The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  More than 15,000 people jammed into Ottawa, a small town with a population of 6,000, to hear the first debate in August. Horses, carriages, military companies, and pedestrians filled the streets, while peddlers sold their wares; special trains brought visitors from Chicago and boats carried spectators down the canal leading into town. Men, women, children, and dogs made Ottawa “one mass of active life,” and it became difficult to navigate through the crowd. Nor was the spectacle any less impressive later in the debate cycle. “The streets were muddy, the sidewalks slippery and things overhead decidedly damp,” one newspaper reported in Quincy, Illinois, on October 26, site of the sixth Lincoln-Douglas debate. “The people kept pouring in notwithstanding the rain kept pouring down. At noon Old Abe arrived escorted by a procession over a mile long.”

  Neither man anticipated the overwhelming popularity or the impact of the debates, and, at the outset at least, perhaps neither understood the full implications their battle would have on the nation's future. However, the Richmond Enquirer sensed it early in the campaign when it said the Lincoln-Douglas Senate encounter would become “the great battle of the next Presidential election.”

  Throughout their exchanges, the two men, both lawyers and both eloquent, made it clear that they opposed slavery extension. Lincoln, the challenger, very directly preferred an outright ban on the spread of slavery (though not its abolition), while the incumbent Douglas believed that geography and climate would confine slavery to its current boundaries, and therefore popular sovereignty—the vote of the people in new states and territories—would naturally lean against slavery when it became an issue. Douglas was squeezed by the extremists on both sides. He was scorned by Republicans and abolitionists, who believed his position amounted to support for slavery; yet the Illinois senator's arguments during the debates would cost him dearly with Southern Democrats who believed he had undercut them by not being more forceful in protecting slavery. As they had during the Lecompton furor, they vowed again that they would never support Douglas for president.

  Lincoln had set the tone for his point of view before the debates, at the Republican convention in Springfield in June, when he delivered what would become known as his “House Divided” speech. He paraphrased scripture by saying: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” Whether prescient or ironic, Lincoln's comments reflected the feeling of many in both North and South.

  In at least four of the debates, Lincoln referred to the caning and mocked Douglas for holding positions similar to those of the late Preston Brooks. He reminded his audiences that, after the Sumner caning, Brooks was “complimented by dinners and silver pitchers, and gold-headed canes, and a good many other things for that deed performed by him.” Yet, Lincoln noted, it was Brooks himself who had once remarked in a speech that the Founding Fathers never expected slavery to last midway into the nineteenth century, and that the men who framed the American government were “wiser and better than the men of these days.” It was only after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and its successful commercialization in the years following, Brooks said, that “today's men” broke with the Founding Fathers and believed slavery must continue.

  Lincoln stressed to his audiences that Douglas felt the same way. “He insisted on it [slavery] being changed from the basis upon which our fathers left it,” Lincoln said, “and put it upon the cotton gin basis (roars of laughter and applause from the crowd). That is the question, therefore, for him and his friends to answer—why they could not let it remain just as the fathers of the government placed it.” In a later debate, he tied Douglas to Brooks more directly: “I say that, willingly or unwillingly, with purpose or without purpose, Judge Douglas has been a most prominent instrument in the changing of the basis on which our fathers originally placed it [slavery], and putting it upon Brooks's cotton-gin basis.” Again, the crowd roared its approval.

  Ultimately, Douglas was reelected to the Senate by the Illinois legislature, though the voters' enthusiasm for Lincoln's oratorical brilliance and razor-sharp arguments would have made him the clear favorite if senators were elected by popular vote as they are today. Still, the debates helped Lincoln acquire a nationwide reputation that would catapult him to the Republican nomination for the presidency two years later.

  Lincoln did not refer to Sumner, Brooks, or the caning often, but considering that the assault had occurred more than two years earlier, it was remarkable enough that he referenced it at all. In fact, the Sumner-Brooks confrontation had created the environment in which Lincoln-Douglas battled; the intensity of the debates and the emotional engagement of the Illinois audiences had their genesis in a passion play that had been running for two years, a story that featured a vengeful and unrepentant Preston Brooks, now deceased, and a bleeding and long-suffering Charles Sumner.

  ——

  By any measure in the 1858 midterm election, Republicans dominated across the North, as voters made their feelings known about slavery at the ballot box. Douglas retained his seat in Illinois, but anywhere the people voted directly for candidates, Democrats suffered badly. Democrats lost their majority in the federal House of Representatives, going from 132 to 83 seats. Republicans picked up 26 seats in the House, bringing their total number to 116, three short of an outright majority (they forged alliances with the remnants of the American Party and anti-Lecompton Northern Democrats). Republicans regained power in Ohio and New York, increased their hold on Massachusetts and New England, won Michigan and Wisconsin, and made substantial gains in Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey. The New York domination was particularly impressive: Republicans swept the state, carrying even the former Democratic stronghold of New York City, and gained seven additional congressional seats. They picked up eleven seats in Pennsylvania, three in Ohio, and three in Indiana, where they also won control of the state legislature. The number of free-state Democrats in the U.S. House declined in total from fifty-three seats to thirty-two.

  Republican percentages of the popular vote increased sharply compared with 1856, as they had done two years prior. In New Jersey, historian Don Fehrenbacher points out, Republicans won 28 percent of the vote in 1856 and more than 52 percent in 1858; in Pennsylvania, 32 percent versus nearly 54 percent for the same years; in Indiana, 40 percent in 1856 versus more than 51 percent in 1858. Combined, Republicans, who garnered just over 35 percent of the popular vote in 1856, saw that figure soar to more than 52 percent in 1858. When Republicans did lose, votes more often than not went to “Douglas Democrats,” which did not bode well for the deep slaveholding South.

  Even in the U.S. Senate, Democrats read the threatening signs. While they held onto the majority, Republicans gained six seats, a trend that, if it continued, would prove particularly destructive to slavery and Southern power as new free states (Kansas, for instance) were added to the Union, each bringing two senators into Congress with them.

  In short, the 1858 midterm election was a political revolution, a triumph of Republicanism that set the stage for the presidential election of 1860. President Buchanan knew that he and the Southern Democrats had been trounced. He dined with friends as election results came into the White House and wrote afterward: “We had a merry time of it, laughing among other things at our crushing defeat. It is so great that it is almost absurd.”

  Can all the results be attributed to the caning in isolation? No. However, was the visceral antislavery reaction Northerners felt after Sumner's beating exacerbated by Roger Taney's astonishing ruling in Dred Scott? Were those feelings further intensified by the South's (and Buchanan's) heavy-handed political bullying to force the Lecompton Constitution down the throats of unwilling Kansans? Did the tone and nature of the Lincoln-Douglas debates reflect the North's evolving feelings against slavery since Brooks attacked Sumner? Without a doubt, the answer to each of those questions is a resounding yes.

  Charles Sumner's “Crime Against Kansas” speech and Preston Brooks's retaliator
y attack started the raging political storm between North and South, Republican and Democrat, abolitionist and fire-eater, that had consumed the nation for more than two years. The 1858 elections would further escalate hostilities as the country moved into and through 1859.

  Then, in the fall of the decade's final year, another event—brazen and raw and also inspired by the caning and the issues surrounding it—rocked the country anew.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  A NEW SAINT

  “Today Virginia has murdered John Brown,” Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison declared to a crowd of more than four thousand who had jammed the Tremont Temple in his home city on the evening of December 2, 1859. “Tonight we have witnessed his resurrection.”

  The throng inside the temple and three thousand more outside on Boston streets had gathered to pay tribute to Brown, who had been hanged earlier in the day in Charles Town, Virginia, on charges of conspiracy to incite a slave insurrection, treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, and first-degree murder, all related to his unsuccessful October raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry (which would later become part of West Virginia). His goal was to obtain weapons, free slaves, and—prosecutors would argue successfully, though Brown denied it—ignite a slave uprising that would bring the South to its knees.

  Instead, his capture and wounding by U.S. Marines (led by Robert E. Lee), the death of half of his eighteen-man raiding party in what many Northerners believed was a righteous cause, his rapid trial, and his execution established Brown as a martyr to abolitionists and a hated madman to slave-owners. “At fifteen minutes past eleven, the trap fell,” read one account of the hanging. “A slight grasping of the hands and twitching of the muscle was visible, and then all was quiet.”

  John Brown, whose furious reaction to the caning had provoked his slaughter of proslavery men in Kansas in May 1856, who had reached out to Boston abolitionists to fund his guerrilla army, who had touched Charles Sumner's bloody coat with awestruck reverence, was dead. Like Sumner, he was a symbol for the antislavery cause.

  Brown was finally silenced, but in cities and towns North and South, there was no quiet in the aftermath of his execution.

  Citizens gathered in great numbers to praise or curse his memory: to deify him as a courageous and forthright liberator, a passionate defender of human dignity and freedom, and a Christ-like martyr who had paid the ultimate sacrifice for a cause greater than himself; or to further pillory his already stained reputation by portraying him as a violent, arrogant, even insane crusader who resorted to murder with little or no provocation. Since the gruesome Pottawatomie murders, Brown's incendiary rhetoric and radical actions had galvanized abolitionists, frightened Northern moderates, and infuriated the South.

  The events at Harpers Ferry further inflamed those passions. Southerners were shocked with the brazenness and illegality of the raid, and blamed it on a Republican conspiracy (though Brown generally did not like Republicans and they mistrusted him). Northerners were inspired not only by the boldness of the raid, but by the dignity Brown showed throughout his imprisonment and week-long trial—his jury only took forty-five minutes of deliberations to return guilty verdicts on all three counts. Brown's final words at his sentencing hearing were cheered in cities and towns when the Associated Press spread them across the North: “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.”

  As he was being led from his jail cell to the gallows, officials asked if he wanted to be accompanied by a Southern clergyman. Brown scoffed and refused, declaring he would rather be joined by “barefooted, barelegged, ragged slave children and their old gray-headed slave mother.” Brown said he would feel “much prouder of such an escort, and I wish I could have it.” In the North, this reaction, too, served as a demonstration of Brown's courage and convictions.

  That night in Boston, Brown's spiritual home and the source of his financial sustenance, it was longtime abolitionists Garrison and Lydia Maria Child who decorated the Tremont Temple platform and positioned banners and placards around the auditorium, readying the room for the Brown tribute. There would be no black crepe or funeral drapes—this was not to be a night of mourning, but of unconditional and unrestrained celebration of John Brown's life work. Soaring oratory filled the temple. Speakers read poems and recited prayers. Militant fugitive slave John Sella Martin brought the audience to its feet by charging that America had delivered up “the Barabbas of Slavery” and crucified “the John Brown of Freedom.” Garrison urged the crowd, now that Brown was dead, to offer its sympathies and prayers to the “four million John Browns who serve in bondage as Southern slaves.”

  Boston's leading abolitionists were inextricably linked with Brown, and their voices rose in his defense, amplified by the drumbeat of religious fervor. Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker, part of the “Secret Six” who helped finance the Harpers Ferry raid, continued to back Brown and defend the raid even when previous supporters began to desert him after the October 16 violence at the arsenal (even Frederick Douglass, fearful of capture, had fled to Canada after Brown's arrest). Higginson called the raid “the most formidable insurrection that has ever occurred,” and dared the federal government to indict him as a co-conspirator. After the raid, too, Ralph Waldo Emerson called John Brown “the new saint…awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”

  The “gallows glorious” phrase was published in major newspapers North and South—to praise approaching deification and howls of protest—and according to Brown biographer David Reynolds, was the most polarizing statement made about John Brown. Its impact rivaled the phrase Emerson had coined about the battle of Lexington and Concord to start the American Revolution—the “shot heard ‘round the world.”

  Across the North, but in Boston particularly and among abolitionists most fervently, Brown was hailed as a religious and moral crusader, whose unjust death by the state of Virginia would fuel a mighty cause. Indeed, even as Brown had awaited his hanging and some called for the Virginia governor to reduce his sentence in the name of mercy, many Northerners hoped that Brown's execution would go on as planned. “Let no man pray that Brown be spared!” declared abolitionist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher in a widely circulated reprint of a sermon. “Let Virginia make him a martyr!”

  After Beecher and others got their wish, Henry David Thoreau told a crowd at a Concord, Massachusetts, prayer service: “Eighteen-hundred years ago, Christ was crucified. This morning… John Brown was hung. These are two ends of a chain which is not without its links.” Louisa May Alcott, who attended the service, later wrote: “No monument of quarried stone, no eloquence of speech, can grave the lessons on the land, his martyrdom will teach.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted in his diary on the day of Brown's execution: “This will be a great day in our history, the date of the new Revolution, quite as much needed as the old one.” Garrison predicted that Brown's failure at Harpers Ferry nevertheless displayed boldness and courage and said that “success will grow out of the rashness of his act.” Making reference to the Virginia governor who did not stop Brown's hanging, abolitionist Wendell Phillips remarked: “John Brown has twice as much right to hang Governor Wise as Governor Wise has to hang him.”

  Boston newspapers echoed these sentiments and their words were picked up and telegraphed southward. After the raid, the Boston Post admitted, “John Brown may be a lunatic,” but if that were true, “then one-fourth of the people of Massachusetts are madmen.” After Brown's death, Garrison wrote in his December 31 issue of the Liberator: “His name will echo in every hovel in the arctic midnight confines of slavery, and the motive of his actions will illuminate every heart like the blaze of a million beacons.”

  Across the North, reaction was similar—communities observed
Brown's death with tolling bells, prayer meetings, gun salutes, and fiery speeches. Author Tony Horwitz noted that Akron, Ohio, businesses shut down and Clevelanders adorned the streets of their city in crepe. In Hartford, a statue of Liberty atop the statehouse dome was draped in black. Pieces of the rope Brown was hung with and screws from his coffin became prized relics, and after Brown's funeral, one man even made off with a lock of the abolitionist's hair. Brown's burial service was without pomp, but Wendell Phillips delivered a graveside eulogy that summarized the North's view of Brown's daring, albeit failed, raid: “History will date Virginia emancipation from Harpers Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months—a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes—it does not live—hereafter.”

  The South was thunderstruck, appalled, even frightened by the Northern reaction to John Brown's raid and his hanging.

  That the North could worship and express holy reverence for a traitor and an assassin was evidence that the sectional situation had deteriorated, perhaps beyond repair, and was spinning out of control. It was bad enough that Northerners held up the loathsome Sumner as a martyr, but at least the harm he inflicted was merely with his vicious tongue, and indeed, Sumner had suffered serious injuries after being attacked without warning. Brown was a stone-cold killer, a wild-eyed lunatic who urged slaves to murder and mutilate their owners much as he had slaughtered innocent men in Kansas in 1856.

  Far from Brown embodying, in Thoreau's words, “transcendent moral greatness,” most Southerners believed him to be a thug and felt that comparing him to Jesus was both absurd and dangerous. “I want these modern fanatics who have adopted John Brown as their Jesus and their cross to see what their Christ is,” thundered Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee as the U.S. Senate was preparing to investigate the Harpers Ferry raid. “This old man Brown was nothing more than a murderer, a robber, a thief, and a traitor.” It was at Pottawatomie, Johnson said, that “hell entered [Brown's] soul,” when he “shrank from the dimensions of a human being into those of a reptile.”