It was this last college incident that offered a telltale glimpse of Preston Brooks's distant future. He had rushed headlong and rashly to assist a family member against insurmountable odds—armed officers—based on little more than a rumor. He had to know that his actions, combined with his previous transgressions, would further sully his reputation at the college and perhaps jeopardize his standing. Yet, in Preston Brooks's world, virtually nothing trumped fierce loyalty to family in importance, risks be damned.
* * *
Like many Southerners, Preston Brooks viewed family as the most important unit in his life. As strained as Charles Sumner's relationship was with his father, as aloof as Sumner behaved toward his siblings, Preston Brooks lived at the opposite end of the familial spectrum. A devoted son, brother, husband, and father, Brooks was deeply committed both to his immediate family and to extended kin. By all indications, Brooks was happiest with his family; again, in sharp contrast to Sumner. “Family meetings are the purest and to me the most delightful of human enjoyments,” he wrote. He was married twice; for two years to Caroline Means Brooks, who died after a lengthy illness (one report called her “always delicate in health”), and then to her cousin, Martha C. Brooks, with whom he had four girls. “God bless these children,” he wrote. “I love them all as the apple of my eyes, and their sweet mother more than all.”
Brooks showered his wife with affection and attention. When a pregnant Martha suffered a fractured leg in a buggy accident in August 1849, Brooks stayed by her side and attended to her care unceasingly. Martha was brought to her mother's house to heal and Preston stayed for a week, showing her how to use crutches and tending to her needs. After two months, with Martha showing little improvement, Preston enlisted the services of a Columbia doctor who operated on Martha's leg. Brooks then cared for his wife every day afterward. Two weeks after the surgery, Martha could walk by herself and Preston took her home. She gave birth to a healthy daughter, Caroline, after this ordeal. Brooks prayed that “God bless and preserve to me one of the best of wives.” He often referred to Martha as “my precious wife,” and “my beloved wife,” and repeatedly asked God to protect and heal her.
In July 1851 Preston Brooks had watched as his three-year-old daughter, Sallie, fought desperately for her life. It wasn't that the death of children was so unusual in South Carolina during the early 1850s—sadly, it was not. But as Sallie, whom Brooks also called Yettie, had been born when Brooks was away at war in Mexico, he developed a deep and tender bond with the child upon his return. He was jubilant that Yettie's first word was “papa,” and she captivated him from the time father and infant laid eyes on each other. As she neared death, there was only a deep pall over the Brooks household.
“My child is now dying,” Brooks wrote, after Yettie had caught cold and became feverish. He recounted that only days earlier, “Yettie had said to her mother…that she had such a bad cold that she could not say her prayers.” In his diary, a devastated Brooks wrote: “It is hard, very hard to give up one so sweet. Her mother is unconscious of her present condition and is asking the poor babe if she knows her. My heart bleeds… My God I pray to Thee to let this affliction prepare my heart and make it acceptable to Thee.” When Yettie died, Brooks recalled tenderly: “Poor sweet ‘Yettie’ was the [most] fearless and sweetest tempered child we had.” Brooks described Yettie as “amusing” and added: “If a child can be said to be humorous at 3 years and 3 months of age, she was so—dearest Sallie has been all we could desire.” A pained Brooks wrote of watching as Yettie's nurse “closed both [the child's] eyes” and took “our poor babe from us.”
A loving husband and father, Brooks was a deeply caring son, too. As the health of his father, Whitfield Brooks, Sr., deteriorated in 1851, Preston prayed for his well-being and wrote: “A better husband and Father never lived…. He is a noble man in virtue and generous tender parent.” At Christmas, Preston realized that the holiday would be the last with his father; Whitfield was not even well enough to come to the dinner table. When his father passed, Preston wrote: “I was with him during the last day and a half and he died in my arms. A kinder parent never lived nor a juster man.” Later, Brooks wrote that he hoped God would bless Whitfield's spirit and “preserve his memory fresh in our hearts.” Doing so would “enable us to emulate his example and appropriate his principles to our conduct.” Preston hoped his father's wisdom and character would serve as inspiration to future generations: “Sacred be the page wherever his name be mentioned,” he implored.
Martha's buggy accident and the deaths of Brooks's father and daughter were followed in April of 1853 by more bad news, a miscarriage—a relatively common occurrence for the time, but still deeply saddening for the Brookses, who had hoped to have another child after Yettie's passing. In the early morning of April 12, Martha had become ill and “threatened with a miscarriage,” Brooks wrote. At first light, he sent for a doctor, but the physician's efforts proved fruitless. Just after 9:00 A.M., Martha “lost a perfectly formed baby boy.” Brooks described the tragedy as “a sore disappointment as we have never before had a son.” Yet, he refused to become mired in self-pity, focusing instead on the blessings he had received in life. “God has been good to me,” he wrote. “I know how very much more of good I have received than was deserved. [I] believe that an habitual dependence upon the providence of the Almighty…is real wisdom.” Such an outlook allowed Brooks to “very much [be] inclined toward thankfulness, even when overtaken by what the human mind would regard as a calamity.”
Martha's miscarriage, which prompted Brooks's philosophical and spiritual reflection on hardship, came at the conclusion of six years of personal pain for the Brooks family, beginning when Preston's brother, Whitfield, Jr. was killed in action in Mexico in 1847. A devastated Brooks buried Yettie next to Whitfield, Jr.—Brooks noted in his diary the ironic juxtaposition of Whitfield's death and Yettie's birth during the war. Whitfield, Jr.'s death was crushing to Preston, who was home from battle recovering from typhoid fever when his brother died. Preston was consumed with guilt when he learned of Whitfield, Jr.'s death, believing that by leaving his combat post, he had not adequately discharged his duty and thus had let his brother down.
These deep familial relationships were part and parcel of Preston Brooks's South, and more specifically, of South Carolina's Edgefield district, where the bonds of kin and region were intertwined and virtually unbreakable.
Insults to his parents or siblings obviously cried out for vengeance, but even indignities inflicted upon his extended family demanded rapid redress and justice. Like any self-respecting South Carolinian, Brooks would never tolerate the belittlement of his region or his state. “Whatever insults my state insults me,” Brooks declared. In some ways, this devotion was among Preston Brooks's most admirable character traits. In other ways, this unswerving loyalty would prove to be a curse.
Like Charles Sumner, Preston Brooks had deep roots in his home state and region. His grandfather, Zachariah Brooks, fought with a South Carolina regiment in the American Revolution. His father, Whitfield, who had some training as a lawyer, ultimately became one of Edgefield's most respected planters, and was described as “a man of science, of liberal education and polished manners.” The Brooks family estate, Roselands, was located near the village of Ninety Six in the northern part of the Edgefield district (it became a county in 1868) and was one of the community's largest plantations.
Located on South Carolina's western border—part of its lower Piedmont district, about midway between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, separated from Georgia by the Savannah River—Edgefield prided itself on its deep influence and leadership statewide. Edgefield residents saw them-selves as representatives of South Carolina and the South, strongly espousing the complex Southern ideals of honor, self-reliance, paternalism, classism, loyalty, local governance, and the virtuousness of agriculture, community, and leadership. By the Civil War, the Edgefield district had produced five governors (the region has pr
oduced ten governors to this day), two United States senators (including Butler), and was one of the most powerful regions in South Carolina. Edgefield was also home to two Civil War governors and Confederate General James Longstreet. In the words of one historian: “As South Carolina led the South—first in nullification, then in proslavery and prosouthern arguments, and later in secession—Edgefield led South Carolina.” The town of Edgefield, which would become the county seat, boasted South Carolina's oldest newspaper, the Edgefield Advertiser, and a classic municipal centerpiece, the Edgefield Court House, which was built in 1839 and anchors the town square, the community's gathering space for civic events and commerce.
Some of the state's staunchest proslavery, pro–states' rights, and promilitary voices emanated from Edgefield, as did many of its most daring and rebellious troublemakers. One editor applauded Edgefield as having “more dashing, brilliant, romantic figures, statesmen, orators, soldiers, adventurers, daredevils, than any other county in South Carolina, if not of any rural county in America.” Families like the Brookses, the Butlers, and the Pickenses “gave to their village and county a character that was South Carolinian, more intense, more fiery, than was found elsewhere…. They seemed to be harder riders, bolder hunters, more enterprising and masterly politicians.”
For Preston Brooks, Edgefield provided a strong training ground for his political future and the foundation from which to pursue public office. Here, he strengthened already deep family bonds—the Brookses were related through marriage to the most important families in the district, including the Butlers and the Pickenses; became devoted members of the elite in the Episcopal Church; and forged a leadership position among the wealthy planter class that owned the majority of slaves in Edgefield. Brooks loved Edgefield; its history, its people, its sense of community, its streak of independence and roguishness; its boldness and brashness.
Nearly 40,000 people, 60 percent of them black, lived in the Edgefield district, which was larger than all Southern cities save for Charleston and New Orleans. Yet for Brooks and other members of the planter elite, the region had the distinct feel of a small, close-knit town. Unlike Boston and other industrial cities of the north, with their factories, railroads, tenements, crowded and disease-ridden immigrant neighborhoods, crime, prisons, impersonal way of life, and utter lack of control, Brooks saw Edgefield as a paragon of pastoral orderliness, a hard-working agricultural district where stately mansions and enormous plantations stood adjacent to small homes and one-mule farms; an intimate setting where extended families and personal relationships defined the community's essence, and where business was conducted face-to-face; a place where, even after people moved away, they often returned to visit.
Of course, Edgefield relied on the strength of one other critical economic and social system that wove its way throughout the district's orderly tapestry, one that existed throughout South Carolina and throughout the South, the ingredient that also distinguished it markedly from Northern cities like Boston. Preston Brooks's economic fortunes depended on it, and he supported it, was defined by it socially and culturally, and in his own way, loved it every bit as much as he loved Edgefield and South Carolina.
The South embraced it and was sustained by it. The North sometimes denounced it, but more often wrestled with how to justify it. And it presented the single most vexing contradiction to the nation's promise that all men were created equal. In the South, its oft-used euphemism was “our peculiar institution.” Stripped of verbal niceties, its actual name bespoke the stark rawness of the issue that had divided and haunted America since her founding.
Slavery.
NINE
VALUABLE PROPERTY
“The institution of slavery, which is so fashionable now to decry, has been the greatest of blessings to this entire country,” Preston Brooks told his House colleagues during debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. “Slavery has been the strongest bond of union between these States.”
Not only did “every section of the Confederacy” benefit from slave labor, Brooks pointed out, but the sweat of the African slave gave “employment to the shipping interest of the East, wealth to the manufacturer of the North, and a market for the hemp and live-stock of the West.” Brooks declared that slavery had given the United States “a commerce which excites the admiration and jealousy of the world,” and a power “greater than armies and navies.”
Without any doubt, Brooks said, “enough has been shown to prove the indebtedness of every quarter of the nation to the humble slaves”—the whole country owed a debt of gratitude to the institution of slavery and to the South, which perpetuated its existence and promoted its broad expansion.
In fact, he warned at the time, because slavery benefited every corner of America, failure to enact the Kansas-Nebraska Act—which would breathe new life into the slave-power—would place the country at “greater danger of disunion than at any time since the formation of this government.”
As much as it derived its identity from the bonds of family, the formal customs of Southern gentility, and the virtues of agriculture and religion, Preston Brooks's Edgefield district was undeniably defined by slavery. If South Carolina was the South's staunchest proslavery state, Edgefield stood as its sentinel, fiercely defending the institution against all detractors and attackers, and proudly espousing slavery's contributions, not just on behalf of white Southern agriculturists, Northern industrialists, and Western landowners who profited from it, but to society as a whole, including (so the reasoning went) the slaves themselves. Slaves may have been shackled and subjugated, but, Edgefield's white residents believed, this was the natural order of things; didn't slaves also enjoy the beneficence of orderly plantation life and the benevolence of protective owners?
The Edgefield argument was the South's argument: slavery was inherently good—for the owners and the owned; for the nation's business; for the overall community. Economic and civil order was best maintained and advanced, and life was richer both materially and morally, with a robust, thriving, and unencumbered system of human slavery.
Cotton was king in Edgefield by the mid-1850s, and black slaves served the monarch well. Thanks to its large plantations and large number of slaves, Edgefield district, with the fourth largest population in South Carolina, led the state in the number of cotton bales produced. Slavery was the basis of economic prosperity in Edgefield, and those with slaves profited most. Historian Orville Burton points out that nearly 63 percent of white households owned land and nearly 66 percent of landowners had at least some slaves. With slaves as collateral, planters could obtain credit from cotton factories and could rent or sell slaves if they needed cash. And slaves helped the community at large too—taxes levied on slave-owners provided Edgefield and other districts with revenue to repair roads and provide other services.
Slavery was so woven into the fabric of Edgefield and South Carolina that virtually no white planter could imagine life without it. Not only was it considered essential to the economy, it was viewed as integral to the overall moral and social order of the region and the strength and stability of the entire country; most slave-owners believed the institution of slavery elevated society and civilization in general. A well-run plantation, with an unambiguous and authoritative patriarchal relationship between owner and slave, symbolized an orderly and morally upstanding community. “No Republican government can long exist without the institution of slavery incorporated into it,” declared one minister. The sentiment was echoed by Thomas Green Clemson, the Northern-raised son-in-law of John C. Calhoun, who said: “Slaves are the most valuable property in the South, being the basis of the whole southern fabric.”
Preston Brooks agreed completely, choosing to scold abolitionists and Free-Soilers when he reminded them that they “know nothing of the Negro [slave] character, or of his intimate and inseparable connection with the moral, social, and political condition of the South.” Whites and blacks working together—one as master, one as slave—was best for all involved, B
rooks believed. His parents were large slave-owners at their Roselands plantation, and at his own Leaside Plantation near the town of Ninety Six, Brooks owned more than eighty slaves, whose value in 1857 exceeded $50,000. This was in an era when a set of blacksmith tools was valued at $5, Brooks's two-horse wagon was priced at $35, and Columbia lodging-seekers could rent a seven-room apartment, complete with “heat, hot water, and janitor services,” for $45 per month. Slaves were by far a planter's most precious commodity—far outdistancing the plantation owners' next most valuable property, mules and grains, the latter used as feed and sold at market.
To those from the North who sought to interfere in the system of slavery or in black-white affairs in general, Brooks said simply: “If you wish either of us well, let us alone.” This feeling was so pervasive in South Carolina that the mere hint of dissent was, at best, discouraged, and at worst, punished. Vigilance and safety committees were established across the state (and the South) to resist and crush any antislavery sentiments and to root out abolitionists who roamed the South, secretly or overtly spreading their message. The committees often opened mail of those with suspected abolitionist leanings, and while some Southerners objected to this practice on First Amendment grounds, most supported any efforts to blunt the impact of abolitionist thinking. In Mississippi, any “free person” who incited slaves to rebel faced a death sentence. In his early days as a congressman, South Carolina's John Henry Hammond warned abolitionists, “ignorant, infatuated barbarians that they are,” that if they were caught in his home state, they could expect “a felon's death.” He viewed it as an offense against heaven not to kill abolitionists.
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