The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  These encomiums Sumner believed about himself, yet they had never helped him elicit the level of affection that Butler had enjoyed among his colleagues; nor were these congressional remarks merely lofty praiseworthy exaggerations intended to honor the dead—Butler was well-liked by colleagues North and South while he was alive. Charles Sumner never was. Sumner must also have chafed, though he did not record his feelings, when one House member offered an evocative firsthand account of Butler's anguish when he entered Preston Brooks's room and realized his young friend and protégé had died. “I [saw] him in the gloomy chamber of death, gazing on the cold corpse of the friend who was dearest to his heart, writhing in his own agony, till, clasping to his bosom the lifeless form, he sobbed forth the wail of unutterable woe.”

  There is also no record of Sumner's reaction when one Southern congressman lauded Butler as “painfully sensitive to the sufferings of others, regardful of their feelings, attentive to their most delicate sensibilities, and [that he] cautiously avoided every topic which…could [cause] pain.” It was a sentiment that no member of Congress could or would utter about Charles Sumner.

  Just days after congressmen paid homage to the deceased Andrew Butler, a despondent and pain-wracked Charles Sumner fled Washington for the friendlier climes of New York (and eventually his second trip to Europe), and another activity took place in Edgefield, South Carolina, that stirred reminders of the caning.

  The contents of Preston Brooks's estate were liquidated during a two-day sale on December 21–22, 1857; because he had died so young, Brooks left no will. Among the property for sale was Brooks's full complement of more than eighty slaves—men named “Israel” (who sold for $1,130), “Calvin” (who fetched $885), and “Henry” (who was described as “unsound” and thus brought in only $615). Women—including “Amelia” and “Hannah” and “Sophie”—sold for an average of $750 each; others were considered more valuable by prospective buyers because they were considered “hearty prime, good breeders”—for example, “Martha” fetched more than $1,200 when she was sold by Brooks's estate to her new owner. Slave children were sold for widely varying prices, including “Little Harriett” ($900), “Green” ($400), and “Fox” (a “Negro boy” who sold for $175). Preston Brooks's slaves were among his most valuable possessions. Only his 3,000 bushels of corn (which sold for $3,000) and his 46 bales of cotton ($2,070) were considered more valuable to buyers.

  The men who purchased Preston Brooks's slaves in December 1857 were not the first to buy and sell human beings in Edgefield County, nor would they be the last. Slavery still drove virtually the entire economy, and at this point, the slave population in the county (more than 23,000) was almost 50 percent larger than the white population (about 15,600), according to researcher and author Gloria Ramsey Lucas.

  But as the purchasers of Preston Brooks's property handed over their cash and their promissory notes to buy the men, women, and children that they would need to work their fields and plantations, they were well aware of how the caning, Dred Scott, and the emergence of the Republican Party were influencing the national debate. These events, plus activities that were once again occurring in Kansas, would determine the fate of the South's peculiar and essential institution. And the future of slavery would determine the fate of the American nation.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE LECOMPTON CONSTITUTION

  “I tremble for Kansas, which seems to me a doomed territory,” wrote Charles Sumner from Paris in April 1857. “How disgusting seems the conduct of those miserable men who thus trifle with the welfare of this region.”

  If Massachusetts had become the center of radical abolitionism and South Carolina the hotbed of fierce proslavery expansionism, Kansas continued to be the place where the epic battle played out. The latest fight, which Sumner watched from afar, was occurring in Lecompton, the territory's capital city (Topeka became the capital when Kansas finally achieved statehood in 1861), and carried with it enormous implications. Before the dust had cleared, President Buchanan and Congress each became involved, the controversy seriously damaged the Democratic Party, and—like the caning—the so-called Lecompton Fiasco would wind up boosting Republican fortunes.

  Late in 1857, largely because the Kansas Territory's free-state majority boycotted the event, proslavery forces won control of a convention called to draft a state constitution for the territory prior to its admission as a state. Gathering in Lecompton, the convention drafted a constitution recognizing slavery as a necessary institution for Kansas. Because convention delegates feared that the free-state majority would reject the constitution, they refused to submit it for popular ratification. “Instead,” historian William Gienapp observed, “voters were given the choice of voting for the constitution with the right to bring in more slaves or for the constitution with only the slaves already in the territory.” No option was given to vote for a constitution without slavery, or to reject the constitution entirely.

  Although he was warned by the Kansas territorial governor that the Lecompton Constitution was essentially a fraud and represented the view of a minority of Kansas residents, President Buchanan sent the constitution to Congress, urging them to approve the document and admit Kansas as the nation's sixteenth slave state—with California's admission as the sixteenth free state in 1850, this would once again balance the ledger between free and slave states. Buchanan called Kansas “as much a slave state as Georgia or South Carolina.”

  Buchanan lobbied heavily to push the Lecompton Constitution through Congress and the heated debate that ensued proved disastrous for his party. Democrats were split along North-South geographical lines, especially when Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas broke ranks with the Buchanan administration and opposed the Lecompton Constitution. Douglas argued his long-held view of popular sovereignty—that residents of the territory should decide fairly whether slavery should be permitted. Congressional and administration interference in this process made a mockery of popular sovereignty, which Democrats had endorsed in both the Kansas-Nebraska Act and their 1856 national platform, which had led to Buchanan's victory.

  While not involved in the debate, Charles Sumner wrote of Buchanan's politicking in support of Lecompton: “His course towards Kansas is unfeeling and base…his party will be split and his Administration left in a minority.” Sumner wrote that Buchanan was delivering a clear message with his actions; in effect, saying: “I am the tool of the South for the establishment of Sl[avery] in Kansas.”

  ——

  Raucous debate continued, particularly in the House of Representatives, the newspapers—Northern papers were almost uniformly opposed—and in local legislatures (Michigan, New Jersey, and Rhode Island passed resolutions against Lecompton). South Carolina's Lawrence Keitt and Pennsylvania Congressman Galusha Grow exchanged blows during one heated argument over Lecompton shortly after 1:00 A.M. on February 6, 1858. “Sir, I will let you know you are a Black Republican puppy,” Keitt said to Grow. The Pennsylvania lawmaker responded: “Never mind. No negro-driver shall crack his whip over me.” Keitt went after Grow, but—unlike Charles Sumner in May 1856—Grow was prepared and knocked Keitt down with a single blow to the jaw. “In an instant,” the Congressional Globe reported, “the House was in the greatest possible confusion,” as more than fifty members joined the melee.

  Speaker James Orr of South Carolina furiously banged his gavel and demanded order, then instructed the House sergeant-at-arms to arrest battling members in an effort to regain control—to no avail. One report said Wisconsin Republicans John “Bowie Knife” Potter and Cadwallader Washburn ripped the hairpiece from the head of Mississippi's William Barksdale. “I've scalped him!” Potter yelled. The fight eventually petered out with no real casualties, but the brawl on the House floor again powerfully symbolized the nation's deep divisions over the future of Kansas and the fate of slavery.

  About a month later, on March 4, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond further articulated those differences during another debate on Le
compton and Kansas. Hammond, who owned hundreds of slaves, delivered an impassioned defense of slavery and the South's contributions to the North and America. He warned the North that by continuing to wage war on the South, it was putting its own economic future in jeopardy. “No, you dare not make war on cotton,” he declared. “No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.” Hammond stressed that cotton production saved the North from economic destruction during the recession in 1857, “when thousands of the strongest commercial houses in the world were coming down, and hundreds of millions of dollars of supposed property evaporating into thin air.”

  And for cotton to continue to thrive as an economic engine, slavery was essential, Hammond argued. Nor should Northerners heed the call of abolitionists who argued that slavery was inhumane. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he said. “A class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity.” Without such a class, Hammond told his Senate colleagues, “you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” Fortunately, the South had found such a class. “We use them for our purposes and we call them slaves,” Hammond said.

  The North claimed to have abolished slavery, Hammond scoffed, but it had abolished only the name, not the thing. At least Southern slaves were fed, clothed, and employed. Northern immigrants were “hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated,” Hammond chastised. “Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South.” Perhaps “ears polite” in the North and the rest of the world had discarded its usage, but “slave” was still a word the “old-fashioned” South spoke with pride.

  Hammond was quite pleased with his speech, describing it as “extremely successful in the Senate and in the country,” and perhaps more important, “it justified my friends and my State in sending me there—it fixed me as the Peer of any one upon the Senate floor. That was glorious to me.”

  Ultimately, though, neither the House brawl nor Hammond's speech could save the Lecompton Constitution. While the Senate voted 33-25 to admit Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution, the House rejected the measure—significantly, it was the South's first loss on a major slavery issue. Politicians and the press in the Deep South expressed their chagrin that eight border state lawmakers provided the difference in the House to defeat Lecompton. “None of the deserters are from cotton-growing states,” noted the Charleston Mercury. “All represent States where slavery may be gradually and safely abolished without ruin.”

  Moreover, Douglas's defection, which infuriated the South, split the party beyond repair. Southerners bitterly denounced him and vowed that they would never support him for president. In the election of August 1858, the voters of Kansas overwhelmingly rejected the Lecompton Constitution, 11,300 to 1,788. “The people of Kansas do not desire admission…with said Constitution under the conditions set forth in said proposition,” declared the governor of Kansas Territory.

  The vote effectively ended the Kansas controversy in national politics, and left no doubt that Kansas would be admitted as a free state as soon as the territory reached the requisite population (it did so in 1861). Congress would next discuss the admission of Kansas in the spring of 1860, an occasion that Charles Sumner would use to once again voice his opinion on slavery. By that time, ironically, with the admission of Minnesota (1858) and Oregon (1859) as free states, the “free-state, slave-state” balance had become more lopsided and Northern free states now held the clear majority; Kansas would never again be so strategic to the South, though it would continue to be a symbol against which to measure its sectional strength.

  Still, in 1857 and 1858, Republicans used the “Lecompton Fiasco” as a stark example of Southern slaveholders forcing the institution upon unwilling residents of a territory, evidence that the South would stop at nothing to protect and expand its power. “Here seemed additional proof of the existence of a Slave Power conspiracy and its designs on northern liberty,” wrote historian William Gienapp.

  In the wake of the caning, Dred Scott, and the Lecompton Fiasco—the latter two supported by the President of the United States—the Republican Party would continue to make the case against the slave power conspiracy as the midterm election of 1858 approached. More and more people heeded the message.

  Charles Sumner had just left France for a short side trip to Germany when, thousands of miles away, one of his Southern Senate colleagues stepped to the podium at Faneuil Hall in Boston and asked a large crowd of partisan Democrats to reject the radical antislavery message of abolitionists and Black Republicans. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was visiting Boston, and while he did not mention Sumner by name in his speech on October 11, 1858, it was clear that his strong language referred to the Massachusetts senator and the people who shared his views.

  Davis was not in Sumner's hometown by happenstance. The Mississippi lawmaker had endured a long year during which he battled a severe cold that resulted in a severe inflammation of his eye. Seriously ill for more than two months, Davis's doctor ordered him to Maine to relax and heal, and in early July, Davis and his family traveled by steamer, first to Boston and then on to Portland, where they spent a pleasant summer enjoying clam-bakes, parties, the Maine ocean air, and relaxed conversation. Davis gave a few speeches to friendly audiences, and his wife found the people of Portland “as kind as our own could have been.” While he was roundly criticized in his home state for vacationing on Yankee soil, the respite did help restore Davis's health.

  On their return trip South, Davis and his wife, Varina, expected to stop off for only a day in Boston, but they were detained when their baby, Jefferson, Jr., contracted a sudden, violent case of the croup that nearly proved fatal. While his son recovered, Jefferson Davis was invited to speak before a large gathering at Faneuil Hall, during which he launched into a rousing speech on states' rights and individual liberties. He called on Boston, as a staunch proponent and defender of the Constitution, to reject antislavery agitators, whose sole goal was “the destruction of the Union on which our hopes of future greatness depend.” More than seven decades earlier, Boston patriots were willing to accept compromise to form the Union, and they championed states' rights once the Union was formed and the Constitution adopted. It was a Constitution that gave no power to the federal government to “create, establish…or destroy property,” and thus the federal government had no power over slavery. Since abolitionists and Black Republicans could not draw on Constitutional arguments to support their cause, they wanted the “peace of the Union destroyed…thus it is that brother is arrayed against brother,” while the antislavery agitator played the role of “vampire,” clinging to the victim he wished to destroy.

  Davis spoke passionately and persuasively, and touched on Boston's proud “birthplace of liberty” antecedents to bolster his case, an approach that may have worked at one time in the 1850s. But now it was too late. While some conservative Democrats and businessmen in the crowd applauded Davis lustily—after the 1857 recession, they were looking to maintain strong ties with Southern agriculturalists—abolitionist fever gripped Boston like a vice.

  Charles Sumner was not around, but as a whole, his city was in no mood to hear, let alone embrace, Davis's message. His reliance on the Constitution to justify slavery rang hollow in Boston, which by now contained thousands of citizens who echoed Theodore Parker's sentiments: “I hate slavery—not merely in the abstract. I hate it in the concrete. I hate Slave-hunters, Slave-breeders, Slave-sellers, Slave-holders…hate them as I hate robbers, murderers, and pirates, and shall seek to rid the world of such a nuisance as fast as I can.”

  Davis, who in 1861 would become president of the Confederate States of America, thanked Bostonians for their hospitality, but he must have regretfully sensed that Boston and much of the North had come around to the abolitionist point of view. The caning had ch
anged them, as had Dred Scott and the Lecompton outrage in Kansas. Something else had, too.

  For the three months leading up to Davis's visit to Massachusetts, Northerners had watched in fascination a most extraordinary race for the United States Senate in Illinois between Democrat Stephen Douglas and Republican Abraham Lincoln, in which slavery had become the central issue. The two men had engaged in a series of remarkable three-hour debates, seven in all, across the length and breadth of Illinois, each attracting tens of thousands of voters. Hundreds of thousands more read the newspaper reprints of their speeches and comments. “Through the sheer force of their words, personalities, and ideas,” one historian pointed out, “they transformed a statewide contest for the U.S. Senate into a watershed national disquisition on the contentious issue of slavery.” The New York Evening Post captured the mood of the most heated election contest in the nation when it declared in 1858: “The prairies are on fire.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  A HOUSE DIVIDED

  The weather didn't matter—the crowds came regardless. In the parched heat of summer and into the autumn chill of 1858, on days hard-baked by bright sun or darkened by soaking, wind-swept rain, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas squared off, their ardent supporters and detractors thronging squares, halls, and fields in the Illinois county seats of Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton.