“LAWRENCE TAKEN! GLORIOUS TRIUMPH OF THE LAW AND ORDER PARTY OVER FANATICISM IN KANSAS!” exulted the Lecompton Union on May 21. “Thus fell the Abolition fortress; and we hope this will teach the Aid Society a good lesson for the future. . . . If every man of them had been killed, every house burned, and total and entire extermination had been the motto of the ‘Law-and-Order Party,’ who would be to blame?”
“Important from Kansas: A General Reign of Terror” ran the New York Times headline on May 22, reporting the march of the Border Ruffians on Lawrence just before its sacking. The Washington Union published a lengthy article, “General Jackson Vindicated Against Mr. Blair’s Imputation of Black Republicanism,” which the paper called “wicked” and a “crime,” and another piece attacked the New York Times for its “black-Republican” coverage of Kansas, and charged it was “controlled by its abolitionist associations and sympathies.” The Illinois State Journal of that day featured a call “To the Citizens of Sangamon County,” from those “opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and who are opposed to the present Administration,” to a meeting on the 24th in Springfield to select delegates to the state convention of the new Republican Party to be held the following week. The first name on the list was “A. Lincoln.”
As Sumner’s crime against Kansas speech was playing out in all its prescient ugliness, it was about to spark another crime, but in Washington. After Sumner had refused Senator Wilson’s offer to escort him safely home, Wilson stayed behind to write a letter at his desk. His eye caught that of a congressman who had wandered onto the Senate floor and stationed himself in a nearby seat, and they silently bowed to each other. He was Preston S. Brooks, of South Carolina. At the time, Wilson didn’t know his name and watched as Brooks limped away on his cane.
The next evening, with news of the sacking of Lawrence spreading, Brooks and his two congressional companions, Laurence M. Keitt and Henry A. Edmundson, stalked into Gautier’s on Pennsylvania Avenue, the best restaurant in Washington, where Sumner often dined, “and, after carefully scanning the faces of the people at the table, walked out without having seated themselves,” failing to find their prey, according to an account by a confidant of Sumner.
Preston Brooks
Preston Smith Brooks was born in 1819 at the pinnacle of the South Carolina plantation elite, the eldest son of one of the oldest and wealthiest families of upcountry Edgefield, the most productive district in the land of cotton. The plantation elite was intricately intermarried and interlinked politically, socially and economically, a class ruling over a small middle class, a larger poor white class, and a majority slave population. The wealthiest, the core of this ruling class, comprised merely 136 people, according to the historian Orville Vernon Burton. Entrance into this class was almost uniformly based on inheritance. Intelligence, ability, and work had little to do with it. This elite fashioned itself an aristocracy, though it was only two or three generations rooted as a ruling class. Its noble tradition was recently invented.
As the natural crucible of John C. Calhoun and the nullification movement, the dynamic in Edgefield drove its political figures relentlessly toward ever more extreme positions, violence, and ultimately secession. The leading men of Edgefield envisioned themselves as the vanguard of South Carolina and South Carolina as the vanguard of the South. Within Edgefield politics was factionalized into shifting warfare among personalities, families, and competing interests. Violence was the fierce and frequent reflex of the slaveholder aristocrats against each other in a primal struggle of ambition (according to the Code Duello), against individual upstart whites that refused to know their place, against slaves repressed through a police state, and against errant Northern outsiders who might have the least criticism of slavery. Physical shows of force, brutality, and intimidation were not only the routine instruments of the system but also customs of the country. Violence was exalted as the bright red banner of true manhood, the test of vigor and courage, the heart of a romantic ideal of dashing conquerors over the conquered. Generations of political violence and extremism would prevail in Edgefield in an unbroken line beyond the Civil War from the Red Shirt militia of Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman that overthrew Reconstruction government and disenfranchised blacks to the career of Tillman’s closest adviser’s son, J. Strom Thurmond, the U.S. senator, Dixiecrat presidential candidate, and father of the Southern strategy that transformed the modern Republican Party as well as an unacknowledged mulatto daughter.
Preston Smith Brooks, scion of Roseland, a large Edgefield plantation, was bred with the concept of honor. But he spent virtually his entire life in embarrassing episodes failing to fulfill its ideal. He grew up in the shadow of legendary heroes, from Revolutionary War forebears to his cousin James Butler Bonham, who died at the Alamo. Yet Brooks was a constant source of disappointment to his father, Whitfield Brooks, Sr., a veteran of the War of 1812 called the Colonel. At South Carolina College, “a favorite with the ladies,” Brooks was disciplined for drinking and suspended for threatening another student with a gun. On the eve of his graduation, he tried to bust his younger brother out of jail, where he was imprisoned for obstreperous behavior, threatened the sheriff, and was expelled. At once, Brooks challenged another wild young man from Edgefield to a duel. Louis T. Wigfall, yet another son of a rich merchant and plantation family, notorious for his violence, drinking, and gambling, had killed Brooks’s cousin in a duel. Brooks sought revenge against his father’s wishes. “I’ll kill Wigfall!” he shouted. On an island in the Savannah River they fired at ten paces, wounding each other. Brooks was left with a limp and a cane. (Wigfall would become a fire-eating secessionist U.S. senator from Texas.) Hoping his wastrel son would improve with responsibility upon his marriage, Brooks’s father bestowed upon him a large plantation called Leaside and eighty slaves over whom he could preside as the master. But Brooks proved himself to be indolent and dissolute. “He is deficient in moral energy and decision in mental activity and is too indulgent in mere physical gratifications,” sadly wrote Whitfield Sr.
Then an exceptional opportunity appeared. Governor James Henry Hammond, whose political career the Brooks family had long promoted, appointed young Brooks as his aide-de-camp. Brooks soon found himself thrust into the middle of a clash of civilizations. In 1844, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts officially designated Samuel Hoar, the eminent lawyer and former congressman, as commissioner to gather the facts for lawsuits against South Carolina for the imprisonment and selling into slavery of free black seamen from Massachusetts who landed in South Carolina. At Hammond’s direction, the legislature passed a resolution calling for the expulsion of the “northern emissary.” After a mob threatened the Charleston hotel where Hoar stayed, a delegation led by the sheriff and mayor physically escorted him into a carriage to leave immediately or else face removal by force. Upon his return home, Hoar recounted to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson that his initial answer was “that he could not and would not go, and that he had rather his broken skull should be carried to Massachusetts by somebody else, than to carry it home safe himself whilst his duty required him to remain.” But he finally felt he had no choice. The incident, “contributed largely to the bitter feeling between the two sections of the country, which brought on the Civil War,” wrote George F. Hoar, the commissioner’s son and later U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Henry David Thoreau, one of Hoar’s neighbors, cited the event as part of his justification for protesting slavery and the Mexican War in his essay of 1849, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” Sumner gave a case history of “this shameless, lawless act,” in a speech in 1854 to the Senate calling for repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act.
Hammond had ordered his new aide-de-camp to go to Charleston and take the Northern agitator to a waiting boat, but Brooks arrived after Hoar had already left. Brooks managed to miss being at the center of the action. Hammond described him as “a mal-apropos young man of little talent, fidgety to be doing [and] always moving in the wrong time and place.”
Seeking the distinction that had serially eluded him, Brooks ran in 1853 for the congressional seat once held by John C. Calhoun. “My experience in life,” he explained to a friend, “has taught me that the best way to keep from being run over is to run over some body myself, politically.” He faced a field of three opponents, the most formidable of whom was Francis W. Pickens, Calhoun’s cousin and Andrew Butler’s nephew. Pickens was an ardent nullifier, who had criticized Calhoun later in his life for being too moderate. (Pickens would serve as the governor who introduced the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession in 1860.) Brooks won with only 32 percent of the vote. His initial victory with such a narrow plurality was a precarious one, especially in volatile Edgefield. He identified himself with a faction called the National Democrats that sought to exercise influence for the cause of Southern states’ rights within the party. His credibility as a National Democrat rested on the party nominating a reliable proslavery candidate for president. For the first time, South Carolina Democrats held a state convention to select delegates to the national convention. They were exposed to withering charges of betrayal from the pro-secessionist nullifiers such as U.S. senator Robert Barnwell Rhett and his son Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., editor of the Charleston Mercury. Senator Butler at first reinforced the fire-eaters, but then reluctantly declared he would yield to “the tide of events and the current of public opinion” so long as it did not “let us de-Carolinaize ourselves.” Brooks leaned toward the unpopular President Pierce, whose fraying hope dangled on his alliance of convenience with Douglas. But disdain for Pierce ran high among most Southerners and many Northern Democrats, still angry about his early efforts to bring Free Soilers back into the party fold through patronage and his appointment of Reeder as territorial governor to Kansas, which Alexander Stephens wrote “was to make Kansas a free State.” Sumner’s inflammatory speech was delivered just as tension was building within the Democratic Party to a crescendo over its undecided nominee and unsure future. The more provocative Sumner’s language, the more he excited the fire-eating Southern Ultras, in turn menacing the party regular National Democrats who required proof of militancy to hold their ground. With every phrase, Sumner tightened the vise.
Within the House, Brooks was a virtual nonentity. He sponsored no bills, held no responsibility, and wielded no influence. His speeches were conventional Southern apologetics and little noticed. In explaining his support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he offered a rote encomium for slavery. “The history of the African contains proof upon every proof of his utter incapacity for self-government. . . . The institution of slavery, which it is so fashionable now to decry, has been the greatest of blessings to this entire country.” On December 24, 1855, the day before adjournment for Christmas, in support of a motion upholding the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which was already an accomplished fact, he postured for the benefit of the Ultras back home: “But, sir, when they [Free Soilers] make a distinct, tangible issue upon the constitutional rights of the South, then I know where to find them. . . . Here is the place to make it, and the place to meet it. I never could understand the magnanimity or chivalry of southern gentlemen, who are content to wear the honors of the country in times of peace, but who propose to leave this Hall and fly to their constituents when dangers threaten. Sir, we are their appointed leaders, and when resistance becomes virtuous we are the very men who should first display it. We are standing upon slave territory, surrounded by slave States, and pride, honor, patriotism, all command us, if a battle is to be fought, to fight it here upon this floor.” If the irony of Brooks’s statement was lost on him it was revealing nonetheless. He was the one, after all, who wore “the honors of the country,” but in time of war left the battlefield and missed the “dangers.” And he made clear that the nation’s capital, the federal city, was the Southern capital, “slave territory,” and its defense against Northern interlopers, “a battle,” was a matter of “honor, patriotism,” to be fought within the Congress itself.
As Brooks was being squeezed politically on all sides at an uneasy political moment, his main relationships in Washington were with Southern hotspurs in the House, “a set of young enthusiasts inspired with notions of personal honor to be defended and individual glory, fame and military glory to be acquired,” as Benjamin F. Perry, the South Carolina Unionist newspaper editor, described them. The antislavery New York Evening Post correspondent in Washington observed that outwardly Brooks “generally appeared very pacific in his manner and temperament.” But the anonymous backbencher was attracted to the fire-eaters’ bombast, quick tempers, and propensity to violence. They acted out his contained emotions.
Laurence M. Keitt
Laurence M. Keitt was Brooks’s closest friend in the Congress. Yet another heir to a slaveholding fortune, from a neighboring district, and a graduate of South Carolina College, he was elected in the same class as Brooks. Five years younger than Brooks, Keitt’s fire-eating intensity glowed magnitudes hotter. He felt himself to be on the verge of a “Promethean moment” of “mighty events” leading to “an immortal future” in which he would engrave his name like “an heroic poem.” He called for secession if the North did not open all territories to slavery, annex Cuba as a slave state, and transform the United States into a confederation in which the federal government was limited only to foreign policy and defense. Speaking against a bill that would have admitted free blacks to the Kansas-Nebraska territory on May 4, 1854, Keitt raised the specter of interracial sex and suggested that white abolitionists panted after black women. “I want to know, also, whether in the State of Ohio blacks and whites intermarry?” he demanded. Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, the leading abolitionist in the House (and Lincoln’s former boardinghouse mate, who had assisted him in writing a bill for emancipation in the District of Columbia), tartly replied: “I move to amend the amendment by inserting after the word ‘white’ the words ‘or more than half white.’ . . . The gentleman is more than two thirds colored himself, if you take the color of the people of his district as the criterion of his complexion. [Laughter.]” Congressman Lewis D. Campbell of Ohio jibed, “If the whites do not intermarry with the blacks in his district, in what way can he explain the fact consistently, with a correct state of morals, that there are so many mulatto people there? [Laughter.]” “If they are there,” replied Keitt, “I might say that Free-Soil schoolmasters and clock venders had much to do with the condition of things of
which the member speaks.”
“Between the South and these men there must be war,” Keitt declared on April 7, 1856, about the antislavery coalition that was emerging as the Republican Party. “In emergencies bold men triumph. Any one can sow peas for the market; ’tis only the hero who can sow dragon’s teeth where they spring up armed men! . . . Let the North refuse admission to a State because of slavery in her constitution, and the history of this Union is closed . . . if it becomes, in our very midst, to us a foreign Government, the South will tear it down from turret to foundation stone.”
A few days later, Brooks and Keitt joined a congressional delegation to inspect the Washington Aqueduct being constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Montgomery Meigs, the supervisor of the project and later quartermaster general during the Civil War, wrote in his journal of the two men: “April 12, 1856: They had plenty of drink—whiskey and brandy and champagne and sherry—so that we had an abundance of whatever man might want upon such an occasion. The quiet, temperate men from the North had the beauty of the scenery and looked with interest upon the works of the aqueduct. The rollicking, roistering sons of the South had the good entertainment of the wines and whiskey. . . . I think the party generally found themselves well entertained. Some of the honorable Members used much more wine than I would have liked to take. Several of them had been out on some frolic last night; and drinking now in the day, they slept a good deal upon the boat. There was much loud talking, laughing, and some unsteadiness of gait.”
On May 8, 1856, eleven days before Sumner’s speech, Congressman Philemon T. Herbert, a proslavery member from California, whipped out a pistol to shoot dead an Irish waiter at Willard’s Hotel for having the presumption to inform him the dining room hours were over. Keitt openly approved of Herbert for murdering an “inferior,” only worried that he might have had the waiter’s blood splattered on him.
All the Powers of Earth Page 18
