The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  John Brown, his sons, and other antislavery men heard about the raid on Lawrence too late to do anything about it, and were outraged by the destruction. “Something is going to be done now,” he told his colleagues. “We must show by actual work that there are two sides to this thing and that they cannot go on with impunity.” His son, John, Jr., pleaded with him: “Father, be careful and commit no rash act.”

  If there was any chance that his son's warning would deter Brown from violence, the possibility evaporated when Brown's party received word by messenger, probably on the afternoon of May 23, of Preston Brooks's attack on Charles Sumner the previous day. News of the caning was “the final spark for his murderous violence,” according to Brown's biographer, David Reynolds.

  Brown's other son, Jason, never forgot the reaction of his father and his followers when they heard about Sumner's beating. “At that blow, the men went crazy—crazy,” he said. “It seemed to be the finishing, decisive touch.” Brown ignored yet another plea to exercise caution, saying: “I am eternally tired of hearing that word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice.”

  On the bright moonlit night of May 24, bent on revenge, Brown and his party savagely murdered five proslavery men in Pottawatomie, Kansas, including three members of one family, a father and two grown sons. The enraged Brown group dragged the men from their beds and their cabins, despite desperate pleas from wives and younger children. The slaughter that ensued forever linked John Brown with deranged violence, a reputation that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  Brown and his men used heavy swords to hack their victims and then finished them off with gunshots. In a sworn affidavit, John Doyle, the youngest son of James and Mahala Doyle, described the grisly discovery of the bodies of his father and older brothers on Sunday morning, May 25: “I saw my brother, lying dead on the ground…his fingers were cut off; and his arms were cut off; his head was cut open; there was a hole in his breast.” He then spotted the body of his other brother, William, whose “head was cut open, and a hole was in his jaw, as though it was made by a knife, and a hole was also in his side…my father was shot in the forehead and stabbed in the breast.” James Harris, who found victim William Sherman dead in a creek near his house, dragged the body from the water and examined it: “Sherman's skull was split open in two places and some of his brains was washed out by the water. A large hole was cut in his breast, and his left hand was cut off, except a little piece of skin on one side. We buried him.”

  When Brown and his men burst into the cabin of Allen and Louisa Jane Wilkinson after midnight, Louisa begged Brown and his men to spare her husband, since she was suffering with the measles and needed Allen to care for her. “I was sick and helpless and could not stay by myself,” Louisa recalled. Brown ignored the plea. “You have neighbors,” he said, and the group took Allen Wilkinson away. The next morning, neighbors found him dead about a hundred and fifty yards from the house, his throat slashed and gashes in his head and side. They refused to let the ill Louisa see the body “for fear of making me worse.”

  Upon learning of the discovery of her husband's body, Louisa fled “for fear of my life,” to her father's home in Tennessee, convinced that Brown and his party “would have taken my life to prevent me from testifying against them for killing my husband.”

  John Brown went in and out of hiding during the summer of 1856, but vigilante justice still ruled in Kansas and he was not punished for his crimes. But in the weeks after Pottawatomie, retribution for the “abolitionist murders” resulted in widespread violence and the deaths of more than two hundred people across the Kansas Territory.

  Press reports about the atrocities fueled the hysteria. Some papers swelled the number of those killed by Brown's band. The St. Louis Morning Herald offered an inflammatory description typical of general accounts: “The blood-curdling story of the murder by night of five men who were at the time quietly sleeping, thoughtless of danger, in their own homes, is fully confirmed…. The accursed wretches mangled and mutilated the bodies they had slain!” Other writers embellished the slaughter, as though it was not gruesome enough; one essayist reported that Allen Wilkinson was “flayed alive, his nose and ears were cut off, his scalp torn from his head.”

  What the proslavery press succeeded in doing was defining the actions of Brown and his men as an organized effort by abolitionists to perpetuate violence and mayhem, rather than presenting Pottawatomie as the anomalous event that it was among antislavery supporters. Unlike their Southern proslavery opponents, abolitionists rarely engaged in outright violence; the Brown party's savagery was virtually unheard of.

  But now, Brown, like Preston Brooks, had changed the nature of the debate. As Brooks had crossed a line of violence among slave-owners, Brown had redefined the reputation of abolitionists, who were once known as passive resisters. Proslavery men now feared Northerners in a way they had not before. “There is no one for whom the [border] ruffians entertain a more wholesome dread than Captain Brown,” said one Kansas writer. “They hate him as they would a snake, but their hatred is composed nine-tenths of fear.”

  As author David Reynolds concluded, before Pottawatomie, abolitionists were considered “laughable cowards who either shirked war…or could be whipped into submission, as in the case of Sumner. After it, they seemed like ferocious criminals intent on attacking Southern institutions.”

  The caning of Charles Sumner ignited the rage of John Brown at Pottawatomie and both events dramatically altered the perceptions of Northerners and Southerners toward each other. The caning convinced Northerners that barbarous slaveholders could never be reasoned with; John Brown's killing spree, whose wanton violence was directly fueled by Preston Brooks's actions, sobered the South's attitudes toward abolitionists—they were now dangerous fanatics who must be eliminated. Within days, in Washington and Kansas, the caning had redefined the sectional and national political landscape.

  On May 29, the caning's impact would reach Bloomington, Illinois. There, passion, but not violence, would rule the day. That passion would give rise to a new, bold, unmistakable, inspirational voice that would one day electrify both North and South, causing one region to burst with pride and admiration, the other to boil with hatred and disdain.

  A tall, lanky lawyer rose from his chair amid the assemblage in Major's Hall, a gathering room located over a store near the courthouse square in Bloomington. The occasion was the fledgling Illinois Republican Party's state convention. As they had converged on the town by train, carriage, and horseback, delegates were well aware of the deep national crisis sparked by Charles Sumner's vicious beating in Washington and the suffering of John Brown's victims in Kansas. Telegraph and newspaper reports had covered both events in lurid detail, and were now reporting fresh outbreaks of violence in Kansas in the aftermath of the Pottawatomie murders.

  Addressing the convention, the tall man began to speak from his seat, but members of the crowd cried out, “The Platform! The Platform!” Abraham Lincoln, who had come to the convention as a delegate from Springfield at the urging of his law partner, ascended the stairs amid deafening applause, and when he began to speak, “he wrought in that crowd of men with wildly differing views and objectives an almost miraculous change,” in the words of one historian. Biographer Benjamin Thomas later wrote of Lincoln: “Outwardly calm, inside he was on fire.”

  A towering figure, rising to his toes so that he “looked seven feet tall,” according to some crowd members, he seemed to grow even larger by the power of his words. With indignation, he spoke of the beating of Sumner and the sacking of Lawrence, but he urged the crowd to avoid violent retaliation. According to one report that paraphrased a portion of Lincoln's words, he implored the audience: “Let the legions of slavery use bullets; but let us wait patiently until November and fire ballots at them in return.” That would be the retribution, when opponents of slavery, galvanized by the attack on Sumner and the destruction in Kansas, could show their strength.

  The audie
nce sat transfixed by his words; even reporters neglected to write down exactly what he said, so that no complete and authentic record of what may have been Lincoln's greatest speech has ever been found. Subsequent claims by some that they had fully recorded his remarks, as well as published accounts of the full speech, have been mostly debunked.

  What is known from piecemeal published accounts is that when Lincoln finished speaking, men erupted in wild cheering and applause, stood on their chairs, threw hats in the air, and waved handkerchiefs, so “caught up” were they in a “tremendous unanimous enthusiasm.” In Lincoln's voice, they had heard a strong condemnation of slavery and a clarion call for the Union.

  Historian Paul Wellman noted that on the day Abraham Lincoln delivered what has become known as his “lost speech,” “Lincoln welded many divergent elements into a party; a party with strong, sober, and intelligent purpose; a party that would uphold the Union to the end.” And throughout the summer of 1856 and beyond, that party—the Republicans, led by Lincoln and others—would seize on the caning of Charles Sumner to swell its ranks, advance its cause, solidify its power, and transform a nation.

  * * *

  On the same day that Abraham Lincoln left his indelible stamp on the Republican state convention in Illinois, Preston Brooks, without atoning for his actions, issued a written apology to the United States Senate for attacking Sumner inside the chamber. Two factors triggered what some called the rashness of his act. First, he claimed he had little choice but to assault Sumner where he did, since, despite his best efforts over two days, he had been unable to confront the Massachusetts senator elsewhere on the Capitol grounds. Second, Brooks pointed out, “the Senate had adjourned for more than an hour previous to the assault.”

  Brooks stressed that he had “little choice but to act as I did,” in the wake of Sumner's caustic words about Butler, as well as his sharp criticism “upon the history and character of South Carolina.” He regretted that what he had intended as “a redress of a personal wrong” had been construed as a “breach of privilege of the Senate.” In fact, Brooks emphasized in his letter, he had nothing but “high respect” for the Senate, and disclaimed any “design or purpose…to offend its dignity.”

  Brooks's letter of apology culminated an eventful week following the caning. John Brown's murderous rampage and Abraham Lincoln's soaring oratory occurred in conjunction with lively debates and important decisions in both the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. Caning fever had gripped Washington, D.C.—the city buzzed about it and concerned itself with little else.

  “The seat of my colleague is vacant today,” said an emotional Henry Wilson, Charles Sumner's fellow senator from Massachusetts, on Friday, May 23, one day after the attack. “The seat is vacant today for the first time during five years of public service.” Wilson reminded his colleagues that Sumner was “beaten upon the floor of the Senate exhausted, unconscious, and covered with his own blood.” The affront to the Senate was unprecedented, Wilson argued, noting that it would be a grave offense to assault a U.S. senator anywhere. “But,” Wilson concluded, “to come into this Chamber and assault a member in his seat until he falls…senseless on this floor, is an offense requiring the prompt and decisive action of the Senate.”

  But Wilson's plea left the Senate unmoved. No one stepped forward following his impassioned speech, and the Senate was about to move on to other business when an angry William Seward rose and virtually demanded that a committee of five senators be appointed to investigate the caning. The Senate agreed, but decided that the committee would be elected by members, not appointed by the Senate president—and that both Seward and Wilson would be excluded from consideration. Much to the chagrin of Sumner's two allies, the resulting committee not only did not contain a single Republican, but was composed entirely of senators who had either consistently opposed Sumner's politics, or objected forcefully to his language in “The Crime Against Kansas” speech.

  Within days, the Senate committee concluded that the caning was “a breach of the privileges of the Senate,” but, since Preston Brooks was a member of the House, the Senate had no jurisdiction over punishment. Brooks could only be “punished by the House of Representatives of which [he] is a member.” With no debate or dissent, the Senate committee report was adopted, thus ending the Senate's discussion on what to do about the vicious physical beating of one of its members.

  On the same day the Senate formed its committee, the House did the same by a vote of 93 to 68. The five-member committee included three Northern Republicans—Lewis Campbell of Ohio, William Pennington of New Jersey, and Francis E. Spinner of New York. In addition, Southern Democrats Howell Cobb of Georgia and Alfred Greenwood of Arkansas rounded out the bipartisan membership.

  The House committee got to work almost immediately, gathering on Saturday morning, May 24, to appoint a clerk and discuss its rules and points of procedure. Georgia's Cobb convinced the committee that Preston Brooks be informed officially that the House investigatory committee had begun its work, and that he would be granted the privilege of attending sessions and questioning witnesses. (Brooks declined, replying to the committee's “polite note” that “I know of no witnesses to the affair but Hon. Mr. Winslow of North Carolina.”)

  The House committee notified Charles Sumner's attending physician, Dr. Cornelius Boyle, that it planned to hear from the Massachusetts senator first—“the sooner the better, if, as a physician, you deem it proper,” and if possible, on Monday, May 26. Pennington, who wrote the letter to Boyle, said, “I have not seen [Sumner] since I saw you dress his wounds on Thursday, and have heard rumors that there is danger of inflammation of the brain, etc. For this cause, I deem it discreet to send this communication through you.”

  On Monday morning, Boyle and Pennington conferred and Pennington visited Sumner at home. He notified the committee that Sumner was not physically fit to leave his lodgings to travel to the Capitol, but had agreed to testify if the committee “might be willing to wait on him.” Pennington said Sumner would be ready to see the committee at his home at 1:30 P.M. Given the circumstances, members agreed to the unusual request.

  On their way to Sumner's lodgings, committee members dispatched Ohio's Campbell to locate Preston Brooks and invite him to the proceedings. Brooks declined the invitation.

  In the first few days after the assault, Charles Sumner seemed to be recovering fairly quickly. His brother, George, traveled from Boston to act as a nurse and assist Dr. Boyle. Though Sumner remained bedridden, Boyle would tell House investigators later that Sumner was “doing very well” in the days after the attack and that his injuries were “simply…flesh wounds—nothing but flesh wounds…. Mr. Sumner might have taken a carriage and driven as far as Baltimore on the next day [after the beating] without any injury.”

  While Boyle's words would later do further damage to Sumner's reputation in the South, his general diagnosis was initially confirmed by Dr. Marshall S. Perry, a Boston physician hired by a Republican manufacturer to ensure that Sumner was receiving the finest possible care. Perry arrived in Washington and found Sumner in satisfactory condition on Sunday, May 25. Perry said that the wound on the left side of Sumner's head had nearly healed, but “in the one on the right there was perhaps an inch, or three quarters of an inch, which had not adhered.” Bothered by a “pulpy feeling” on the right side of Sumner's head and by his patient's “unnaturally excited state,” Dr. Perry recommended that the senator remain quiet and get complete rest. “His nervous system [had] received such a shock that I told him he should be very careful,” he recalled.

  By the time the House committee arrived at his quarters on Monday afternoon, Sumner apparently was still making progress, although his head wound still leaked pus, he was wracked with pain, and his exhaustion persisted. Sumner recounted the events of May 22, reaffirmed that he had never met Brooks prior to the assault, had no suspicion of an impending attack, and insisted that he was unarmed and totally unprepared for the confrontation.<
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  “I had no arms or means of defense of any kind,” he testified indignantly. “I was, in fact, entirely defenseless at the time, except so far as my natural strength went. I had no arms either about my person or in my desk. Nor did I ever wear arms in my life.” In a swipe at the Southern members of the committee, Sumner added: “I have always lived in a civilized community where wearing arms has not been considered necessary.”

  Senator Cobb repeatedly engaged in questioning that was designed to suggest that Sumner could not have been totally surprised by Brooks's attack, pointing out that Sumner's colleagues offered to walk him home after “The Crime Against Kansas” speech and urged him to be careful, fearful that he had outraged Southerners. Sumner said he treated his friends' warnings as “trifling” since he “suspected no danger”—because of that dismissal, he had no hint that an assault was forthcoming. “I had not the remotest suspicion of it until I felt the blow on my head,” Sumner asserted.

  Sumner also dismissed suggestions that his speech was unduly inflammatory or insulting to Senator Butler or his home state. “I alluded to the State of South Carolina, and to Mr. Butler, but I have never said anything which was not in just response to his speeches or to parliamentary usage; nor anything which can be called a libel upon South Carolina or Mr. Butler.”

  Their questioning concluded, members of the House committee left Sumner's lodgings and returned to the Capitol.

  That evening, Dr. Boyle applied collodion, a syrupy surgical dressing, to Sumner's wounds to prevent “the escape of pus.”