But the isolation of his Allegheny retreat weighed heavily on Sumner—acute loneliness gripped him. In addition, his debilitating headaches, lack of focus, and inability to sleep at night all contributed to a fear that he might be losing his mind. The concern was compounded when one of his doctors admitted that he was not sure whether Sumner's brain “was deranged organically or only functionally.” Sumner expressed his dread of the former. A permanent brain injury would be unbearable. If Brooks's cane had inflicted lasting damage, then “death would have been my best friend.” To Theodore Parker, he invoked a biblical reference when he said he wanted to leave Cresson earlier, “setting my face Eastward,” but his physicians advised against it. “I [still] feel [the pain of] a short walk and any mental exercise on my brain,” he said. “This must not be. The object now is to banish these tendencies, that they may not be chronic.” Sumner confessed to his good friend that, for the opportunity to make one speech during the current Senate session, he would have “bartered a good slice of [my] life that remains.”
Finally, after a month in Cresson, Sumner could not tolerate the insularity of the mountain locale any longer; against his doctor's advice, he traveled to Philadelphia, hoping to get some work done. Again, his condition worsened and rendered him incapacitated. “I left the mountain prematurely,” he confessed, “before my nervous system had hardened into health.” To an attorney friend he admitted: “My nervous system has suffered sadly…and it is now all jangled.” All he could do was “pray for health, which comes slowly, very slowly.”
Newspaper reporters followed Sumner from location to location during the summer of 1856 and wrote about his condition; Americans North and South were able to pay close attention to the state of the senator's health, and most were not shy about expressing their opinions. One of those opinions, repeated again and again, filled Charles Sumner with anger and stung him almost as painfully as the caning itself—this was not an assault on his person, but on his character. As though his physical and mental maladies were not difficult enough, Sumner now tried to fight through bitterness over what he considered the most egregious insult of all. Plain and simple, Southerners believed he was faking.
——
“While suffering for more than four months,” Sumner wrote in September, “I have been charged with the ignoble deed of shamming illness.” He had heard these charges expressed throughout the summer, and though they weighed heavily on his mind, he had remained silent until he crafted the sentence in a letter to a friend.
Most Southerners thought Sumner's injuries were minor and that both Sumner and Northerners were exaggerating and exploiting the effects of the caning to build political momentum for the Republican Party and abolitionism in general. The shamming charges began early, when the Whig of Richmond, Virginia, published a piece titled “Possuming” on May 31: “For our part, we never had believed that Sumner was sufficiently hurt to make it necessary for him to take to his bed at all.” The paper scoffed at the notion that the “well deserved” caning was so severe that it could “detain him in confinement for more than a week.” More likely, the paper said, Sumner's absence from the Senate and reports of his serious injuries were part of a “miserable abolitionist trick from beginning to end,” designed to encourage sympathy and strengthen resolve among Northerners.
Attacking Sumner's manhood, the Whig added that “nigger-worshipping fanatics of the male gender, and weak-minded women and silly children, are horribly affected at the thought of blood oozing from a pin scratch.” The way to scare Sumner back on his feet, the paper declared, was for the Senate to appoint a committee of “one Southern man” to assess Sumner's condition. In fact, the mere sight of a “hundredth part of a Southern man” would be enough to “impart to the possuming wretch the strength to enable him to take up his bed and walk—yea, walk even to Boston!”
Throughout the summer, these sentiments took hold and blossomed, convincing Southerners that the North had resorted to the most dastardly and dishonest tactic of all: exploiting Sumner's assault for political reasons. Did this not provide the freshest and most compelling evidence to date of the Republicans' shallowness and, even more distasteful, their lack of integrity and honor?
Sumner was not helped by Dr. Boyle's “flesh wound” remark shortly after the attack, nor by his constant relocating during the summer, which, while purportedly to seek relief and comfort, suggested to the South that Sumner was perfectly fit to travel. These issues were compounded in July when the Washington Union, an unabashed supporter of the proslavery Pierce administration, reported that Sumner's wounds were entirely healed, but that he refused to resume his seat in the Senate due to “his wounded pride and his irrepressible anger and indignation.” By the fall, the Union went one step farther, printing the accusation that Sumner's physicians were “nursing the disease, lest it should die a natural death.” Sumner, the paper said, was resolved not to recover until after the next senatorial election in Massachusetts.
Even some Northern publications shared these feelings. The Democratic Boston Post suggested that Sumner's doctors were conspiring to portray him as an invalid until just before the elections, when he would suddenly appear triumphant and healthy, thereby energizing and exciting voters.
In early September, Republican strategists, alarmed about this stubborn and relentless drumbeat, urged Sumner's other four doctors (Wister, Perry, Lindsly, and Jackson) to put the “shamming” issue to rest by issuing sworn statements on the extent of his illness. Dr. Perry, one of Boston's most esteemed physicians, said Sumner was so terribly injured that mental or physical exertion could cost him his life. In his sworn affidavit, he said Sumner was “in that state of extreme nervous exhaustion from which men are months, and at times even years, in being fully restored.” Dr. Jackson, a Democrat, stated that Sumner was “extremely unwell” when he arrived in Cresson, and that he left the mountain town—prematurely and against doctor's orders—“still an invalid.” He said Sumner was unsteady on his feet, languid, pale, displayed a weak pulse, and even the slightest mental effort, like “writing a common letter of business,” produced pressure on his brain and a “dull throbbing pain in the head.” Jackson, who was also postmaster in Cresson, was removed from the position by the Pierce administration for issuing a sworn statement that Sumner was an invalid.
Sumner's behavior and correspondence in the late summer and early fall repeatedly appeared to confirm the severity of his condition. He turned down an invitation to appear at the Republicans of Rhode Island convention, telling the invitation committee that he was still under orders from physicians not to exert any “public effort.” He apologized for turning down similar invitations from the Republicans of Illinois (citing his “long-continued disability”) and the Republicans of Hudson River Counties in New York (pointing out he was “too feeble for any exertion”).
When he missed a long-scheduled freedom rally in Cincinnati in September, many of the tens of thousands of attendees went away disappointed. Sumner was crushed. “With sorrow inexpressible,” he told organizers, “I am still constrained to all the care and reserve of an invalid.” The exertion he would require to reach Ohio, most of the distance by “slow stage[coach],” would almost certainly trigger a relapse. “This is hard, very hard, for me to bear,” Sumner despaired, “for I long to do something at this critical moment for the cause. What is life without action?”
To abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, he explained that even when he felt marginally better, “some slight excess of exertion seems to undo everything” and he wondered “when this doom will close.” To John Bigelow, he admitted that he was “still an invalid,” that he faced “weeks, if not months, of seclusion,” and that his “only chance of cure [was] repose.” He was perhaps most honest with Samuel Gridley Howe when he described the peaks and valleys of his health on September 11: “This is my best day. But yesterday was a disheartening day; I seemed to be going back.” And this: “Two nights of this week I have passed without closing my eyes for five
minutes—literally hearing the clock strike every hour till daylight, while my legs and arms seemed all jangled.” A disappointed Sumner told Howe that doctors advised him against “anything except amusement till cold weather.” And to virtually all of these correspondents, Sumner reminded them that his infirmity was so serious that he lacked the strength to return home to Boston, though he had been away for ten months.
None of this evidence, from doctors, journalists, or Sumner himself, dissuaded Southerners. At large rallies and small meetings, in letters and newspaper articles, they repeatedly accused Sumner of shamming. They challenged his masculinity and, by extension, the character and toughness of the entire North. They dismissed with laughter the claim that a gutta-percha cane—one that had shattered to splinters in the attack, no less—carried the heft to incapacitate Sumner for so long. While Northerners expressed outrage at Brooks's savagery, and viewed him as representative of the Southern brutality that was a necessary characteristic of slave-owners, Southerners rejected the assertion outright. They adamantly depicted the caning as a personal incident, designed to avenge a personal insult, by a means that was common among gentlemen of the South.
No historical evidence suggests that Sumner was faking. Indeed, the evidence is weighted heavily in the opposite direction. Throughout the summer of 1856, Sumner's feeble condition and intense suffering are documented—by Sumner himself, by virtually all of the medical professionals who treated him, and by all of his friends and visitors. As Sumner biographer David Donald concluded, if there was a plan for Sumner to feign illness, others would have been part of the conspiracy—“and if there was a plot, it was one of the best kept secrets in American history.”
Nonetheless, the chasm between North and South on the issue of “shamming” further reinforced the sectional battle lines that were hardened by the caning itself. Reason no longer seemed to matter. Sworn testimony was rejected outright and documentation was suspect. Across both North and South, any facts that challenged the story line were discredited, discouraged, or dismissed altogether.
* * *
On Friday, August 29, at 8 o'clock in the evening, throngs of Columbia, South Carolina, residents jammed the street in front of the city courthouse to see and hear from their newly crowned hero, Preston Brooks.
The Edgefield congressman was making his way home from Washington for the first time since the caning. In town squares along the way, Southerners had gathered to cheer and thank him for—in the words of one newspaper reporter—“the prompt and appropriate manner in which he chastised the notorious Charles Sumner for his wanton abuse and cowardly assault upon… Andrew Butler, and the fair fame of his state.” Now, in the South Carolina capital, Columbia Mayor Edward Arthur presented Brooks with a silver pitcher, a beautifully crafted silver goblet, and one of the “finest hickory canes with a handsome gold head,” both to reward his beating of Sumner and his display of “honorable conduct” in the stressful days and weeks that followed. The goblet was engraved with the inscription: “To Hon. Ps Brooks from Citizens of Columbia, May 22, 1856.” It was no small fact that the goblet was engraved not with the date of the rally, but with the date of the caning—Columbia citizens recognized its singular importance in the swirl of events that were gripping the nation. For his actions on that fateful day, Preston Brooks was embraced by South Carolina's capital city as one of “Carolina's noblest sons.”
Columbia residents had been waiting to fete Brooks since May, but felt the celebration would be far more meaningful if he could attend personally; now their patience had been rewarded. Befitting Brooks's newfound stature, his admirers in Columbia had even arranged for a handsome coach, drawn by four “neatly decorated” horses, to transport him from the train station to City Hall. But celebrations in South Carolina's upper districts had delayed his arrival in Columbia; rather than his train pulling into the depot the previous afternoon, where a large crowd had gathered to greet him, it did not reach the station until 4:00 A.M. At that time, all was quiet in Columbia.
But a couple of respectful hours later, a committee of citizens called on Brooks, notified him of the planned rally, urged him to stay over one night in Columbia despite his desire to get home, and suggested he speak at 8 P.M. Brooks agreed to the invitation, saying it would give him “great pleasure” to speak.
After Mayor Arthur congratulated Brooks for his “triumph over the malignant slanderers” from the North, Brooks advanced to the front of the portico, amid roars of approval from the crowd. He thanked them for their support and attendance, and told them he had been met with kindness from the South “every foot of the way” from Washington. Brooks told the gathering that he attacked Sumner thanks to a “high sense of duty,” and that his attack was an “ordinary castigation.” What had resulted was that abolitionists, seeking excuses for their “vile slanders,” had made the caning a pretext for more fanaticism. Brooks said he felt as though he had done as much as any one man to “concentrate the feeling of the South.” If the South could not live in equality in the Union, then its only course was to dissolve it. “With right upon our side, we could meet and conquer them,” Brooks said.
Brooks then turned his attention to the upcoming presidential election, urging his fellow South Carolinians to vote for Democrat James Buchanan, not because Buchanan was his “first, second, or third choice, but [because he was] my last.” He would rather have seen Franklin Pierce or Stephen Douglas nominated, but he reminded the crowd, “there must be compromise everywhere,” and Buchanan and the Democrats represented a proslavery platform that was “the right one for the South.”
Conversely, Brooks warned, a Frémont victory in November would be a disaster for the South. In fact, if Republicans were successful in their bid for the presidency, Brooks said Southerners should march to Washington on inauguration day and seize the archives and the government treasury. “We should anticipate them, and force them to attack us,” he told the cheering crowd.
If the caning had dramatically changed Charles Sumner's life, it had also transformed the once moderate Preston Brooks into the South's chief symbol of defiance and even secession.
Several weeks after the Columbia rally, in early October, Brooks appeared before a massive crowd in the village of Ninety Six in Edgefield. The New York Times estimated the gathering at ten thousand people, the largest assemblage ever in the village, and the glorious culmination of the dozens of Southern celebrations to honor Brooks. Special trains were run from Greenville and Columbia, carrying dignitaries and ordinary citizens alike, all with a desire to bask in the energy and excitement that Brooks's presence generated. Senator Butler was there, as was Georgia's Robert Toombs, and the South Carolina governor presided. A band played music, a military color guard raised South Carolina's flag, and Brooks was once again presented with goblets and canes (one report said he received a wagon load of canes to replace the one he had shattered over Sumner's head).
The fanfare was beyond impressive, yet the enormous rally would best be remembered by Brooks's fire-eating remarks. The South Carolina congressman—who once said that disunion would be a “fearful catastrophe” and its prevention was “the highest duty of every patriot”—thrilled the thousands in Edgefield when he declared: “I have been a disunionist since the time I could think!” He went one dramatic step further and brought the crowd to a state of delirium when he asserted: “The Constitution of the United States should be torn to fragments and a Southern Constitution formed in which every State should be a slave state.”
Even some Southerners gasped at Brooks's inflammatory remarks, which were quickly reprinted and repeated across North and South; they attached themselves to Brooks's historical legacy with almost as much tenacity as the caning itself. The incendiary language was out of character for the Edgefield congressional, but then, so was the beating of Charles Sumner. Had the pressure of the caning and all it wrought—the trial and hearings, Brooks's near expulsion from the House and his “loss of individuality,” the notorious reputation he h
ad developed in the North, the political exploitation by Republicans—clouded Brooks's judgment? Did his new status as Southern hero and iconic representative of Southern thought and lifestyle convince him that frenzied anti-Unionist proclamations alone would satisfy his countrymen? Did his Edgefield speech reflect a radical change in his thinking or was it merely his way of telling the audience what it wanted to hear?
Some in the South believed the latter. The Charleston Courier described Brooks's remarks as the result of this “national and union loving” man being “frighted…from his propriety.” Virginia Congressman J. M. Botts, who had actually denounced the assault on Sumner, said the “compliments he [Brooks] had received from his warmhearted, enthusiastic but injudicious friends in the South,” coupled with the “taunts and abuses heaped upon him” by the North, had combined to “bewilder and mislead his judgment in much that has transpired since.” Historian Robert Neil Mathis pointed out that, considering Brooks had emerged as a “symbolic defender” of all Southern grievances, it was remarkable that the Edgefield speech was the only public instance after the caning that his “nationalism faltered.”
Without question, Brooks had become the most popular and admired man in South Carolina, and probably across the South as well; some suggested he run for governor and others wanted him as “the first President of the Southern Republic.” However, Mathis pointed out, after his extreme language at the Edgefield rally, Brooks made no more disunionist speeches, nor did he “seek further personal aggrandizement.” He also continued to support the Constitution. Notorious villain or honorable knight, Preston Brooks had become a national figure, and his name was synonymous with a remarkable attack that resonated with symbolism across a divided nation. One contemporaneous Southern journal jubilantly and accurately proclaimed: “His name [has] now reached nearly every fireside in the land.”
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