The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  To his brother, Brooks acknowledged that the House already was considering his expulsion and the debate was now “very animated on the subject.” He urged Ham to remain calm and not to be alarmed by any reports he should hear. And while he felt he was in danger from potential assassins, he cautioned that Ham “must not intimate [this] to Mother.”

  Brooks's beating of Sumner released at least two years of pent-up fury in the Southern congressman. His letter to Ham expressed both excitement and bloodlust. After recounting the assault and explaining that his cane had splintered, Brooks boasted that “the fragments of the stick are begged for as sacred relicts [sic].” He also issued a warning that the attack on Sumner might not be the last: “It would not take much to have the throats of every Abolitionist cut.”

  If Preston had any misgivings about the deed he did not express them, and Ham's response provided immediate vindication. Ham reassured his brother that his actions were justified and that Sumner deserved the long-overdue beating. “You did perfectly right,” Ham exclaimed. “I have not been more delighted for years & only wish I could have participated with you. I am more proud of you than ever! I believe I love you better!” Ham told Preston that he was willing to help him pay his fine, and provide any other assistance his brother needed. “If they fine you a thousand dollars, if I were you, I should regard it as money well invested,” Ham said. He described everything about the caning as “glorious”—Preston's initial approach, the weapon he selected, the manner in which the cane was applied, the out-come, and the cause for which Preston struck. Ham joked that he would have changed only a single detail: “I might have substituted the cow-hide [cane] for the Gutta percha, but the difference is too small to complain.”

  Ham's endorsement and enthusiasm were reflective of the combined glee and righteousness that swept the South. Preston Brooks had done what so many wished to do, and, in the process, had covered himself and his region in glory.

  “Hit him again,” crowed the Edgefield Advertiser in its editorial saluting Preston Brooks for his drubbing of Sumner. “We feel that our Representative did exactly right; and we are sure his people will commend him highly for it.” Sumner had left Brooks with little choice, the newspaper asserted. What else could the Massachusetts scoundrel senator expect? In alliterative style, the paper recounted that Sumner had “emptied one of his vials of vile vituperation on the head of Senator Butler,” who was absent from the chamber at the time. A beating was the appropriate punishment for this offense, and even more appropriate was the fact that it was a “thorough one.” The Advertiser heard reports that Brooks had thrashed Sumner fifty times, but believed the number was exaggerated; “we very much doubt if the Captain cared to exceed the legal number of thirty-nine, usually applied to scamps.”

  Damn any long-term ramifications of Brooks's action, the newspaper suggested: “We have borne insult long enough, and now let the conflict come if it must.” In fact, the Advertiser took joy in the fact that an “immense and greedy audience” witnessed Sumner's caning, implying that future beatings could occur if Southern slaveholders' rights continued to be eroded.

  Brooks's hometown paper reflected the widespread opinions of Southern newspapers and Southern citizens. “Well done!” declared the Yorkville, South Carolina, Enquirer. “No better or more gallant man could have been selected to begin the argument [between North and South]…we give him unstinted commendation.” Sumner's speech had rankled the South to such an extent that Brooks's response was seen as not only suitable, but necessary. The Federal Union of Milledgeville, Georgia, called Sumner's Kansas speech “one of the most malignant and indecent tirades ever uttered in the Senate Chamber…much more dishonorable to a nation than the chastisement inflicted upon the perpetrator.”

  Southern papers and slave-owners expressed hope that the attack on the notorious Sumner would be a lesson for all hated abolitionists. What to do with men like Sumner? asked one Southern publication. “Nothing in this world but to cowhide bad manners out of him or good manners into him.” The attack was a righteous example of the actions required to combat the increasing Northern disrespect for Southern values. “The vulgar Abolitionists are getting above themselves,” the Richmond Enquirer declared. “They have grown saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen…. They must be lashed into submission. Sumner, in particular, ought to have nine-and-thirty every morning.”

  Other publications called Brooks “chivalrous” for avenging Sumner's outrageous attack on Butler and Southern honor. One compared his actions to patriots who had seized tea and threw it into Boston Harbor to protest British tyranny eighty years earlier (though the paper was quick to note that Sumner and other Boston antislavery fanatics had little in common with the brave Boston patriots of the Revolutionary era). In the same way those gallant men acted without official authority to advance a higher cause, Preston Brooks acted according to “his own brave heart” and in so doing, “he will be recognized as one of the first who struck for vindication of the South.” That fact alone would place Brooks “among the heroes and patriots of his country.” Another paper described Brooks as a “conservative gentleman” seeking to restore to the Senate the dignity and respectability from “which the Abolition Senators are fast stripping it.” Furthermore, his fine example was worth emulating “by every Southern gentleman whose feelings are outraged by unprincipled Abolitionists.”

  Ordinary Southerners also rallied quickly and passionately to Brooks's side. At a pro-Brooks rally in Washington, D.C., one banner carried the inscription: “Sumner and Kansas: Let Them Bleed.” Celebrations were held across the South, and James H. Adams, the governor of South Carolina, announced a fundraising effort to present Brooks a silver pitcher, goblet, and stick. When the governor went to the Exchange Bank in Columbia to establish the fund, he was besieged by contributors. “Before I got to Hunts Hotel I had 94 dollars paid up,” he wrote to Brooks in Washington, “some wanting to give 5 and some 10. I was invited to a room by a friend to take a drink and on counting the money it appeared that I lacked [only] 6 dollars of the one hundred I started out to raise.” Governor Adams assured Brooks: “I am satisfied I could have raised a thousand dollars just as easily as I did the 100.”

  Brooks received hundreds of canes as gifts from well-wishers, and Charleston merchants contributed to buying him a cane inscribed “Hit him again.” At a huge May 24 public meeting in Newberry, South Carolina, Brooks's constituents voted to present a gift to their congressman—a “handsome gold-headed cane”—and fully endorsed his actions. Attendees at a large rally in Fairfield passed a resolution approving of Brooks's “administering to Charles Sumner of Massachusetts a wholesome and richly merited castigation.” A group of businessmen set out from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., with a new gold-headed cane for Brooks, with one member of the group saying he would be “sorry for the abolitionist's head that shall come in contact with this cane. It will be very likely to crack.” University of Virginia students arranged to send Brooks a cane that “should have a heavy gold head, which will be suitably inscribed, and also bear upon it a device of the human head, badly cracked and broken,” according to the Richmond Enquirer.

  Nor was it only white men who supported Brooks. One of “Carolina's truest and most honored matrons” wrote to Brooks assuring him that “the ladies of the South would send him hickory sticks, with which to chastise Abolitionists and… Republicans whenever he wanted them.” Slaves in the South Carolina capital of Columbia collected money to buy him “an appropriate token of their regard.”

  Letter writers to Brooks echoed newspaper reactions and the brotherly sentiments of Ham Brooks. “I am so delighted with your cool, classical caning of Mr. Sumner,” wrote W. F. Holmes of Newberry County, South Carolina, on May 27. “You have immortalized yourself in the opinions of your immediate constituency.” Holmes said Brooks would be long remembered for his heroic act. John Swanson of Columbus, Georgia, likely pleased Brooks when he wrote: “For your beating of that Damn Rascal, liar, and
tory Sumner you deserve all the honours your country can bestow,” and he assured Brooks, “I would this day vote for you or Mr. Butler for any office.” Brooks had set an example that other Southern men should follow, Swanson added: “If…all would treat the Rascals as you have, we would have had peace long ago and heard very little of abolition in Congress.” One South Carolina citizen was glad Brooks refrained from murdering Sumner, not for Sumner's sake, but so that Brooks could avoid the death penalty. “If you were seventy-five years old, I would say ‘kill him.’ But as you are not half that old, I wish you to live and continue to serve and honor your country.”

  Others sought to inform Brooks of how news of the caning had excited the South. “The cry of ‘well done’ has already echoed from the seaboard to the mountains,” wrote a Georgetown, South Carolina, admirer. Letter-writer Seaborn Jones added: “You have the good wishes of everyone I have heard speak on the subject—and everyone is full of it. Nothing else is talked of.” Of the Sumner caning itself, Jones asserted: “It is what the Rascal has wanted a long time, & he has only received a small portion of what he deserves.” One anonymous South Carolina letter-writer directed his correspondence to Sumner: “If you infernal abolitionists don't mind your own business…and let ours alone, the People of the South…will go in mass to the Capital—and tar and feather—horse-whip & expel every rascal of yours.” Sumner would be wise, the writer suggested, to “learn a useful lesson from what you have received.”

  Seaborn Jones also assured Brooks that Southerners would support him in the event Sumner filed a lawsuit against him; such support would leave abolitionist sympathizers with few options. “While there is a dollar left in South Carolina, they will never hurt you in a pecuniary way, and they can do nothing else!” Jones said.

  Not all of the Southern response unanimously supported Brooks. Some newspapers, especially, condemned his actions because they took place inside the Senate chamber and others questioned the chivalry of attacking Sumner while his legs were pinned under his desk. But these criticisms were relatively mild, and most were leveled by writers in border states such as Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri.

  For the most part, throughout the Deep South, the near universal reaction of ordinary people was best summarized by the words Louisiana's Braxton Bragg wrote to a friend: “Were I in the House I should certainly propose a vote of thanks to Mr. Brooks. You can reach the sensibilities of such dogs only through…their heads and [with] a big stick.” And if such dogs could not be reached, Southerners had little recourse. The Richmond Enquirer warned of the potential consequences: “Sumner and Sumner's friends must be punished and silenced. Either such wretches must be hung or put in the penitentiary, or the South should prepare at once to quit the Union.”

  * * *

  As Southerners gathered in their fields, their parlors, and their town squares to discuss and celebrate Preston Brooks's attack on Charles Sumner, Northerners clustered on city street corners, in factories, and in offices, abuzz with disbelief and outrage about the events in Washington, D.C.

  Whereas jubilation was the prevalent emotion in the South, Northerners were horrified and angry, their reaction almost universally in stark contrast to their fellow Americans who lived below the Mason-Dixon line. Indeed, as in the South, the catalysts for the enormous uproar in the North initially were press accounts and editorials about the event; but the true measure of the caning's almost immediate impact in Northern states was best reflected by the groundswell of rage that poured forth from prominent officials and ordinary citizens.

  Hundreds of Northerners from across the political spectrum wrote Charles Sumner to convey their sympathy, anger, shock, and indignation. Even those who disparaged Sumner's fanaticism and provocative political style, even those who protested the acerbic tone of “The Crime Against Kansas” speech, voiced their condemnation of Brooks's attack and their genuine concern for the senator who had suffered physical pain, cruelty, and distress at the hands of the slave power's representative.

  Brooks's attack convinced thousands of moderate Northerners almost overnight to embrace the opinion that abolitionists had held steadfastly for years: that proslavery Southerners—stripped of their gentlemanly finery and veneer of cloying politeness—were little more than savages. Even the governor of New York wrote to Sumner, commending him for persevering in the face of the “barbarous and brutal assault” by the “sneaking, slave-driving scoundrel Brooks.”

  Like their Southern counterparts, Northern newspapers entered the fray quickly and set the tone for the debate, most vilifying Brooks—“a cowardly scoundrel”—for resorting to violence inside the venerable Senate chamber, and suggesting that the South Carolina congressman's actions were emblematic of the South's approach to the slavery debate. Many quickly labeled the caning as one of the nation's most infamous events. “The outrage in the Senate, on Thursday last, is without a parallel in the legislative history of the country,” noted the Republican-leaning Boston Atlas in an editorial. “Never before has a Senator been struck down in his seat, and stretched, by the hand of a lawless bully, prostrate, bleeding, and insensible on the floor.” The normally staid Illinois State Journal called the Brooks assault “the most direct blow to freedom of speech ever made in this country.” What made Brooks's attack so dastardly, the press pointed out, was that it was part of a Southern conspiracy to destroy free speech; restrictions on abolitionist speech and writing had spread rapidly across the South. Now, apparently, those restrictions extended to the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

  To explain why the Sumner caning had aroused “a deeper feeling in the public heart of the North than any other event of the past ten years,” the New York Times said: “The great body of the people, without distinction of party, feel that their rights have been assailed.” The symbolic offense against the body politic was not just the beating itself, but the location in which the attack occurred. “The blow struck at Sumner [took] effect upon Freedom of Speech in that spot where, without freedom of speech, there can be no freedom of any kind,” the Times noted.

  Virtually every Northern paper agreed that the caning's impact was shocking, widespread, and unprecedented in American history. This was not a duel between gentlemen, with their seconds waiting alongside in case they were needed; this was not a fistfight between equals in which each party removed his waistcoat, rolled up his sleeves, and waited for the other to announce his readiness; this was not even an emotional outburst that could be forgiven once flared tempers cooled and hand-shakes signaled an end to tensions. Brooks's caning of Charles Sumner was premeditated (planned for nearly two days), devious (Sumner had no idea it was coming), unfair (Sumner's thick legs were trapped under his desk when Brooks struck), shocking (because it occurred in the Senate chamber), and unmerciful (Brooks struck again and again despite Sumner's obvious helplessness).

  As they castigated Brooks, many called for violent reprisals against him. The Boston Bee spared no language on how the “bully Brooks” should be dealt with: “[He] ought to be…mercilessly kicked from one end of the continent to the other.” In a similar vein, the zealously Republican Pittsburgh Gazette printed one of the most aggressive responses to the caning, arguing even that the Christian duties to “turn the other cheek” or offer “forgiveness” no longer applied in dealings with the slave power. Rather, the Gazette thundered, “these cut-throat Southerners will never learn to respect Northern men until some one of their number has a rapier thrust through his ribs, or feels a bullet in his thorax.” Brooks was nothing more than a bully “who lacked even the courage of the duelist, and [instead] displayed the meanness…[and] malice of the assassin.” In language that proved prescient, the Gazette declared that the caning “has done more to alienate the hearts of the North from the South than any other event that has happened since the republic was founded.”

  Editorials in Boston and across the North repeatedly stressed that one of the most significant impacts of Brooks's attack was the chilling effect it could have on
future debates. Senators fearing physical reprisals would be less likely to express themselves, fearing, in the words of one editorial writer, “that what a single creature has done today, a hundred, equally barbarous, may attempt tomorrow.” What did the future hold for the country, if “by the persuasive arguments of the bludgeon, the bowie knife, and the revolver, [a member could]…refute and silence any member who may dare to utter…his personal convictions?”

  Some publications echoed the sentiments of the Republican-leaning Evening Journal of Albany, New York, which argued that Brooks's attack had less to do with his “injured vanity” and more to do with answering Sumner's arguments against slavery, especially in Kansas. The paper asserted that the South proposed to debate the question of self-government in the Western territories with “ball cartridges and bayonets.” Southern tactics were appalling, most editorials asserted, and their most “repulsive illustration” was the Brooks attack on Sumner. The entire nefarious character of Southern debate differed radically from the North—“we do not think it necessary to shoot, to slash, or to stun the man with whom we may differ,” the Atlas opined—and must be vociferously condemned and assailed. Despite the Brooks attack, perhaps because of it, the Senate must remain “virtuous and firm” in its effort to “strangle this serpent of Slavery Extension.” Otherwise, Brooks's violence would occur again and again to antislavery Northerners under the guise of states' rights. “State liberty can not long survive the extinguishment of Federal freedom,” the Evening Journal warned. That Brooks felt comfortable assaulting Sumner inside the chamber was even more chilling: “Is the Senate of the United States no longer free to the North?”