the Republican Party, see Gienapp, “Caning of Sumner,” 230–31.
56. Lowell Daily Citizen and News, May 29, 1856. On Webb and slavery, see Crouthamel, James Watson Webb, 55–56, 99–100.
57. Brooks to Webb, May 26, 1856, James Watson Webb Papers, Sterling Library, Yale University. On Webb’s conversion to the Republican Party, see Crouthamel, James Watson Webb, 125–35; Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 267–68.
58. Frances Seward to her children, May 22, 1856, in Walter Stahr, Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 161.
59. NYT, May 28, 1856. In true Southern style, Andrew Butler (D-SC) worried about the speech’s damage to his reputation because he couldn’t defend himself if the speech was spread “to the four corners of the globe, where I am not known.” Globe, 34th Cong., 1st Sess., June 12, 1856, 630 app.
60. Hamlin to Fessenden, May 28, 1856, in The Life and Times of Hannibal Hamlin, ed. Charles E. Hamlin (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1899), 284.
61. Fessenden to Frank, June 15, 1856.
62. Preston Brooks to John Hampden Brooks, June 21 and May 23, 1856, in Meriwether, “Preston S. Brooks on the Caning of Charles Sumner,” 4, 3.
63. Richmond Daily Dispatch, May 30, 1856.
64. Globe, 34th Cong., 1st Sess., May 23, 1856, 1289–90. When Clingman insisted that Campbell’s implications were false, Campbell immediately asked, “Does the gentleman mean anything personal by that?” Ibid., 1290.
65. Wise to Edward Everett, May 31, 1856, Edward Everett Papers, LC.
66. Keitt to Sue Sparks, May 29, 1856, Laurence Massillon Keitt Papers, Duke University.
67. “A Well Wisher” to Banks, July 10, 1856, Nathaniel Banks Papers, LC.
68. Shelden’s Washington Brotherhood skillfully explores bonds between congressmen, depicting Congress as a “bubble” of good feeling (5, 68). Yet, as congressmen themselves attested, they could socialize across sectional lines and still envision a “North” or “South” that was trying to dominate the federal government and degrade their section, and thus had to be stopped at any cost, even to the point of congressional violence. Sociability and hostility weren’t mutually exclusive, and a handful of hotheads could push congressmen to extremes in ways that mattered. Along similar lines, Banks didn’t appoint a moderate committee to investigate Sumner’s caning because the caning meant so little to congressmen; quite the opposite, he appointed a moderate committee because the caning meant so much. Washington Brotherhood, 142–43.
69. Preston Brooks to John Hampden Brooks, June 21, 1856, in Benson, The Caning of Senator Sumner, 133–34. Brooks engaged in formal duel correspondence with Henry Wilson (R-MA), Anson Burlingame (R-MA), and New Yorker James Watson Webb, and he had a friend ask John Woodruff (A-CT) if he was a fighting man. He also insultingly dismissed Calvin Chaffee (A-MA) as not worth fighting, and went looking for Russell Sage (R-NY) and Edwin Morgan (O-NY) at Willard’s Hotel, vowing to do them damage, though he never found them. When pressed on his actions the next day, Brooks allegedly claimed to be “excited with wine.” New-York Tribune, August 22, 1856; National Aegis, August 27, 1856; Liberator, August 29, 1856; Chicago Daily Tribune, August 25, 1856.
70. Keitt and Burlingame exchanged harsh words on June 21, leading to talk of a duel, but no action; Toombs was allegedly planning to attack Benjamin Wade (R-OH) for his harsh words about the caning and about Toombs, who had declared that Sumner got what he deserved. Myers, Henry Wilson and the Coming of the Civil War, 326. On Campbell, see ibid., 324.
71. French to Henry Flagg French, June 29, 1856, BBFFP. See also Myers, Henry Wilson and the Coming of the Civil War, 324.
72. Albany Evening Journal, June 7, 1856. For their correspondence, see Daily Union, May 31, 1856.
73. John Bigelow, Retrospections of an Active Life, 1817–1863, 5 vols. (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1909), 1:166. Lewis Campbell (R-OH), Burlingame’s second, was allegedly told about Cilley’s disadvantage by Francis P. Blair (R-MO), who claimed that Cilley’s friends wouldn’t have shied from him in the North as they had in the South.
74. New York Herald, July 23, 1856, quoted in Boston Traveler, July 23, 1856. See also Lawrence O’Bryan Branch to Nannie Branch, July 30, 1856, Papers of Lawrence O’Bryan Branch, UVA; “The Carolinian Fire-Eater”—a humorous poem depicting Brooks as a coward—Liberator, August 1, 1858; and Brooks’s “Canada Song,” which first appeared in the New York Evening Post, in Benson, Caning of Senator Sumner, 200–201. On the Burlingame-Brooks affair, see National Era, July 31, 1856; Burlingame, “A Card,” National Intelligencer, July 21, 1856; Burlingame’s account of his dispute in Daily Union (Washington), July 23, 1856; James E. Campbell, “Sumner—Brooks—Burlingame, or, The Last Great Challenge,” Ohio Archeological and Historical Quarterly 34 (October 1925): 435–73.
75. French to Henry Flagg French, July 17, 1857, BBFFP.
76. Jessie Benton Fremont to Elizabeth Blair Lee, July 23, 1856, The Letters of Jessie Benton Fremont, ed. Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 120.
77. Sumner to Joshua Giddings, July 22, 1856, Charles Sumner Papers, LC. For negative coverage, see for example Boston Herald, July 21, 1856, and September 13, 1856 and Lowell Daily Citizen, July 23, 1856.
78. See for example Rollin H. Neale to Burlingame, July 29, 1856; William Winter to Burlingame, July 28, 1856, Anson Burlingame and Family Papers, LC. See also New Hampshire Patriot, October 15, 1856; Boston Herald, November 4, 1856, on why Burlingame is the man to elect to Congress because Massachusetts shouldn’t send a “milk and water man.” Southerners had little respect for Burlingame after the affair. See for example Lawrence O’Bryan Branch to unknown, June 13, 1856, Papers of Lawrence O’Bryan Branch, UVA.
79. Burlingame to Jennie Burlingame, July 13, August 1, 3, 6, and 10, September 1, 1856, Anson Burlingame and Family Papers, LC.
80. New York Herald, June 5, 1856. See also Resolutions of citizens of Marshfield, June 2, 1856; Albert Browne to Sumner, June 6, 1856; L. D. Johnson to Sumner, June 7, 1856; Edward Everett to Charles Eames, June 21, 1856, Edward Everett Papers, LC.
81. Irwin Silber, ed., Songs of the Civil War (New York: Dover, 1995), 169–70.
82. On the link between the rise of the Republicans and the period’s violent events generally, see David Grant, Political Antislavery Discourse and American Literature of the 1850s (Newark: University of Delaware, 2012), 102–105; McKivigan and Harrold, eds., Antislavery Violence; Pierce, “Murder and Mayhem”; Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 348–52; Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict, chapter 5.
83. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 414. On the election of 1856 as a “victorious defeat” for Republicans, see ibid., chapter 13.
84. See esp. idem., “Crime Against Sumner.”
85. For an exploration of the role of emotion in the rise of the Republican Party, see Michael E. Woods, “‘The Indignation of Freedom-Loving People’: The Caning of Charles Sumner and Emotion in Antebellum Politics,” Journal of Social History 44 (Spring 2011): 689–705; idem., Emotional and Sectional Conflict.
86. “The Sumner Outrage. A Full Report of the Speeches at the Meeting of Citizens in Cambridge, June 2, 1856” (Cambridge: John Ford, Printer, 1856), 6; Seth Webb, Jr., to Charles Sumner, May 23, 1856, Charles Sumner Papers, LC; [Petition and resolutions], Fitchburg, Mass., May 24 and 26, 1856, ibid.
87. “The Sumner Outrage,” 6; Students of Union College to Sumner, May 27, 1856, Sumner Papers, LC; Advertiser (Portland, Maine), June 3, 1856.
88. Ibid. On the symbolism of Brooks’s cane, see Michael E. Woods, “Tracing the ‘Sacred Relics’: The Strange Career of Preston Brooks’s Cane,” Civil War History (June 2017): 113–32.
89. Preston Brooks to John Hampden Brooks, June 21, 1856, South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 52 (1951): 1–4. See also Henry Ward Beecher’s article in the Washington Star, June 12, 1856: “With the exception of one or two papers, the whole South has accepted the act and made it representative! It is no longer Brooks that struck Sumner! He was the arm, but the whole South was the body!”
90. French, diary entry, May 25, 1856, Witness, 269.
91. French to Bess French, June 8, 1856, ibid., 327. For Sam’s adventure and Fessenden’s panicked response, see Fessenden to Sam, June 15, 1856; James Fessenden to Sam, June 16, 1856; idem. to Fessenden, June 25, 1856; Fessenden to Ellen Fessenden, July 6, 1856, all in William Fessenden Papers, Bowdoin College; Cook, Civil War Senator, 98. For Sam’s narrative of his experience, see Francis Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1907), 71–78.
92. Foner notes Northern approval of the physical courage of Republicans. Free Soil, 146.
93. New England Farmer (Boston), July 19, 1856. Some of the resolutions passed by indignation meetings specifically mentioned the long history of Southern “insolence” in Congress. See for example those passed by a meeting in Manchester, N.H., May 28, 1856, Charles Sumner Papers, LC. On support of Northern fighting men, see also Thomas Hicks to Wade, February 2, 1856, and J. H. Baker to Wade, June 2, 1856, Benjamin Franklin Wade Papers, LC. On indignation meetings and the rise of the Republican Party, see Woods, “Indignation of Freedom-Loving People”; idem., Emotional and Sectional Conflict, chapters 4 and 5.
94. Richmond Whig, February 16, 1858. The Whig was commenting on an article in the Daily Palladium (Oswego, N.Y.) on February 10, 1858, titled “Don’t Kick Him,” detailing Wilson’s desire to be “Sumnerized”—“kicked or cuffed”—into reelection.
95. Richmond Whig, February 16, 1858.
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