Years later, in Hammond's home state, the town of Spartanburg arrested a New York man, posing as a researcher, after he was caught carrying abolitionist pamphlets among his materials. While he awaited trial, public sentiment overwhelmingly favored the ultimate penalty for his transgression: death. But Spartanburg officials delayed his trial, instead using the New Yorker as an example to heighten public awareness about the dangers of abolitionism. Later, cooler heads prevailed, and the man was released and allowed to flee to the North unharmed.
The Southern hatred of abolitionists had deep roots that went well beyond economic concerns. It was a hatred fueled by a visceral fear that abolitionism had the potential to destroy the South's way of life, but—even worse—that the South would become as decadent, disorderly, and godless as the North.
At the heart of Southerners' fear of abolitionism, at the core of the entire planter-plantation-slave dynamic, was the nearly universal and unshakable belief among elite white slave-owners that blacks were inherently inferior.
Plantation owners believed blacks, slaves in particular, were incapable of caring for, providing for, or—God forbid—governing themselves. Slaves required guidance and discipline, in much the same way parents would shelter or reprimand innocent or insolent children. Most planters had convinced them-selves that the plantation model was both the best way to protect blacks from themselves and the best way to protect white society from blacks. Hence, the plantation's strict prohibition against blacks learning to read or write; its religious instruction to save blacks from their heathen tendencies; its detailed written rules governing the whipping, hobbling, and other severe punishment of slaves for a slew of transgressions. James Henry Hammond believed that the black race had been created to be a “mud-sill” upon which a higher level of society could be built. Without such a lower-class foundation, “you might as well attempt to build a house in the air,” he wrote.
Preston Brooks grew up in an environment whose entire structure depended on absolute adherence to and reliance on these beliefs, an agricultural society in which the principle of black inferiority was constantly reinforced. As much as Charles Sumner believed emancipation was virtuous in the eyes of God, Preston Brooks believed any talk of freeing slaves was heresy. How could blacks care for themselves? How could they survive?
“The history of the African contains proof upon every page of his utter incapacity for self-government,” Brooks told his fellow congressmen in 1854. “His civilization depends upon his contact with and his control by the white man.” Brooks asserted that abolitionists who sought liberty for the black man not only were threatening the entire Southern economic structure, but were threatening the well-being of the very people they were allegedly trying to help. Abolitionists were well aware, Brooks said, that “when he [the black man] is left to his own government, he descends to the level of the brute.”
One need look no further than Jamaica, which had emancipated its black slaves in the mid-1830s, to see the constant chaos and mayhem that existed on the island, Brooks argued. If abolitionists had “one drop of genuine philanthropy…in their veins, they would guard [the black] population…from the evils of such a liberty.” Slave-owners repeatedly employed this argument of protectionism to mask the brutality of human bondage and repel calls for emancipation. For Brooks and others, the thought of thousands of free blacks roaming the South represented the most frightening disorder imaginable. The Edgefield Advertiser warned its readers of the dangers of abolitionism and emancipation: “Insolent free negroes would thrust themselves into society and make proposals of marriage with their [white] sons and daughters.”
Southerners were also appalled at Northern abolitionist hypocrisy—not just for enjoying the fruits of economic prosperity that Southern slavery had helped create in the North, but for decrying the mistreatment of slaves at the same time immigrants in Northern cities subsisted in squalor. In the mid-1850s, while Charles Sumner demanded that the federal government force planters to emancipate slaves across the South, Irish immigrants in Sumner's Boston were living in horrendous conditions, suffering from hunger, disease, unsanitary housing, abject poverty, and unceasing religious and ethnic bigotry, the latter often perpetrated by the very class of people to which Sumner belonged.
Preston Brooks and his Southern compatriots repeatedly mocked the North for its failure to recognize the irony. Indeed, slave-owners argued, Northern capitalist greed, manifested by the growth of factories and the unstoppable wheels of industry, had exploited and crushed poor white workers to a much greater extent than slavery had subjugated the black man. South Carolina Congressman Lawrence Keitt scoffed: “The tower of Massachusetts civilization, which hypocritically nestles the… African to her bosom, thrusts aside thousands of the children of her loins, who can scarcely draw the support of their existence from an overtasked industry!”
And what of the obvious and most glaring distinction between slaves and poor immigrants: that slaves were nothing more than property in the South, owned by planters who bought and sold human beings as the business required, who, like Brooks, listed their slaves among their plantation assets, along with plow horses and kitchen china? Why, that was the very point, Southern slaveholders argued; because slaves were the most valuable property on a plantation, their well-being was paramount. Plantation owners had invested far too much capital in their slaves to allow those assets to deteriorate or suffer harm.
According to Preston Brooks and his slaveholding counter-parts, this level of investment created a system of dictatorial benevolence on the plantation that simply did not exist in the ruthless industrial world of the North. Slaves were often considered an extension of the family, albeit vastly inferior members, while in the North, the relentless pace ground workers to dust, and they were simply replaced by others who would soon suffer the same fate. Even punishment of slaves—sometimes mild, sometimes horrific—was simply a means of maintaining order on the plantation and in society, a way of protecting the owner's investment. Virginia author and slavery advocate George Fitzhugh saw slavery as the most mild and humane form of exploitation, a system that was essential for Southern civilization to flourish.
Beyond Northern hypocrisy, Southerners believed they had one more argument on their side: a constitutional one. Notwithstanding the intensity of slavery debates during the Constitutional Convention seventy years earlier, the fact that the Founders had virtually ignored the slavery question in the final document proved not only that it was just and legal, but that the institution was intrinsically important and valuable to the success of the republic.
It also proved, de facto if not explicitly, that the Declaration's claims that “all men are created equal,” endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” simply did not and could not extend to black slaves.
For abolitionists to argue differently, Southern slave-owners said, demonstrated a profound and dangerous ignorance, of both the Founders' intentions and God's plan.
As deeply as they cherished slavery—for cultural, moral, social, economic, religious, and societal reasons—Southerners hated Charles Sumner for his unabashed and brazen efforts to tear down the institution, an unforgivable offense.
His very name was “the synonym of all that is base and odius,” one letter-writer proclaimed to Brooks. A Memphis newspaper called Sumner a “low groveling wicked demagogue, whose character stinks in the nostrils of all rational men.” Another Brooks friend claimed Sumner was hiding behind his “Senatorial robes which he has for so long disgraced” to “shoot his poisoned arrows and fling his filthy” foul-mouthed abuse.
Brooks's second cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler, asserted that Sumner represented a movement “uncontrolled by responsibility and unregulated by intelligence.” He viewed Sumner's constant attacks on slavery as far from principled; Southern planters and politicians believed that the arrogant senator from Massachusetts simply desired to destroy the moral and social order of th
e South.
That Sumner sought to obliterate the South's most sacred values—love of family, loyalty to region, reliance on slavery—provided enough reasons for Preston Brooks to respond forcibly to the acerbic tone and inflammatory content of “The Crime Against Kansas” speech. But overlaying all of these was one more reason, one that governed and defined the way Preston Brooks lived, loved, and managed his life. Even more important than the sense of order that he held dear was an ingrained and powerful concept that lay at his core.
TEN
THE SOUTHERN CODE OF HONOR
On an island in the middle of Georgia's Savannah River in 1840, twenty-one-year-old Preston Brooks felt the searing pain as the bullet from his opponent's pistol tore into his thigh. But Brooks's own bullet had found its mark too; his Edgefield rival, Louis T. Wigfall, fell to the ground after being struck in the hip. Both men had missed with their first shots; both suffered serious wounds in the second exchange of fire.
The duel had been a long time coming, as complicated political and social divisions between the Brooks and Wigfall families were well-known in Edgefield. The tensions between Preston and Wigfall finally came to a head during the heated gubernatorial election of 1840, in which the two families supported different candidates and traded vicious charges and insults. Wigfall challenged Whitfield Brooks to a duel according to the Southern code duello, a series of complex rules governing dueling, but the elder Brooks refused. Under the same dueling code, Wigfall let Whitfield Brooks know that he would post a placard that after-noon labeling him a scoundrel and a coward. Preston's uncle J.P. Carroll and his cousin Thomas Bird went to the courthouse where Wigfall had posted the notice and asked him to remove it. Wigfall refused and Carroll tore the placard down. Bird, thinking Wigfall would shoot Carroll for the offense, drew a pistol and fired at Wigfall, but missed. Wigfall fired two shots back; the second mortally wounded Bird, who died two days later. To avenge his cousin, Preston Brooks challenged Wigfall to a duel, and Wigfall—desirous to kill another member of the Brooks family—eagerly accepted.
The code duello was a subset of a code of honor that governed virtually every aspect of a white Southern gentleman's life and character. Firmly established by tradition, it governed how to behave, both at home and in social situations; how to treat and speak to women; how to manage his plantation, including the proper way to interact with slaves; how to serve his country and community; and how to avenge personal insults, slights, or slander against him or his kin. It helped define for men the notion that strong, sincere beliefs were worth fighting and dying for; strong moral character, fierce family loyalty, knightlike chivalry, and unswerving courage were among the code's hallmarks. Often, perception was more important than reality—a man's reputation in the community was defined by a complex set of mores and values, and if others perceived that he was living up to these standards, he was accorded public respect and his honor remained intact.
Outright violence was a violation of the code, but dueling provided an outlet that allowed gentlemen to channel their aggressions according to well-defined and mutually agreed upon rules. As historian Steven Stowe wrote: “The code of honor and the duel itself were a bulwark against social chaos rather than a form of violence.”
By virtue of his upbringing, his personality, and his social standing, Preston Brooks was bound by the code of honor, and though he felt obligated to adhere to its rules, obligation alone did not govern his actions. He was a willing participant in the code because he believed fully and unequivocally in its principles and its rituals. For a Southern planter, acting honorably was, in fact, the natural order of things. And in Edgefield, honor defined a man's moral worth.
Preston Brooks's experience during the Mexican War made him question the strength of his character and whether he had embarrassed his family, and by extension, violated the Southern honor code.
Unlike Charles Sumner and most abolitionists, who were outspoken opponents of the war, Brooks and virtually all of Edgefield were strong supporters of the action in Mexico. Recruitment swelled after General Zachary Taylor won rapid and decisive victories; men wanted to travel to Mexico to get a taste of the glory that could accompany heroism in combat. Patriotism and defense of the republic were concepts embodied in the Southern honor code. “I devoutly pray that I may be in at least one battle,” Preston Brooks wrote.
Like many from Edgefield, Brooks volunteered and was named captain of Company D of the Palmetto Regiment, also known as the “Old ’96 Boys” (from the village of Ninety Six). In late 1846, after Brooks led his troops into the public square accompanied by “The Star Spangled Banner,” he pledged to the gathering to bear the flag honorably, to “bear it aloft in triumph, or perish beneath it in glory.” Colonel Pierce M. Butler praised the “gratitude and patriotism” of Brooks and others from Edgefield, including Preston's youngest brother, Private Whitfield B. Brooks, Jr. Butler also expressed satisfaction that his district had supplied its quota of volunteers quickly, writing to Brooks: “I am much gratified at the spirit & Patriotism evinced by yourself & other officers. From old Edgefield nothing less was expected.”
Edgefield sent its sons off to war with a commemorative dinner, where they recalled the glory of the American Revolution, toasting “Capt. P. S. Brooks, in whose veins run the blood of our revolutionary sires. We believe he will lead ‘The 96 Boys’ wherever duty, honor, or patriotism require.” Anxious to prove himself in battle, Brooks led his company to Mexico, arriving just as Veracruz was being occupied. He then marched his troops to the city of Alvarado.
In June 1847, he contracted typhoid fever, became seriously ill, and was forced to leave his troops and return to South Carolina. The humiliation and disgrace he felt was greater than had he fallen on the battlefield—literally, a fate worse than death. A bullet or a bayonet would have brought Brooks glory, but illness connoted weakness. Brooks feared that he would disappoint his community and his family, especially his father.
Those fears were exacerbated when his brother, Whitfield, Jr., died in action. “Thus is fallen one of my dearest sons,” wrote the elder Whitfield. “Mysterious are the ways of God.” In a letter to a friend, where he recounted his family's contributions to the Mexican War, Whitfield, Sr., called his namesake “the noblest son that a father ever raised.” In another letter, he wrote that because Whitfield, Jr., was a “noble specimen of a man,” and his future held so much promise, “the severity of the bereavement is increased by [a] thousand.” His son had died “like a chivalrous knight in the cause of his country,” and perhaps the one consolation is that Whitfield, Jr.'s violent death had occurred “while his heart was yet pure and untouched by selfishness, and unsullied by vice.” Whitfield, Jr.'s heroic legacy was further burnished when his commanding officer recalled the young Brooks's dying words on the battlefield: “Have I discharged my duty?” His commander's reply: “Yes, like a man; you are an honor to your-self, your family, and your country.” Those last words were chosen for his Edgefield tombstone. Whitfield, Jr. was later immortalized in a poem by William Gilmore Simms, one of South Carolina's literary legends.
His brother's heroic death and his father's subsequent grief caused Preston to agonize while recovering from his illness during the summer of 1847. Though he was assigned as a recruiting officer, the work proved unsatisfying and boring. So many Edgefield men had already volunteered that not many recruits remained. Many others were discouraged by the reports of the intense Mexican heat and heavy rains by returning troops. “The disasters of the climate…have quite destroyed the spirit of volunteering,” Brooks noted.
Feeling utterly inadequate and embarrassed, he pleaded to go back to Mexico to reunite with his troops. Fearful that he would be branded a coward, Brooks wrote to Palmetto Regiment surgeon Dr. James Davis, who had treated him, asking for “professional and personal testimony” to the citizens of Edgefield as to the seriousness of his health and the need for him to return from Mexico. Desperate to save face, to avoid disgrace of his fellow townspeopl
e, to preserve, or perhaps regain, his reputation and standing, Brooks fired question after question in his letter to Dr. Davis: “Did not Col. Butler and yourself urge me to return home from Vera Cruz because of my ill health?” “Did I not refuse to resign or take leave of absence and go to Jalapa at the peril of my life—saying that I would try that climate before I would consent to return?” “Was I not at Death's door on this journey?” “Did not Col. B and yourself again insist on my return, and did you not tell me that my life depended on it?”
It was imperative that Davis answer each question fully and accurately, Brooks insisted, “before the people of my District [deny me] the confidence and respect of which I value more than life itself.” The tone of his questions bespoke an irony that Brooks apparently failed to recognize—that begging for respect, in and of itself, demonstrated a lack of the honor that he so craved. Southern honor was earned, not simply granted if one pleaded enough.
Nonetheless, pressured to respond in a manner that would place Brooks in a favorable light, Davis wrote a detailed letter in October 1847 outlining Brooks's illness. Brooks likely had the letter hand-copied and circulated, since a notation on the letter's exterior reads: “Copy of Letter to Dr. David No. 5 Preserve this” and paraphrased versions of its content appeared in later newspaper accounts.
Dr. Davis emphasized that Brooks was “laid bare with a roasting typhoid fever, a disease extremely fatal in our country, and almost certainly fatal to our soldiers under the climate of Mexico.” Yes, Brooks had fought strenuously against the doctor's advice, fought to remain at his post, to lead his men, to engage in combat, but Dr. Davis asserted: “I candidly told him that if he persevered in going on with the army, or in remaining in Mexico, he would die.” Brooks “at last yielded” to the doctor's entreaties to return to South Carolina, “only after the doctor insisted the soldier was near death.” Indeed, Davis repeated in his conclusion, had Brooks remained in Mexico, “he would not have been at this time among the living.”
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