The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  No clear-thinking, rational person could countenance any of these choices for Kansas, Sumner contended. That left only the Remedy of Justice and Peace to reverse the outrage against the Territory of Kansas, which was for the Senate to wield the “angelic power” of freedom and approve Senator Seward's proposal to admit Kansas immediately as a free state.

  Throughout the two-day, five-hour speech, Sumner's language was bold, confrontational, even incendiary, but not out of the ordinary for the speaker. Senators from the North and South were accustomed to his outspoken, sometimes strident, some-times exaggerated proclamations. If “The Crime Against Kansas” had contained nothing more, history would have regarded the speech as powerful, even noteworthy, but certainly not transformational or even overly controversial for the time—certainly not “among the Senator's most notable productions,” in the words of Sumner's biographer.

  But Charles Sumner could not stop with a recitation of the issues and their possible resolution; nothing in his history or his personal constitution suggested he was capable of doing so. He simply could not help himself. He had promised much more in the way of shock and impact; specifically, language of a “general character, not belonging to the argument” designed to vilify those senators who have “raised themselves to eminence on this floor in championship of human wrongs.”

  In addition to laying out the issues that led to “The Crime Against Kansas,” Sumner called out as villains two Southerners, Senators Andrew Butler of South Carolina and James Mason of Virginia, and one Northerner, Stephen Douglas of Illinois, author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Not surprisingly, he reserved his most vicious and insulting verbal attacks for the man least able to fight back—the elderly, ailing, absent Butler—and for the state from which he hailed.

  * * *

  On the first day of the speech, Monday, he delivered one of his most highly charged passages—what would become one of the speech's most frequently referenced and most famous lines—when he berated Butler. Despite their past friendship, their relationship had cooled as the slavery debate intensified, especially after the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Sumner, who had once escorted Charles Dickens through Boston's cobblestone streets and toured the great cities of Europe to further his education, considered Butler neither his moral nor his intellectual equal. Thus, Sumner had no compunction about belittling the man as a way to weaken the man's argument.

  He began by comparing Butler to the fictitious Don Quixote (Sumner had borrowed Don Quixote from the library to prepare his speech), a man who believed himself to be a chivalrous knight, but who was actually deluding himself—a true knight who practiced genuine chivalry would have resisted the temptation of slavery, but Butler could not. Instead, Sumner charged, Butler “has chosen a mistress to whom he has made vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.” He labeled Douglas “the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices.” Douglas, pacing at the back of the Senate chamber, later recalled saying to himself, “That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damned fool.”

  South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks was in the Senate chamber for some of Sumner's first-day speech and was deeply offended to hear Butler, his second cousin, compared to a foolish old Don Quixote who embraced his wench, the harlot slavery. In fact, Sumner's repeated sexual references in the speech, his use of words like “harlot,” “virgin,” and “rape” were likely particularly galling to Southern slaveholders who repeatedly chafed at stubborn rumors (many proven true after the Civil War) that they sometimes engaged in sexual relations with their slaves and even sired children. Sumner's choice of language was designed to cut to the quick about this most controversial and sensitive topic.

  Preston Brooks was not in the Senate chamber for Sumner's second-day attacks against Butler and South Carolina, utterances that were not as inflammatory as his “harlot” remark, but were in some ways more personally cruel, biting, and—Southerners would later say—cowardly, because they were directed against a defenseless opponent. As a result of his stroke and a slight facial paralysis it had caused, Senator Butler now slurred his speech. Ridiculing this affliction, Sumner accused Butler of arguing against the admission of Kansas as a free state “with incoherent phrases [that] discharge the loose expectorations of his speech.” Sumner described Butler as a buffoon, telling a shocked Senate chamber that the South Carolinian “touches nothing which he does not disfigure with error…he shows an incapacity of accuracy, whether in stating the Constitution or in stating the law, whether in details or statistics.” In an outrageous conclusion to this set of insults, Sumner declared that Andrew Butler “cannot open his mouth but out there flies a blunder.”

  Sumner also taunted Butler for his state's reliance on “the shameful imbecility of slavery” and ridiculed him for questioning the value and contributions of Kansas Territory when his home state had so much to be ashamed of. “Has he read the history of the State which he represents?” Sumner shouted. “He cannot forget its wretched persistence in the slave trade…or in its constitution, republican only in name, confirming power in the hands of the few,” including containing the requirement that legislators from South Carolina own an “estate of five-hundred acres of land and ten Negroes.”

  Sumner labeled “madness” Butler's attempts to diminish Kansas by comparing it to South Carolina. “In the one is the long wail of slavery; in the other the hymn of freedom,” he said. Sumner added that there already was more “educated talent” in Kansas than in Butler's “vaunted” state. “Already in Lawrence alone, there are newspapers and schools, and throughout this Territory, there is more academic mature scholarship…than in all South Carolina.” Sumner told his Senate colleagues that if the entire history of South Carolina “were blotted out of existence,” civilization would lose less than it “has already gained by the example of Kansas in that valiant struggle against oppression.” In short, Sumner's message to Butler was “that Kansas, welcomed as a free State, will be a ministering angel to the republic, when South Carolina, in the cloak of darkness which she hugs, lies howling.”

  Virginia's Mason and Illinois's Douglas also felt Sumner's wrath, though they were not subjected to the same scorching language as Butler. Sumner said that Mason, a key author of the Fugitive Slave bill—“a special act of inhumanity and tyranny”—also suffered from the “bitterness of a life absorbed in support of slavery.” Mason did not represent the “early Virginia,” the Virginia of Jefferson and Washington, but instead represented the “other Virginia, from which Washington and Jefferson avert their faces.” This was the Virginia “where human beings are bred as cattle” and people were imprisoned if they read the Bible to “little [slave] children.” Considering Virginia's reputation, it was “proper” that Mason should “rail against free Kansas.”

  Douglas, too, was one of the “natural enemies” of Kansas, and Sumner lambasted him for declaring as “traitors” those who opposed the unlawful Kansas legislature. “If this be treason,” Sumner asserted, “make the most of it.” And if Douglas favored hanging those who were convicted of treason, so be it, Sumner said—“not the first time in history will a scaffold become the pedestal of honor.”

  Coyly, Sumner said he singled out Butler, Mason, and Douglas with “reluctance,” but felt it was his duty to help “the country understand the character of the hostility to be overcome.”

  His entire speech, including his recitation of the issues in Kansas and his personal attacks upon his three Senate colleagues, culminated with emotional closing remarks on the second day. As the clock approached three in the afternoon, after five hours of oration over two days, a drained Sumner begged his fellow Senators to consider a free Kansas. He appealed to them to admit the territory as a free state in “just regard for free labor; in Christian sympathy for the slave…in dutiful respect for the early Fathers…in the name of the Constitution…and, in the name
of the Heavenly Father, whose service is perfect Freedom.”

  When Sumner finally sat down, the storm broke forth in the stunned Senate. Northerners expressed their displeasure first.

  Michigan's Lewis Cass, the dean of the Senate and the man who formally presented Sumner to his colleagues for his swearing-in ceremony after his election by the Massachusetts legislature, rose to criticize Sumner first. In solemn tones, he declared that Sumner's speech was “the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body… I hope never to hear again here or elsewhere.” According to former Massachusetts governor Edward Everett, Sumner's speech had raised the stakes and deepened the bitter rancor between North and South. “Language equally intemperate and bitter is sometimes heard from a notorious parliamentary blackguard,” a shocked Everett said, “but from a man of character of any party I have never seen any thing so offensive.”

  Douglas responded angrily after Sumner finished on the second day, kicking off a heated exchange with the Massachusetts senator. He accused Sumner of “a depth of malignity that issued from every sentence,” and deemed his speech “obscene and vulgar…unfit for decent men to read,” and more worthy of “those haunts where ladies cannot go, and where gentlemen never read Latin.” He objected to Sumner's verbal assaults on the absent Butler. “He will be here in due time to speak for himself, and act for himself too,” Douglas said. Douglas took great umbrage at Sumner's description of the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a “swindle” and failed to understand why Sumner felt compelled to use personal attacks in his speech. Was it to foment political strife? Was it Sumner's object to “drive men here to dissolve social relations with political opponents?” Was it to “turn the Senate into a beer garden, where Senators cannot associate on terms which ought to prevail between gentlemen?” Or, Douglas wondered, was it simply Sumner's goal “to provoke some of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street, that he may get sympathy upon the just chastisement?”

  Sumner regained the floor to respond, shouting that Douglas had best remember that “the bowie-knife and bludgeon are not the proper emblems of senatorial debate.” Sumner followed by saying that “no person with the upright form of a man can be allowed—” but then he hesitated and did not finish his sentence.

  “Say it!” Douglas taunted him.

  Sumner complied: “No person with the upright form of man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality. Will the Senator from Illinois take notice?”

  A steaming Douglas retorted: “I will, and therefore will not imitate you, sir.”

  Undeterred, Sumner replied that “again, the Senator has switched his tongue, and again he fills the Senate with his offensive odor.”

  Virginia's Mason, whom Sumner had personally attacked in the speech, told his Senate colleagues that listening to Sumner was to hear “depravity, vice in its most odious forms,” something he would not tolerate outside of the Senate, but was forced to listen to in the chamber because of the “necessity of my position under a common Government.” Under Senate rules, Mason lamented, he was required to “recognize as an equal, politically, one whom to see elsewhere is to shun and despise.”

  As the encounter ended late in the afternoon of the second day, some of Sumner's allies crowded around him and congratulated him for taking the fight to his opponents; one newspaper correspondent in attendance later called Sumner's remarks “majestic, elegant, and crushing.”

  But several of Sumner's Republican colleagues also feared for his safety, especially troubled that Douglas's reference to kicking Sumner “as we would a dog in the street” could provoke violence. Representative John A. Bingham, a Republican from New York who attended the second day of the speech, warned Sumner's fellow Massachusetts senator, Henry Wilson, to protect his colleague. He believed Douglas's remark was “designed to produce and encourage an assault,” and predicted that “there will be an assault upon him.” Wilson and Ohio's Ben Wade both regretted the vindictiveness of Sumner's language, and believed that others who felt the same could take action against him. “I am going home with you today—several of us are going home with you,” Wilson told Sumner. Believing the proposed precautions were totally unnecessary, Sumner replied: “None of that, Wilson.” He slipped out a side door of the Capitol and walked to his lodgings alone.

  * * *

  Beyond the walls of the Senate chamber, reactions to Sumner's speech also began almost immediately, with equal intensity expressed on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

  Northern antislavery stalwarts felt as though Sumner had finally issued a long overdue clarion call against the deteriorating situation in Kansas and slavery in general. Proslavery Southerners concluded that Sumner's extreme views and his personal attacks, especially against Butler, were just additional examples of the radical, destructive, and uncompromising beliefs of abolitionists and evidence of their desire to obliterate the Southern way of life.

  On one end of the reaction continuum were the gushing remarks by Northern antislavery newspapers such as the New York Tribune (“Mr. Sumner has added a cubit to his stature”) and compliments from Sumner's loyal friends: including poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (“A brave and noble speech…the greatest voice on the greatest subject that has ever been uttered”), abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (who called the speech “invincible in its truthfulness), and genteel antislavery champion Lydia Maria Child (who found nothing in Sumner's speech “which offended either my taste or my judgment”). Child, who normally eschewed personal invective, found the speech “magnificent” and filled with “intellectual strength and moral heroism.”

  The South was deeply aroused, too, but in an overtly hostile way. Most Southerners objected to Sumner's overall message, but were far more infuriated at the personal insults levied against Butler. One Tennessee congressman announced that Sumner “ought to be knocked down and his face jumped into.” The Richmond Enquirer was outraged by his language and tone and denounced him for daring to speak his words while American ladies were present in the gallery. With his obscenities, Sumner acted as “the public insulter of female delicacy, sensibility, and refinement.” The cowardly Sumner stood in stark contrast to the “honorable, courageous and manly” Andrew Butler. The Washington Star wrote that Sumner's “personal vilification and abuse of Senator Butler…caused a blush of shame to mantle the cheeks of all present” in the Senate chamber.

  Most political moderates, Northerners and Southerners alike, expressed dismay at Sumner's harsh tone, sensing that the Massachusetts senator had crossed a Rubicon of sorts on the subject of slavery, sensing also that recriminations were likely.

  Sumner's speech was printed at once in leading newspapers in many Northern cities, and large pamphlet editions were soon made available in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.—more than one million copies of the speech would be distributed within a couple of months. Sumner himself picked up final copies of the speech from the printer on May 21, one day after he had concluded his five-hour oration.

  On street corners, in offices, and in homes across Washington—a city filled with proslavery interests—Southerners seethed at Sumner's insults and discussed retaliation. They denounced the speech and Sumner again and again, and one man, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, interpreted Sumner's caustic words as a personal affront to his family, his region, and his manhood. To Brooks, part of a new breed of young Southern congressmen who fiercely defended their region's way of life, despots such as Sumner represented a dangerous group of radical Republicans whose rhetoric threatened the South, her sense of order, and her most cherished institutions. Sumner's uncompromising and strident calls for the immediate, unconditional, and uncompensated emancipation of slaves posed a grave danger to the Southern economy and the region's orderliness. If a man could be forced by the federal government to surrender his assets—human or otherwise—then that government, and the people who advocated this a
buse of power, must be stopped.

  Sumner had compounded his sins by personally insulting Brooks's physically impaired second cousin, Senator Andrew Butler, and his home state, South Carolina, on the United States Senate floor and in front of an entire nation.

  When Butler returned to the Senate two weeks after Sumner's speech, he revealed to his colleagues that in the thirty-six hours after “The Crime Against Kansas,” his cousin Brooks was tormented everywhere he turned. “He could not go into a parlor, or drawing-room, or to a dinner party, where he did not find an implied reproach that there was an unmanly submission to an insult to his State and his countrymen,” Butler said. The South Carolina senator added: “It was hard for any man, much less for a man of his temperament, to bear this.”

  As Brooks bristled under these reproaches, he considered his options. Though Sumner's remarks were slanderous, legal action was out of the question. No Southern gentleman considered a lawsuit the proper redress for a slur upon his good name or that of a family member. According to the normal code of Southern chivalry, Senator Butler would be obliged to flog Sumner—but Brooks's elder cousin was now sixty years old and infirm, and Sumner was a physically large and powerful man. Thus, after two sleepless nights, Preston Brooks had made a decision. Later he would say, “I felt it to be my duty to relieve Butler and avenge the insult to my State.”

  PART II

  SEVEN

  NOTHING BUT A CANE

  As Representative Preston Brooks, gold-headed cane in hand, approached an unsuspecting Senator Charles Sumner on Thursday, May 22, 1856, the Southerner was thankful that the waiting was finally over.