The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  Many publications pointed out that the South's widespread support of Brooks provided ample evidence that his actions could not be viewed as an isolated event. In an editorial entitled “Stupidity of the South,” the New York Times condemned the “fatuous blindness” of Southerners in approving Brooks's attack, calling it a form of “madness that must lead to their utter defeat.”

  An outraged William Cullen Bryant, editor of the widely read and influential antislavery New York Evening Post, warned: “Violence is the order of the day; the North is to be pushed to the wall by it, and this plot will succeed if the people of the free States are as apathetic as the slaveholders are insolent.” Apathy was not an option, asserted the Pittsburgh Gazette, nor were insipid calls for calm, reason, or cooler heads: “Blow must be given back for blow,” the paper railed, “and if our present Representatives will not fight when attacked, let us find those who will.”

  Notwithstanding the inflammatory language used by Northern newspapers, it was Northern citizens who were most aghast and offended by the caning.

  Preston Brooks's action was deemed heroic by Southerners because it represented a boiling-over of an entire region's deep rage and disgust with self-righteous, hypocritical abolitionists; however, Northerners reacted with equal and opposite fervor. Charles Sumner's vicious beating unleashed a fury in the North that had been brewing through years of increasing Southern brutality in its efforts to perpetuate slavery. It had been going on for far too long; beginning in earnest with debates over the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, intensifying during the Kansas-Nebraska debate in 1854, and becoming intolerable to Northern sensibilities in the latest struggle for Kansas's future.

  Preston Brooks's devious attack had pushed most Northern citizens to the edge. Anger pulsated across the North, from the East Coast cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, to the mining towns of western Pennsylvania and the Ohio valley, to the fertile farmland that carpeted Indiana and Illinois, to even more remote settlements in places like Wisconsin.

  In the few days following the caning, Sumner received hundreds of letters; not surprisingly, Boston and Massachusetts were well-represented, but residents of many states expressed their stunned outrage. Sumner received more letters from Illinois than from any other state; perhaps its close proximity to Kansas coupled with the presence of a fledgling Republican Party and an emerging Abraham Lincoln sensitized its residents to the issues raised by the caning. One Illinois writer, representative of Sumner's indignant correspondents, told the senator that “the blood boils in my veins as I read the telegraphic dispatch…of the cowardly brutal assault on you in the Senate by the fiend from South Carolina.” Portending the dreadful events to come, he added: “I feel as though no other provocation was needed to justify the North in shouldering the musket and fighting the battles of the revolution over again.”

  Even children were appalled. “The instant papa told me,” one Massachusetts girl wrote about the attack, “it seemed exactly as if a great black cloud was spread over the sky.” Little Mary Rosamond Dana, daughter of Sumner's friend and confidant, attorney Richard Henry Dana, wrote with a mixture of childlike innocence and a thirst for revenge: “Mr. Brooks is a very naughty man and if I had been there I would have torn his eyes out, and so I would do now if I could.” She assured Sumner that her classmates were equally outraged at Brooks's attack, noting that the “school boys in Cambridge…have each made an image of Mr. Brooks, laid it down on the ground and let the dogs and carriages run over him and whipped and beat him.” The boys also created a hay-stuffed version of Brooks's personage, dressed it in a black coat, and hung it in effigy from the flagpole. In fact, the entire Dana family was traumatized by Sumner's attack. “I think of you every hour of every day,” Richard Henry Dana wrote on May 27. “You haunt me. Mrs. Dana cannot sleep because of you and my children cry tears of anger and pity.”

  Northern letter writers did more than express anger and sympathy; perhaps more satisfying to Sumner, they also lauded the Massachusetts senator for his courage, his steadfast and vociferous leadership, his moral virtue on antislavery issues, and, indeed, the martyrdom he had attained as a spiritual representative of the entire Northern antislavery movement. His caning brought him a level of affection and admiration from Northerners that he had long sought, but which always seemed to elude him.

  Unsurprisingly—and unlike Preston Brooks's brother Ham—Sumner's siblings offered no written words of support to their brother after his beating. Instead, hundreds of Northerners assumed the role of Sumner's extended family, offering comfort to a man whose injuries and suffering elicited feelings of pity, outrage, and sectional pride. “We are all not only shocked at the outrage committed upon you,” wrote prominent educator Horace Mann, “but we are wounded in your wounds, & bleed in your bleeding.” Boston resident James Stone, who attributed his relatively short letter to the fact that he was an “invalid and could write no more,” assured Sumner: “Indignation at the brutal attack upon you is on every lip, and fills every heart.” Stone also found some positive news in Sumner's beating, pointing out that Northern slavery supporters had their beliefs shaken by the attack: “It seems to be the last feather that breaks the camel's back of their sympathy with slavery.” This was God's way of turning the “wickedness of our opponents” into “food [for] our great cause.”

  Many letter writers picked up on Stone's theme that the caning had elevated Sumner's status and his cause. Charles Cleveland, a teacher from Philadelphia, first told Sumner he wished he could have been in Washington to prevent the attack. Short of that, there was reason to celebrate Brooks's “brutal and cowardly” assault: “I have a wife and five children and fifty pupils looking up to me; but you have the eyes of every true heart—every freedom-loving heart throughout the country looking up to you.” A Dedham, Massachusetts, letter writer declared that the North harbored “united, implacable scorn” for Brooks but added: “That blow, no thanks to him, was struck for freedom.” S. R. Phillips, writing from Kenosha, Wisconsin, said Brooks's attack was inevitable due to the “cruelty and brutality” of Southern slave-owners, adding that the “nation is on the brink of civil war.” It was Sumner who could rally the North to destroy the South once and for all, Phillips said. It was Sumner who could command Northerners to follow him until the last “Border Ruffian” had been killed.

  After New York's William C. Russell read Sumner's speech and then read it aloud to his wife—a South Carolinian “who loves the South”—neither could find anything in it that would have inflamed Brooks. By refusing to stoop to Brooks's level, Russell believed Sumner “may do a real good, which may penetrate further and last longer than your most brilliant speeches.”

  Sumner's dear friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow agreed with these general sentiments. Sumner's wounds and his bleeding had “torn the mask off the faces of traitors, and at last the spirit of the North is aroused.”

  While Sumner lay bedridden and alone in Washington, thousands upon thousands of his fellow Northerners swarmed to rallies to show support for the Massachusetts senator and disdain for his South Carolina assailant. Throughout late May and early June, huge public gatherings and “indignation meetings” would be held in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Albany, Cleveland, Detroit, New Haven, Providence, Rochester, and virtually every city and small town East and West—including places like Berea, Ohio, Rahway, New Jersey, and Burlington, Iowa—to protest the caning. Attendees of all political persuasions jammed into halls and churches, stomped their feet, cheered speeches, roared their approval for Sumner, and shouted their denunciations against Brooks, the South, and slavery. In many places, Brooks was hanged in effigy.

  Further, when word started reaching the North and East about the pillaging of Lawrence, Northern Republicans and other antislavery factions quickly began linking “Bleeding Kansas” and “Bleeding Sumner” in the public's mind. In both instances, harm had been inflicted upon those whose voice opposed slavery and all its evils. Yet, for more than a year, anti-sl
avery advocates, including Republicans, had tried to grab the attention of Northerners about the outrages in Kansas, without success. News from Kansas was sporadic, fragmented, confusing, and often contradictory. Who could say exactly what was true and what was exaggeration? Who could say which side engaged in excesses and why?

  But the caning of Charles Sumner, the deliberate attack upon a United States senator, was concrete, shocking, unprecedented, and easily understood. Even among Southerners, there was little dispute about the facts of the incident. “[The caning] was much more ominous and threatening than events in a distant, sparsely settled territory,” historian William E. Gienapp wrote.

  Republicans would eventually exploit and capitalize on the caning by linking the Sumner and Kansas events during the 1856 presidential campaign, but during the late spring and early summer of 1856, the antislavery party initially sought to avoid blatant partisanship as Northerners expressed themselves at indignation meetings. Republicans did play a part in encouraging the giant rallies behind the scenes, but generally stopped short of organizing them or delivering overtly partisan speeches.

  In New York City in late May, a huge crowd of nearly five thousand people jammed the Broadway Tabernacle to overflowing—thousands more stood on the surrounding streets, unable to squeeze inside. The size and vociferous nature of the crowd was striking; New York City had never been a strong antislavery bastion, and in fact, its businessmen had often sought accommodation with Southern planters and farmers. But at this rally, it was well-known conservatives—lawyers, merchants, bank presidents, educators—who addressed the crowd and criticized Brooks and the South. The crowd roared when attorney Daniel Lord denounced the South for failing to uphold the principles of free speech through its endorsement of Brooks's caning. Columbia College President Charles King said it was time for the North to act as well as talk, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher spoke about the cowardice of the assault on Sumner, and former Whig Samuel Ruggles asserted that if Congress could not maintain its own decorum, “then force must be met by force.” Whenever resolutions were read to the crowd, it erupted in “cheer after cheer…like the discharge of heavy artillery” when Sumner's name was mentioned, and let loose with a “spontaneous outburst of groaning and hissing” whenever Brooks's name was uttered.

  Describing the New York meeting to Sumner afterward, publisher George Putnam called it “the most remarkable & significant assembly I ever attended; 4000 of the most substantial citizens of N. York spoke as one man in terms and tones,” with enough volume and conviction to “make Southern sneaks and bullies tremble in their shoes.” Putnam stressed that the feeling among the big crowd was “deep, calm, but resolute,” and concluded that “no public demonstration has ever equaled this denunciation of the alarming crime.” Another attendee observed that the crowd consisted of men who normally did not get involved in political affairs, noting that the staunch support for Sumner was noteworthy since the throng was led by men “not given to fits of enthusiasm or generous sympathy.”

  Observers, reporters, speakers, and audience members in New York were struck repeatedly by the remarkable turn in public sentiment. Men who had always been “conservative and cotton loving to the last degree,” the New York Tribune pointed out, were now denouncing slavery and the slave power for the use of wanton violence. “A new era is inaugurated,” George Putnam declared. He had never seen such excitement and earnest determination, and all of it fomented by Brooks's uncontrolled attack. Perhaps the loudest cheer of the event occurred when Reverend Beecher boomed: “The symbol of the North is the pen; the symbol of the South is the bludgeon.”

  Not surprisingly, Boston, perhaps most aggrieved by the caning, held its own boisterous meeting on May 24, when a crowd of five thousand people crowded in and around Faneuil Hall. For the moment, at least, past differences between Sumner and many in the merchant class were set aside. Governor Henry Gardner asserted that he would “rise above party feeling and party bias” and stand by Sumner as a son of Massachusetts “in this, his hour of trouble.” Sumner's long-time, but also long-estranged, friend George Hillard called Brooks's attack “the act of an assassin,” and drew prolonged cheers when he said the caning was “not only a cowardly assault upon a defenseless man, but a crime against the right of free speech and the dignity of a free State.”

  The shock to Northern sensibilities led to powerful language at virtually every rally across the North. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Professor C. C. Felton accurately informed the crowd: “The telegraphic nerves are trembling all over the country every moment with…the expression of public opinion on this great outrage.” Later, he labeled the caning “an act without a parallel in the civilized world—nay, almost without example in savage life.” Exaggerations or not, the crowd soaked up the words with unbridled enthusiasm. Felton said he regretted not being a member of the legislature that could vote for Sumner's reelection in January 1857, but elicited thunderous applause when he added: “But if I had five hundred votes, every one should be given to send him back again.” At Howard Hall in Providence, Rhode Island, Professor William Gammell captured the feeling of the entire North when he reminded the crowd that the “dastardly outrage” was directed not simply against Charles Sumner. Brooks's blows also “fell on the head of this Republic. They descended on the honor and dignity, the peace and security of the American people—of you and me, fellow citizens.”

  As part of this brutal attack, Preston Brooks should be branded as a pariah, Gammell said. “Let all men avoid him, and turn away from him, in the halls of the Legislature, in the marts of business, and in the circles of society.” Another Providence speaker echoed Gammell's theme when he urged that Brooks “should…be forever banished from the Capitol he has so fully dishonored. This barbarian must be purged from the houses of Congress.”

  Indeed, the most significant aspect of the reaction that raced through the North was that virtually every Northern man—however much he disapproved of Sumner, his speech, or abolitionists—expressed cutting condemnation of Brooks. For example, Democratic strategist Benjamin Butler, certainly no friend of Sumner's, paid a visit to the convalescing senator on his way to the Democratic National Convention in Washington, D.C. in late May. He praised Sumner, perhaps for the first time, as a “chivalric citizen of the Puritan commonwealth,” and denounced Brooks as a “coward and an assassin.”

  Years later, historian Allan Nevins described Northern animosity in the days following the caning: “Looking at Kansas and the Senate Chamber, freesoilers of the North felt that the peaceful processes of American democracy were being supplanted by a regime of terror.” Newspaper editorials, letters from citizens, and indignation rallies were powerful examples of the caning's sweeping impact, but there were others in the days immediately following the attack.

  In two separate incidents hundreds of miles from Washington, D.C., the caning shaped events that further widened the chasm between proslavery forces and those who either opposed its extension or favored outright abolition. In one place, Preston Brooks's attack inspired soaring rhetoric and a call for unity and Union among Northerners. In another, the beating of Charles Sumner triggered yet another shocking and bloody act of violence that further weakened the nation's fabric.

  THIRTEEN

  ENTER JOHN BROWN

  Deep in troubled Kansas, news of the caning rocked the plains and contributed to disastrous repercussions. It did not precipitate John Brown's anger, but it infused him with a rage that exploded into unspeakable violence—unprecedented in American antislavery activism—and forever changed the Southern perception of abolitionists.

  He was not yet the legendary and often caricatured John Brown, the confrontational, enigmatic Moses-like giant whose flowing beard, mercurial disposition, and antislavery fanaticism branded him indelibly—to some, as a towering crusader for justice; to others, as a dangerous, wild-eyed madman. John Brown the legend would not appear for several years, but even in 1856 Kansas, a portrait of Brown shows the darkness that haunte
d him and would one day strike fear into his proslavery opponents—the deep furrowed brow, the sneering, contemptuous turned-down mouth, the lines etched in his face like dried parchment, and most chilling, the cold, hard, steel-blue eyes.

  Brown was incensed even before he received word of the caning. On the evening of May 21, more than 750 Missouri border ruffians, laid low for months by the brutal Kansas winter, had finally sacked and pillaged antislavery Lawrence, swarming virtually unchallenged into the town. They burned and looted homes, ransacked the offices of antislavery newspapers and hurled their printing presses into the Kansas River, and destroyed the Free State Hotel. They carried the South Carolina flag and banners with inscriptions that included: “The Supremacy of the White Race,” “Alabama for Kansas,” and “You Yankees Tremble and Abolitionists Fall; Our Motto is, Southern Rights to All.”

  Proslavery forces in Kansas were jubilant. Samuel J. Jones, a sheriff who had been shot and wounded by a New York Free-Soiler, called the attack on Lawrence “the happiest moment of my life. I determined to make the fanatics bow before me in the dust, and kiss the territorial laws; and I have done it—by G—d, I have done it.” A proslavery newspaper said of the destruction of Lawrence, and particularly the demolition of the hotel: “Thus fell the abolition fortress and we hope this will teach the [New England Emigrant] Aid Society a good lesson for the future.”

  Frightened Lawrence residents who watched the onslaught could hardly believe their eyes, but had agreed not to resist, lest they feed into claims of their disloyalty to the country. Still, they witnessed destruction that left them shaken. O. E. Learnard wrote to his friends that Lawrence had suffered a “fearful disaster” and believed the attack on the peaceful city was “unparalleled…in the history of this country.” Ruffians did not stop at the hotel and printing presses, he recounted, but “every house in town was plundered and the women and children driven off.” Exhaustion prevented Learnard from writing in great detail, but he assured his friends that, far from discouraging Free-Soilers, the attack had filled them with resolve. “We are more confident than ever,” he wrote, though he warned in a later letter that the slavery debate would soon cause the country to be “embroiled in civil war.”