The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  During his lifetime, Brooks had been seriously wounded in a duel, contracted and recovered from typhoid fever, lost a brother in action during the Mexican War, buried his first wife, and watched his three-year-old daughter die from illness in 1851—yet in some ways, the days and hours after Charles Sumner's speech were the longest of his life.

  He had been contemplating action against Sumner since Tuesday, even before the Massachusetts senator had concluded his offensive oration. Brooks was in the Senate chamber to hear Sumner's Monday tirade against Senator Butler, and while he was not present for the conclusion of Sumner's speech, he had heard plenty from his colleagues about the disparaging and insulting language the arrogant Massachusetts lawmaker again had used to describe Butler and South Carolina.

  On Wednesday morning, he met his friend Representative Henry Edmundson of Virginia and told him that he planned to punish Sumner—“to relieve Butler and avenge the insult to my state”—unless the Senator apologized for his utterances. He asked Edmundson to wait with him to witness, but “take no part in,” the confrontation. “Sumner may have friends with him, and I want a friend of mine to be with me to do me justice,” Brooks explained. He told Edmundson that “it was time for Southern men to stop this coarse abuse used by the Abolitionists against the Southern people and States.” He believed that Sumner deliberately provoked Butler and South Carolina, and Brooks would “not feel that he was representing his State properly if he permitted such things to be said.”

  Brooks and Edmundson had sat on a bench in the blistering heat near the walkway leading from Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and awaited Sumner's arrival. Edmundson reminded Brooks of persistent rumors that Sumner had armed himself in anticipation of an attack and asked Brooks what preparations he had made for such an occurrence. Brooks replied simply: “I have nothing but my cane.” After fifteen minutes of waiting and no sign of Sumner, Brooks and Edmundson concluded that either they had missed their quarry or that Sumner was not going to show. Much to Brooks's frustration and dismay, the two Southern congressmen made their way to the House chamber.

  The same afternoon, Wednesday, Brooks had an opportunity to read the text of Sumner's speech, which stoked his rage anew. That evening, he told his close allies from South Carolina, Representatives Lawrence M. Keitt and James L. Orr, that he planned to “disgrace” Sumner with a “flagellation,” though he stated neither the time nor the place. Angry that Sumner had escaped his wrath that day, smoldering from the senator's repeated insults, Brooks barely slept and awakened early Thursday morning. Again, he carried his wooden gutta-percha cane and again he met Edmundson at the western end of the Capitol, which provided him with a wide view of the approach Sumner was likely to take. He planned to assault Sumner there if the senator walked to work; if he came by carriage, Brooks planned to cut through the Capitol grounds, run up a series of stairs, and intercept Sumner behind the building where the carriages stopped. Edmundson advised him against this course of action, arguing that Brooks would become fatigued climbing so many stairs and would thus be physically incapable of overpowering the larger, stronger Sumner.

  Perhaps Brooks agreed with Edmundson's logic, perhaps he felt Sumner had eluded him again. In any case, he and Edmundson walked toward the Capitol, and Edmundson recalled later their conversation “was in relation to other matters.”

  But when they arrived at the door entering into the rotunda, Brooks abruptly headed toward the Senate chamber. Edmundson turned toward the House, but shortly thereafter, once the House adjourned, “casually” made his way to the Senate—both houses of Congress had planned to adjourn early to mourn the recent death of a representative from Missouri, and the House broke session first. Edmundson said he wanted to hear the remaining Senate eulogies for the Missouri congressman, but he also admitted that he expected an “interview” to take place between Brooks and Sumner, and “perhaps that influenced me in remaining longer in and near the Senate Chamber than I otherwise should have done.”

  The Senate adjourned at 12:45 P.M.

  On the day he would unknowingly alter the course of American history, Brooks squirmed in his seat and silently cursed the attractive woman who stood chatting a few feet from him. Agitated and sleep-deprived, Brooks was out of patience. He needed the woman to leave—now. He could hardly carry out his mission to avenge his kin and his region in the presence of a lady. It would violate the code of honor he lived by as a Southern gentleman. He had already tried, but failed, to get the sergeant-at-arms to remove the woman.

  So Brooks waited, seething. He sat in the back row of the Senate chamber with Edmundson. Earlier, they had encountered Keitt, who had also made his way from the House to the Senate chamber. Sensing trouble ahead, Edmundson had proposed that they all leave the chamber, but Keitt said: “No, I cannot leave till Brooks does.” Keitt now stood nearby.

  Although the Senate had just adjourned, a few senators milled about. Brooks paid them no notice. His eyes were fixed on Sumner, whom Brooks regarded as one of the most arrogant boors he had ever come across—and one of the most dangerous threats to the future of the South.

  Brooks knew from the conversation around him that Sumner was signing copies of “The Crime Against Kansas,” a speech that Brooks viewed as a crime in itself. Sumner, whom Brooks and his Southern colleagues considered the most radical of the Boston antislavery leaders, had delivered his usual fanatical tirade against slavery, but this time he had gone too far. Not satisfied with merely focusing on the issue, Sumner had resorted to vicious personal attacks on Brooks's second cousin, an insult compounded by Senator Andrew Butler's absence from the chamber and inability to offer his own defense.

  Worse, the reason for Butler's absence was that he was home recovering from a stroke that had paralyzed a portion of his face and hindered his ability to speak; shockingly, Sumner had used his speech to mock Butler's affliction, too. Sumner had also insulted Brooks's home state, and by extension, the people of South Carolina—and added a blistering, unprovoked attack against the Southern way of life.

  The crime against Kansas? No, Brooks believed the real crime was Sumner's attack against Brooks's family and his beloved home state. Sumner had crossed a line, and Brooks would make him pay—as soon as the woman vacated the Senate chamber. “She's pretty,” Brooks said to Edmundson, “but I wish she'd leave.”

  Restless and anxious, Brooks rose and he and Edmundson walked out of the main chamber and into the adjoining vestibule. Keitt, meanwhile, stood near the clerk's desk at the rear of the chamber. Brooks had been in the Senate chamber for an hour now. He considered sending a note to Sumner asking the Massachusetts senator to meet him outside, but Edmundson convinced him that Sumner would simply invite Brooks to come to his desk.

  Finally, the woman finished her conversation, turned, and walked directly past Brooks and Edmundson and out the Senate chamber door. Brooks waited another moment, his eyes boring into Sumner, who seemed oblivious to anything except the speech copies he was signing. It came as no surprise to Brooks that Sumner was completely absorbed in his own duties; his ego was well known across the Washington political establishment. Justice demanded that he be brought down a peg.

  Brooks glanced at Edmundson, nodded, and began walking toward Sumner with his usual pronounced limp, the result of an old bullet wound that Brooks had sustained during a duel in 1840. In his hand, Brooks carried the gold-headed gutta-percha cane that he often leaned on for support, though today he needed the cane for another reason. Brooks made his way up the aisle toward Sumner, later saying he did so “under the highest sense of duty.” He stepped closer. Sumner still had his head bent toward his desk, writing feverishly.

  Clutching his cane, Brooks reached Sumner's desk where the Senator sat behind a large pile of documents, “writing very rapidly, with his head very close to the desk” completely unaware of Brooks's presence. Sumner's chair was drawn up close and his long legs were entirely under the desk.

  “Mr. Sumner…” Brooks began.

 
Sumner did not stand, but raised his head to identify his visitor.

  Brooks tightened his grip on the cane.

  Later, another South Carolina congressman would say that Preston Brooks felt a “high and holy obligation” to step forward and avenge the insults Sumner directed toward his kin and his state. Anything less would have humiliated Brooks—as a man, a slave-owner, a proud South Carolinian, and a passionate advocate for the Southern way of life.

  Brooks saw no alternative; years of adhering to the twin Southern virtues of honor and order demanded retaliation against Sumner.

  EIGHT

  A SON OF SOUTH CAROLINA

  “The South has been the goose of the golden egg to the North,” thundered Preston Brooks in March 1854, during the congressional debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, “which Free-Soilers, [with] their…fanatical tampering, are threatening to destroy.”

  It was Brooks's first speech since his election to Congress in 1853. Unlike Charles Sumner, Preston Brooks sought neither fame nor limelight when he arrived in Washington, but inter-woven with his service was a deep desire to attain glory and uphold honor for himself and his state. In the same way that Sumner's Boston upbringing and dysfunctional family life shaped his antislavery views and his invective in speeches and debates, Preston Brooks's steadfast loyalty and devotion to family, state, and Southern mores and customs fueled his staunch proslavery views. They combined to ensure that, at this particular moment in history, he—more so than anyone else—would be the one to retaliate against Sumner for his insulting speech.

  Thanks to his actions after “The Crime Against Kansas” speech, the man whose political outlook and sentiments were once considered overly moderate and “a little too national” in the eyes of his Edgefield, South Carolina, constituents, would become the standard-bearer and the avenging angel for the most radical elements of the slaveholding South.

  In the weeks following the pivotal event of his life, Preston Brooks would be almost unanimously vilified by Northerners as “Bully Brooks,” “hotheaded,” “evil,” “hot-tempered,” a “dastardly ruffian,” “black and wicked,” a “coward and an assassin,” even “mentally unbalanced,” all characterizations that were understandable in light of his actions, but mostly inaccurate.

  In fact, with the exception of his rambunctious college years and the two years leading up to May 22, 1856—commencing with the debate on Kansas-Nebraska in 1854—the South Carolina congressman had spent most of his adult life building a reputation as a reasonable, even gentle, moderate who judged men on their character and issues on their merits.

  Virtually everyone who knew Brooks described him as amiable and unselfish. Newspapers described him as a man “of kind heart and the most tender sensibilities” who maintained an “imperturbable dignity” and was “considerate and kind” in his relations with others. One publication referred to him as “earnest, sincere, so full of enthusiasm, that few could resist the influence of his spirit.” A political colleague called him “generous, kind, and even gentle in his nature,” taking more pleasure in repairing “a wrong done by himself than in one inflicted on him by another.” Another ally pointed out that even during a period of “unusual party bitterness,” Brooks maintained many warm friendships among his political opponents.

  Brooks himself deplored acts of needless violence. He warned a friend that defending honor through violence was “the bane and plague of humane society.” After he was wounded in a duel, he pledged to the doctor who treated him that he would never again engage in dueling “for in my conscience I do think it to be wrong.” He intervened to prevent duels and, after becoming a member of Congress, suggested that any member who brought a concealed weapon into the House of Representatives should be expelled.

  Even at a young age, he developed a reputation for prudence and sound judgment. As a twenty-five-year-old aide-de-camp to South Carolina Governor James Henry Hammond, Brooks volunteered and was selected to discreetly remove Massachusetts lawyer and politician Samuel Hoar from Charleston. Hoar was an uninvited emissary of the Massachusetts legislature who had come to South Carolina to investigate the treatment of black seamen who were Massachusetts citizens. The South Carolina legislature asked Hammond to remove Hoar and gave the governor “unlimited power for that purpose.”

  Hammond, fearing mob violence against Hoar, felt it was “of the greatest importance that all should be concluded decently and with such a tone of quiet and air of dignity,” and above all, wanted the expulsion to occur without violence (though he did authorize the use of force to remove Hoar). The governor wanted to “show the world that we are acting more from principle than impulse.” As for the man he selected for the delicate mission, Hammond said: “Brooks is young and ardent, but not without judgment.”

  Politically, Brooks was a moderate, at least in South Carolina, and he supported the national Democratic Party from his first days in the House. He opposed his state's so-called “Irreconcilables,” who believed South Carolina's interests were not served by the national Democrats, and whose most extreme members advocated immediate secession from the United States.

  His reputation as a moderate followed Brooks upon his election to Congress. After a speech, one constituent said he was “pleased with the nationality of his address” and impressed with the way Brooks “repelled all local prejudices and sectional jealousies.” During debate about the transcontinental railroad, and in particular, whether the massive project should be built along a Southern or Northern route, Brooks pleaded with fellow members of Congress to “suppress all sectional feelings,” arguing that “sectional jealousies are the bane of national advancement.” While some loyal South Carolinians found his national legislative positions unnerving, Brooks held the view that “my devotion to my state…requires not to be propped by cultivation of sectional sentiments.”

  Northerners were impressed with Brooks's moderate demeanor and willingness to seek common ground. New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith found Brooks to be a “frank, pleasant man.” The National Era, an antislavery journal, said Brooks was “always a Southern gentleman” when he expressed his opinion, and the New York Times described Brooks as “a man of generous nature…warmly attached to his friends” who was “by no means relentless or vindictive towards his foes.”

  Preston Brooks's reputation as an even-tempered moderate soon had colleagues looking to him to broker discussions and agreements among those with more entrenched views. This often thrust Congressman Brooks into the diplomat's role—something his former college faculty members would never have believed possible.

  Perhaps Preston Brooks sought to fashion himself as a political peacemaker to atone for the pugnacity of his university years. College life revealed impulsive and even violent components of Brooks's personality that bubbled to the surface in the mid-1850s after years of dormancy. He learned to control these emotions as he matured, but these latent tendencies influenced his behavior years later, and they were an important part of his unfolding persona.

  Brooks's rebellious antics deeply irritated the staff and faculty at South Carolina College in Columbia. Indeed, after his fellow Edgerfieldian, Louis Wigfall, graduated in 1837, Brooks became the leading troublemaker at the school, the “chief disturber of faculty peace…destined for [a] spectacular career in the realm of violent personal conflict,” according to the college historian. While his solid scholarship and good grades protected him in some cases, he had poor study habits, enjoyed the taverns in Columbia a little too much, and was never far from expulsion.

  Brooks was first called before the faculty as a freshman for traveling far from the college without permission, but because of his high class rank, he was not disciplined. As a sophomore, he was suspended for missing too many classes and church services. Upon his readmission, Brooks was reprimanded several times for “drifting up town to Briggs' Tavern and other attractive, though forbidden, haunts.”

  In South Carolina, dueling was a common way to settle differences, but ironically, it was
Brooks's refusal to duel that led to his first campus fight. In January 1838, Brooks was seeking the presidency of the school's Clariosophic Society, a prestigious debating club. A fellow student, Lewis R. Simons, had promised not to run against Brooks, but apparently went back on his word. Brooks told acquaintances that Simons was a “falsifier” and Simons challenged Brooks to a duel. Brooks refused, pointing out that college rules prohibited duels. He agreed to give Simons a “boy's satisfaction,” a fistfight. The following day, as Brooks walked to meet Simons, his friends informed him that Simons had armed himself with a pair of pistols and that Brooks should do the same. He refused at first, but then he accepted a gun from a friend.

  When the two met, Simons again challenged Brooks to duel. When Brooks refused again, Simons pulled a horsewhip from beneath his cloak and began to strike Brooks, who drew his pistol. Simons cried that he was unarmed. Brooks tossed away his pistol and the two engaged in fisticuffs. The faculty expelled Simons, the instigator of the incident, and suspended Brooks to “reflect on the matter” until the following April.

  When Brooks returned, he continued to frequent taverns and was careless about attending class, but easily passed his final exams in November 1839. Presumably, graduation lay just a few months ahead.

  But another incident interfered. This time, Brooks received an exaggerated and perhaps incorrect report that his brother had been detained in a Columbia jail and was suffering from “ignominious treatment.” Brooks rushed to the guard house bran-dishing pistols and threatened to shoot police who had mistreated his brother. Officers quickly disarmed him and sent him on his way, but the exasperated South Carolina College faculty had had enough. Weary of his belligerence and his casual attitude toward his studies, they voted to expel him. His fellow class-mates and the former governor of South Carolina petitioned on his behalf, but to no avail. The future congressman never received his bachelor's degree.