The Caning

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The Caning Page 12

by Stephen Puleo


  Brooks finally returned to Mexico in December 1847, but many of the great battles were over. His troops welcomed him back, but the Palmetto Regiment was assigned the relative inglorious role of occupation army. Brooks was distraught, believing, as the company declared in its welcoming resolution, that had he remained in Mexico over the summer, “he would have added another name to the list of the heroes of Edgefield.” Instead, because of his illness and the orders he received to return home “he was deprived of the honor of participating in the glorious achievements of an army.”

  Brooks wrote to his father asking for help in obtaining a more exciting post by appealing to South Carolina Congressman James H. Black. Preston conceded that “every officer in my regiment [says] had I not gone home, I would have died.” Nonetheless, “I will never be satisfied without a fight.” The senior Whitfield complied with his son's request to write to Congressman Black, noting that Preston “deeply and sorely feels the loss sustained by being absent in the great battles.” Whitfield recounted for Black that Preston said “he will never return home until he has been in a battle,” and concluded that his son “now pants for an opportunity of doing something to repair what he conceives he has lost.”

  Despite his best efforts, Preston Brooks did not achieve glory or honor on the battlefields of Mexico, one of his great regrets. He was haunted by the effects of his own illness, which itself could be perceived as a sign of weakness even before it drove him from the battlefield, and by his brother's gallantry and sacrifice. Preston was humiliated again on July 4, 1849, when Edgefield held a ceremony to honor its heroes of the Mexican War, but did not include him among the recipients of commemorative swords to herald their bravery, a slight about which he felt “unjustly neglected.” Brooks took some consolation in December when members of Company D presented him with a “handsome sword' to honor his service, which they hoped he would “transmit to your children.” Still, even in his remarks thanking his men, Brooks alluded to Edgefield's earlier snub during the Fourth of July sword presentation ceremony.

  Historian Harlan Gradin called Brooks's wartime illness and feelings of failure “one of the most profound psychological traumas in his lifetime.” Brooks would need to find another way to achieve recognition and glory; another way to honor his family, his state, his region, and all that his way of life stood for.

  PART III

  ELEVEN

  THE CANING

  Many factors—love of family, loyalty to region, reliance on slavery, adherence to the code of honor—weighed heavily on Preston Brooks as he approached Charles Sumner's desk in the Senate chamber on May 22, 1856.

  But the growing bombast and all-out assault by abolitionists and their ilk also drove him. Since the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act two years earlier, when Southerners openly talked of secession if the legislation failed, Northern abolitionists had only grown bolder and more radical. They denigrated the South and her way of life at every turn, they preached emancipation without compensation, they portrayed Southern planters as brutes and criminals, they encouraged insurrection by slaves—and now, with Sumner as their vocal spokesman, they assailed efforts by Southerners to admit Kansas to the Union as a slave state. The situation was perilous; the South's right to exist as a slave society was in jeopardy. “If abolitionism be successful in Kansas,” warned one Southern newspaper, “we believe the battlefield of Southern rights will be brought to our own doors in less years than the life of a man.”

  These overall attacks, plus Sumner's “gross insult to my State…and uncalled for libel…on my blood” left Preston Brooks with little choice. Later he would say that he would have “forfeited my own self-respect, and perhaps the good opinion of my countrymen,” if he had not “resented the injury enough” to call Sumner to account.

  Despite his loathing for Charles Sumner, Preston Brooks did not intend to kill him. A fellow congressman would later say that had Brooks decided to make Sumner pay by “pulling his nose” or “slapping his face,” events might have turned out much differently. But the irate Brooks viewed Sumner's sins as demanding a more severe form of punishment. A duel was a possibility, but two factors caused him to dismiss this idea: first, Sumner was not a man of honor and thus was unworthy of such a gentlemanly form of settling disputes; second and most important, Brooks feared Sumner would brush aside a challenge to duel and institute embarrassing legal proceedings against Brooks for “sending a hostile message,” in addition to any injuries Sumner suffered in a duel. Brooks noted that these charges would “subject me to legal penalties more severe than would be imposed for a simple assault and battery.”

  Brooks also thought about using a horsewhip or cowhide to flog Sumner, but feared the larger, stronger Sumner would wrest either weapon from his hand. “[He] is a very powerful man and weighs 30 pounds more than myself,” Brooks told his brother. If Sumner disarmed him, Brooks perhaps could be forced to draw a pistol and “been compelled to do that which I would have regretted the balance of my natural life.”

  Instead, to “expressly avoid taking [a] life,” Brooks decided to punish Sumner using an ordinary, easy-to-grip cane made of gutta-percha wood, which a friend had given him three months earlier. The cane weighed eleven and a half ounces, had a gold head, and tapered from a thickness of one inch at the large end to three-quarters of an inch at the small; it had a hollow core of about three-eighths of an inch. Because the cane was not solid, it was likely to splinter if and when it struck the head or torso.

  Vanity prevented a nearsighted Charles Sumner from wearing glasses, so when he heard his name spoken, he looked up and squinted at the tall, blurred and indistinct figure standing before his desk. Sumner had never met Brooks and would not have recognized the South Carolinian even if he had been wearing spectacles.

  “Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully,” Brooks began in a low voice. “It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” Sumner moved as if to rise, and Brooks stopped speaking and struck him on the top of the head with the smaller end of the cane, a blow simply “intended to put him on his guard.” The force of the blow so shocked Sumner that he lost his sight immediately. “I no longer saw my assailant, nor any other person or object in the room,” he recalled. “What I did afterwards was done almost unconsciously, acting under the instincts of self-defense.”

  Sumner threw up his hands to protect himself and Brooks struck him again and again on his head and face with the heavy end of the cane. For the first five or six blows, Sumner struggled to rise, but his legs were still pinned under his desk and he forgot to push back his chair, which was on rollers. After about a dozen blows to the head, his eyes blinded with blood, Sumner roared and made a valiant effort to rise and his trapped legs wrenched the desk—which was bolted to the floor by an iron plate and heavy screws—from its moorings.

  Sumner staggered forward down the aisle, arms outstretched in a vain attempt at defense, now an even larger and easier target for Brooks, who continued to beat Sumner across the head with the cane “to the full extent of [my] power.” He rained down blows upon the Massachusetts senator. “Every lick went where I intended,” Brooks said later. “I plied him so rapidly that he did not touch me.”

  As he pounded Sumner, Brooks's cane snapped, but he continued to strike the senator with the splintered piece. “Oh, Lord,” Sumner gasped, “Oh! Oh!” He stumbled and reeled convulsively around the seats in the Senate chamber, tearing another desk from its screws as he began to fall to the floor. But Brooks showed no mercy and would not let Sumner escape that easily—he had discarded his initial plan to simply teach Sumner a lesson and now did seem intent on killing him. He grabbed the helpless Sumner by the lapel and held him up with one hand while he continued to strike with the other. Brooks would later state that he did not stop hitting Sumner until he had thrashed him with “about 30 first-rate stripes.” Witnesses later testified that they heard shouts of encouragement for Brooks, including, “Go, Brooks!” and “Give the
damned Abolitionist hell!” Near the end of the beating, Sumner was “entirely insensible,” though before he succumbed, he “bellowed like a calf,” according to Brooks.

  Finally, others in the Chamber responded to the uproar. New York Times reporter James W. Simonton ran forward with a group of other men, seemingly determined to stop Brooks, but as they got near the action, Brooks's friend Congressman Lawrence Keitt rushed in, his own cane raised high over his head, yelling, “Let them alone! Goddamn, let them alone.” With his other hand hovering near his holstered pistol, Keitt threatened anyone who interfered. His tactics worked. Brooks would later say in his account of the beating: “I repeated it till I was satisfied; no one interposed and I desisted simply because I had punished him to my satisfaction.”

  New York Congressmen Ambrose Murray and Edwin Morgan finally entered the fracas as it wound down. Murray seized Brooks by the arm and tried to draw him back, but Brooks's arm slipped from Murray's grasp. Later, conflicting reports emerged about this singular moment—some witnesses said Brooks's brief escape from Murray allowed him to beat Sumner once or twice more as the senator lay motionless, lodged against a toppled desk; others, including Brooks, denied it vehemently. As Murray struggled again with Brooks, Whig Senator John Crittenden from Kentucky ran up the aisle and warned Brooks, “Don't kill him,” and helped pull him away from Sumner. Brooks, perhaps realizing he had gone too far, muttered, “I did not intend to kill him, but I did intend to whip him.”

  Robert Toombs of Georgia, standing close by, did not help subdue Brooks; indeed, he hoped that Brooks would renew his assault on Sumner. “I approved [of] it,” Toombs said later. Stephen Douglas, who had run from the anteroom when he heard sounds of the struggle, also chose not to interfere. He thought about trying to end the attack, but reconsidered, believing “that my [strained] relations to Mr. Sumner were such that if I came into the Hall, my motives would be misconstrued, perhaps, and I sat down again.”

  Meanwhile, Morgan caught a dazed Sumner, whose torso had begun slipping from the desk toward the floor, “saving [him] from falling as heavily upon the floor as he otherwise would have done.” Morgan cradled the fallen Sumner, who, head and face covered in blood, “lay at the side of the center aisle, his feet in the aisle.” Morgan heard Sumner groan piteously at first and then go silent, “as senseless as a corpse for several minutes, his head bleeding copiously from the frightful wounds, and the blood saturating his clothes.” Morgan's shirtsleeves were soaked with blood from Sumner's head wounds.

  With Sumner now unconscious, and several pieces of Brooks's cane splintered across a floor slippery with Sumner's blood, friends led Brooks toward a side room; along the way, Crittenden gently took the nub of the broken cane that the South Carolinian still clutched. Brooks surrendered the remnant of his weapon without resistance, but asked Crittenden to find and retrieve the cane's gold head. Brooks later boasted to his brother John Hampden “Ham” Brooks, “I wore out my cane completely, but saved the Head which is gold.” Other Southerners picked up pieces of the splintered cane; later, these scraps would be fashioned into rings that many Southern lawmakers would wear on neck-chains as a sign of solidarity with Brooks.

  In the side room, Brooks's colleagues helped him wash a small cut he had suffered above his eye, caused by the recoil of his cane during the savage beating. Minutes after his cut was bandaged, Brooks and Keitt had left the Capitol and were walking down Pennsylvania Avenue.

  A witness to the attack, William Leader of Philadelphia, who was making his first visit to Washington and had ventured into the Senate chamber just prior to the assault, later testified that the beating was “one of the most cold-blooded, high-handed outrages ever committed.” He did not know Sumner and belonged to a different political party, and thus had “no prejudice in his favor.” Leader believed that had Sumner “not been a very large and powerfully built man,” the caning would have killed him. “No ordinary man could possibly have withstood so many blows upon his bare head,” Leader said.

  Within moments, Charles Sumner regained consciousness, his bleeding head resting on the knee of Edwin Morgan. A few colleagues helped the bewildered and wobbly Massachusetts senator from the floor. A page gave him a glass of water, and he heard a voice suggest that he be carried to a sofa in the anteroom. Sumner asked that someone find his hat and take care of the papers at his desk, then leaned on Morgan and, face covered in blood, staggered toward the anteroom.

  On the way, he passed Louisiana Senator John Slidell, who moments earlier, when informed that Sumner was being beaten, confessed he felt “no particular emotion” at the news. When Slidell saw the bloody Sumner, he expressed no sympathy either, and “did not think it necessary…to make any advances toward him,” admitting that he had “no associations or relations of any kind with Mr. Sumner,” and had not spoken to the Massachusetts senator in two years.

  Colleagues gently lay a stunned Sumner on the lobby sofa to rest. Sumner later said he recognized Morgan's voice as he lay on the floor of the Senate chamber, but he had “no recollection” of who had helped him to the sofa. Lawmakers quickly summoned Dr. Cornelius Boyle, who treated Sumner in the anteroom, stitching his wounds, which were still bleeding profusely. Boyle noted that both head gashes Sumner received had split through the scalp to the bone, “laying it bare,” and that he suffered defensive wounds and bruises on his hands, arms, and shoulders.

  Friends then helped Sumner into a carriage and accompanied him to his nearby Sixth Street lodgings. Upon arrival, they assisted Sumner, still in a stupor, to first undress and then get into bed. Sumner's shirt near the neck and collar was soaked with blood. His waistcoat and trousers were streaked red. Sumner was not aware of the condition of his clothing at the moment, but he examined it later and would recall: “The broad-cloth was covered with blood on the shoulders so thickly that the blood had soaked through the cloth, even through the padding, and appeared on the inside. There was also a great deal of blood on the back of the coat and its sides.”

  As soon as he reached his bed, Sumner, likely suffering from a concussion, told Wilson that he wished to continue his crusade against slavery as soon as he could return to the Senate. “When I recover I will meet them again, and put it to them again,” Sumner reportedly told Wilson. A patient Wilson did not respond directly, but urged Sumner to try to relax.

  About an hour later, Dr. Boyle arrived to make a more thorough examination and told Sumner's friends that the senator's condition was such that it was “absolutely necessary that he should be kept quiet,” since he could not determine the “extent of his injuries at that time.” An exhausted, injured, pained, shocked, and bewildered Charles Sumner could only remark before falling asleep: “I could not believe that a thing like this was possible.”

  News of Sumner's beating consumed Washington and raced across the nation like a giant brush fire. Both antislavery Northerners and proslavery Southerners pounced on the caning to support their own views: the North to argue that the South could no longer be reasoned with on the most important issue facing the country; the South to declare that Sumner's reckless Kansas speech had unmasked the North's true goal, which was to destroy slavery, and with it, the South's economic system and its way of life.

  In the short term, the caning sent explosive shock waves across the country: outrage in the North; jubilation in the South. In Kansas, it contributed to savage murders by abolitionist John Brown; in Illinois, it inspired a young Republican lawyer named Abraham Lincoln to deliver a speech that held listeners spellbound, so much so that no one took notes to record the full text of his words for others to read. Those who were in the audience for the so-called “lost speech” declared it among the finest they'd ever heard.

  The caning left Charles Sumner debilitated and infirm, but it also solidified his role as the North's great martyr; it caused Preston Brooks to fear reprisals, including assassination, but elevated him to Southern hero. It forced the United States Congress to conduct a full investigation. It inspired some,
angered some, and frightened others. The caning evoked raw emotion and action from newspapers, politicians, abolitionists, fire-eaters, speechmakers, and perhaps most notably, ordinary Northerners and Southerners.

  Almost overnight, the caning crushed any hope of conciliation between North and South and galvanized both sides. It transformed slavery from a legal, political, and economic issue to a titanic moral struggle, replete with religious overtones—and it established Sumner and Brooks as Antichrist figures to their opposing sides.

  In the near term and long term, the caning would carry more tragic consequences. Sectional clouds, already dark, thickened ominously as word of the caning spread. The steady chill in North-South relations over the years suddenly intensified, fostering extremism and obliterating compromise.

  Preston Brooks's attack on Charles Sumner, start to finish, consumed somewhere between sixty and ninety seconds, but its tremors would reverberate across North and South for years to come. A line had been crossed on May 22, 1856, and there was no going back.

  TWELVE

  A DIVIDED RESPONSE

  “Every Southern man is delighted and the Abolitionists are like a hive of disturbed bees,” wrote Preston Brooks to his brother Ham the day after the caning. “I expected to be attacked this morning but no one came near me.”

  Preston Brooks had already been arrested for assault, but was immediately released on $500 bail after pledging to return for trial whenever the court requested. Earlier he had shared with Laurence Keitt that he wanted his friends to understand “precisely what I have done and why I did it.” Charles Sumner's speech, he said, was “an atrocious libel on South Carolina, and a gross insult to my absent relative, Judge Butler.” Once Sumner had delivered the offending oratory, Brooks was determined to punish him for it.

 

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