All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Brooks’s intimate circle was completed by a third musketeer, an Ultra from Virginia, Henry A. Edmundson, heir to a large plantation called Fotheringay on the Roanoke River and, like Brooks, quick to take offense and use violence. During a long night’s debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 12, 1854, an inebriated Edmundson waved his cane as he rushed to beat Congressman John Wentworth, a Democrat from Chicago, who opposed the bill and evaded his wrath, and then tried to draw a knife on Congressman Lewis Campbell, who grabbed him, after which the sergeant-at-arms had Edmundson arrested at least for the rest of the night. On January 18 1856, after Joshua Giddings taunted Edmundson, quoting Brutus from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Go, show your slaves how choleric you are, / And make your bondmen tremble,” Edmundson bounded to attack him but was prevented from doing so.

  Edmundson became the unreliable narrator of the events as they unfolded, protecting himself as he focused attention on Brooks. He claimed “the first intimation that Mr. Brooks had taken any offense at what Mr. Sumner said” was from a conversation with Senator Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia, who told him on the morning of the second day of Sumner’s speech that Brooks already “had taken exceptions.” Hunter was a charter member of the F Street Mess, a mate of Butler, who was absent at his plantation. The encounter between Hunter and Brooks might have occurred naturally in the Capitol, the street, or a social setting. But it also showed the pointed interest of the F Street Mess in the matter. Voicing his “exceptions” to Hunter, Brooks was speaking to a figure at the center of power, and whatever Hunter told Brooks he might rightly interpret as the collective F Street view. What Hunter told Brooks, Edmundson did not say. Butler would later describe Brooks enveloped wherever he went in a din of “reproach” for inaction. The focus on Brooks placed the burden on him.

  Edmundson recalled that the day after Sumner’s speech, on the morning of May 21, as he entered the Capitol with “some other gentlemen,” he encountered Brooks on the Capitol steps. Brooks had waited an hour and a half the night before “when he [Sumner] escaped me by taking a carriage.” He was waiting again. “I accosted him,” recalled Edmundson, “saying, ‘You are going the wrong way for the discharge of your duties.’ ” His use of the word “accosted” suggested that he was chiding him. Was Brooks going the wrong way because Edmundson thought he was going toward the Senate instead of to the House, or because he was going to the House rather than to the Senate? If it were the former, Brooks would have been confused, but if it were the latter he would have been evasive in “discharging” very different “duties.” Brooks complained to Edmundson about Sumner’s “insults” and his determination “to punish him” if he failed to make “an ample apology.” “I wish you merely to be present, and if a difficulty should occur, to take no part in it. Sumner may have friends with him, and I want a friend of mine to be with me to do me justice.” It was a strange invitation for Edmundson to be his second in what was not to be a duel, somehow to “take no part” but also somehow to protect Brooks. Edmundson told him “it had been rumored by Senator Sumner’s by friends that he had armed himself in anticipation of an attack, and asked Mr. Brooks what preparation he had made; for I had nothing but a little brier stick. He replied: ‘I have nothing but my cane.’ ” Sumner, of course, was generally known to travel unarmed and to be an advocate of pacifism. But Edmundson stoked Brooks’s fear of being physically overwhelmed, hurt, and humiliated.

  While Edmundson and Brooks talked, Keitt and Senator Robert Ward Johnson joined them. Johnson, a Calhoun acolyte, was the one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Arkansas, owner of a plantation with 193 slaves, and chief of the dynasty known as “The Family” that politically controlled the state. “Neither of them was informed of my purpose during that day,” Brooks later claimed about the events that followed, though his statement seems dubious. His “exceptions” to Sumner were being widely discussed among the Southerners all around town.

  Early on the morning of the 22nd, an exhausted and likely hungover Brooks, who had spent another sleepless night wracked with lubricated visions of vengeance and worry about executing them, seated himself half hidden within the gatehouse of the Capitol waiting to pounce on Sumner. Edmundson spotted him “alone.” “I supposed what his object was and stopped in.” “You are looking out,” Edmundson dryly observed. Brooks explained that he “had scarcely slept any the night before, thinking of it,” and laid out his half-baked plan that he was scouting for Sumner to arrive and would confront him before he entered the Senate. Edmundson advised him “that would be an imprudent course.” He told Brooks that Sumner was “physically a stronger man than himself.” This was the second time in two days that Edmundson had reminded Brooks of his physical inferiority and need to fear Sumner. For all his bravado, Brooks still carried a lead bullet lodged in him from his near fatal and absurd duel with Wigfall, tottered with a limp, and was a smaller man. He moved slowly, quickly tired from his weakness, and lacked endurance. In a fair fight without his cane he would be easily knocked down. His cane was more than a weapon; it represented his physical equality. Undoubtedly, Brooks’s frailty intensified his dread. He knew he was not up to the task. “Sumner is a very powerful man and weighs 30 pounds more than myself,” Brooks wrote his brother. Edmundson told him “the exertion and fatigue of passing up so many flights of steps would render him unable to contend with Mr. Sumner, should a personal conflict take place.” Dragging his crippled leg, Brooks could not walk up the steps without needing to rest. Together he and Edmundson made the climb and entered the Capitol Rotunda. Brooks went one way, to the Senate, and Edmundson another way, to the House. There Edmundson listened to eulogies for a recently deceased member, John Gaines Miller of Missouri, until the House adjourned, and he wandered over to the Senate, where Miller’s death was also announced before it too adjourned.

  Edmundson noticed that Brooks was hovering at the main aisle near Sumner before he darted to take an empty seat. Edmundson casually walked by him. “I asked him if he was a senator?” Edmundson’s goading provoked Brooks’s anxiety. “He then said to me he would stand this thing no longer; he would send to Mr. Sumner to retire from the chamber.” Brooks raced out of the Senate to stand in the vestibule with a view of Sumner, who was quietly franking copies of his speech for mailing. Edmundson advised Brooks “that if he sent such a message, Mr. Sumner would probably send for him to come into the Senate chamber.” In that case, Sumner would have advance notice that Brooks would approach him. Brooks knew that would be an uneven match. He became more nervous, telling Edmundson he “did not desire to have an interview with Mr. Sumner while ladies were present, and I knew there still remained a lady occupying a seat in the lobby not far from where Mr. Sumner was sitting.” Edmundson and Brooks walked back into the Senate. Keitt had now positioned himself near the podium. Edmundson suggested to him that they should not be present. “I proposed to Mr. Keitt that we should go down [the] street.” “No,” replied Keitt. “I cannot leave till Brooks does.” Edmundson turned to Senator Johnson to get his opinion on the scenario he had just laid out to Brooks. He asked Johnson “if there would be any impropriety, should an altercation occur between Mr. Brooks and Mr. Sumner, of its taking place in the Senate chamber, the Senate having adjourned at the time? . . . I suggested, in the said conversation, there seemed to me no impropriety in calling on Mr. Sumner in the Senate, it having adjourned some time before, and there being few persons present.” But their conversation was interrupted by cries “with exclamations of ‘Oh! Oh!’ ”

  Sumner was bent over his desk, his chair pulled close in, writing. “I was addressed by a person who had approached from the front of my desk,” he recalled, “so entirely unobserved that I was not aware of his presence until I heard my name pronounced. As I looked up, with pen in hand, I saw a tall man, whose countenance was not familiar, standing directly over me, and at the same moment, caught these words: ‘I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, wh
o is a relative of mine—’ While these words were still passing from his lips, he commenced a succession of blows with a heavy cane on my bare head, by the first of which I was stunned so as to lose sight.” He later had “an indistinct recollection of the words, ‘old man.’ ”

  “At the concluding words I struck him with my cane and gave him about 30 first rate stripes with a gutta percha cane,” Brooks wrote his brother. “Every lick went where I intended. For about the first five or six licks he offered to make fight but I plied him so rapidly that he did not touch me. Towards the last he bellowed like a calf.”

  But Sumner made no effort to fight back; nor did Brooks fend him off in self-defense. Sumner was stunned from the first hit, threw his arms up involuntarily, tried instinctively to escape, fell back into his chair, rose again, ripping his desk, fastened to a steel plate, from the floor, staggered blindly, and lost consciousness. Brooks pounded him on the head in an ecstatic frenzy. His cane splintered, but he kept striking. As Sumner reeled, Brooks grabbed him by the lapel of his coat and kept hitting him. Shouts of encouragement rang out. “Don’t interfere!” “Go it, Brooks!” “Give the damned Abolitionists hell!” “It is all fair!”

  While Brooks beat Sumner, Keitt suddenly “rushed in, running around Mr. Sumner and Mr. Brooks with his cane raised, crying ‘Let them alone! let them alone!’ threatening myself and others who rushed in to interfere,” recalled James Simonton, the New York Times correspondent. Senator Crittenden, of Kentucky, in conversation with another senator at the back of the chamber, startled by the commotion, marched down the aisle demanding that Brooks stop. “You had better not interfere, we will lick one at a time,” Keitt warned, according to the reporter from the New York Evening Post. “Don’t strike!” shouted Senator Robert Toombs, of Georgia, to Keitt, who lowered his cane. “Don’t kill him!” Crittenden shouted at Brooks. “I had no wish to injure him seriously, but only to flog him,” Brooks later claimed he replied. Congressman Ambrose Murray, of New York, seized Brooks by his right arm, trying to stop him from striking, but Brooks freed himself, hitting Sumner again and again, until finally Murray yanked him backward.

  Congressman Edwin Morgan, of New York, forced himself between Brooks and Sumner. “I caught Mr. Sumner and saved him from falling violently on the floor. There he laid senseless as a corpse for several minutes, his head bleeding copiously from the frightful wounds, and the blood saturating his clothes.” Morgan held his bleeding head on his knee until he slowly regained a dazed consciousness. “While standing there, several Senators and many bystanders were complacently looking on, without the least intention of assisting. . . . Toombs was one. Douglas was another.” Morgan lifted Sumner to walk to the anteroom of the Senate, where he lay on a sofa. “As I entered the lobby,” Sumner recalled, “I recognized Mr. [John] Slidell, of Louisiana, who retreated.”

  The three men whose presence were mentioned—Toombs, Douglas, and Slidell—felt compelled to give explanations in speeches to the Senate on May 27. “As for rendering Mr. Sumner any assistance, I did not do it,” said Toombs. But as for the caning, “I approved it. That is my opinion.” Douglas explained that he was in the reception room chatting with others when a messenger “rushed through, and remarked, as he passed, that somebody was beating Mr. Sumner.” Douglas claimed that he stifled his impulse to enter the chamber to “help to put an end to the affray, if I could; but it occurred to my mind, in an instant, that my relations to Mr. Sumner were such that if I came into the Hall, my motives would be misconstrued, perhaps, and I sat down again.” He insisted he was innocent of any involvement. “I had not the slightest suspicion that anything was to happen.” Nobody had accused Douglas of foreknowledge, but he felt he should deny it. One eyewitness in the public gallery observed, “Senator Douglas stood within five feet of Mr. Sumner, in a free and easy position, with both hands in his pockets, and making no movement toward the assailant.”

  Senator John Slidell unapologetically stated that he and Douglas reacted at the moment to the messenger’s excited report without any feeling whatsoever. “We heard this remark without any particular emotion; for my own part, I confess I felt none. I am not disposed to participate in broils of any kind. I remained very quietly in my seat; the other gentlemen did the same; we did not move.” Slidell did not say whether they spoke to each other about the extraordinary act of violence occurring just a few yards away. Instead, he expressed his contempt for Sumner, “I did not think it necessary to express my sympathy, or make any advances towards him.” Then he accused Sumner of lying that Slidell was somehow involved with Brooks’s attack, “calculated to deceive the public and make a false impression on popular opinion.” Nobody, however, had charged Slidell with complicity. “I had not the slightest idea that Mr. Brooks, or anybody else,” Slidell insisted, “had any intention of attacking Mr. Sumner.”

  Standing over Sumner, his unconscious body stretched on the floor with his overturned chair on top of his legs, Brooks still “had a piece of the stick in his hand,” said Crittenden. “I took hold of it, and he very gently yielded and allowed me to take it out of his hand.” The cane had shattered from the impact of smashing Sumner’s skull, with one fragment flying at Brooks’s face, cutting near an eye. After washing it, Brooks left the Capitol with Keitt at his side and together they walked down Pennsylvania Avenue.

  “I wore my cane out completely but saved the head which is gold,” Brooks wrote his brother. Someone, it turned out, retrieved the valuable souvenir for him. When the cane splintered, the section with the head flew off. The Senate messenger, W.H.H. St. John, who had excitedly told Douglas, Toombs, Slidell, and others about the attack, later that day cleaning up strewn papers in the chamber found the head of the cane. Douglas noticed his discovery. “Mr. Douglas then being in the Senate asked him for it,” wrote Isaac Bassett, the assistant doorkeeper, in an unpublished memoir. “What Mr. Douglas done with it I never knew.” Bassett also observed that during the assault on Sumner “Mr. Douglas, and others stood by but did not interfere.” By returning the gold head of the cane to its owner Douglas was not completely passive, after all.

  Bassett the doorkeeper pocketed one of the broken pieces of Brooks’s cane. “I have a piece now in my possession,” he wrote decades later. He also helped carry the limp Sumner to the anteroom and “bathed his head which bled profusely.”

  The nearest physician summoned, Dr. Cornelius Boyle, saw two wounds “cut to the bone” of Sumner’s skull, “very ragged,” which he stitched up. Neglecting to clean Sumner’s wounds, his hands, or sterilize his instruments, he was undoubtedly a contributing cause of Sumner’s subsequent high fever, infection, and prolonged weakness. The science about concussions and traumatic brain injuries was virtually unknown. Boyle’s testimony that Sumner suffered “flesh wounds” would provide the grist for Butler to accuse him of “shamming” in order to playact the martyr.

  The doorkeeper of the House, Nathan Darling, who assisted the doctor, offered the most detailed description of Sumner’s condition. He had been a captain during the Mexican War. “I have dressed wounds, and could amputate a leg if necessary,” he said. “When I arrived there, I found Mr. Sumner all covered with blood. The bystanders did not seem to understand much about it, or seemed frightened, and I went to work. . . . I examined his head, and found two large wounds upon it, and one smaller one under his ear. His hands, his shoulders, and his back, were very much bruised. . . . I believe, if the licks had been struck with half the force on another part of the head, they would have killed him instantly. If they had been inflicted lower down on the side of the head, I believe death would have been the result. I think there is no doubt of it. I have seen a soldier killed with the end of a rawhide struck on the side of his head. He never breathed.” Darling said that Sumner’s head wounds “were cut right to the bone. The left hand had a black lump on it as large as a butternut. The right hand was hurt, though not so badly. Both his arms and shoulders were black. There was a black streak across his left arms and shoul
ders, and across both his thighs. The latter, I presume, was made in rising up from his table. The doctor told me that, if no man had seen the cut made on the right side of his head, he would have sworn it was not made with a stick at all. It was what we call a thrust cut, and was as ragged as if it had been made with a brick. . . . There was also a cut on the nose.” Sumner’s wounds were similar to those inflicted on slaves whipped as punishment, except that they were lashed on their backs, too valuable as property to be beaten on the head, which might kill them.

  Even before Sumner delivered his speech, talk of violence had wafted through the Capitol, the boardinghouses, the hotels, the restaurants, and on the streets. “I remember to have heard Mr. Brooks say,” according to Edmundson, “it was time for southern men to stop this coarse abuse used by the Abolitionists against the southern people and States, and that he should not feel that he was representing his State properly if he permitted such things to be said; that he learned Mr. Sumner intended to do this thing days before he made his speech; that he did it deliberately; and he thought he ought to punish him for it.”

  Senator Andrew Butler, who had been in South Carolina when the caning occurred, seemed particularly well tuned into the acrid atmosphere that had led to it. Upon his return, on June 11, he explained how Brooks’s emotions were played upon, revealing more than he might have imagined. “I said that my friend and relative was not in the Senate when the speech was being delivered, but he was summoned here, as I have learned from others. He was excited and stung by the street rumors and street commentaries, where even ladies pronounced a judgment; and, sir, woman never fails to pronounce a judgment where honor is concerned, and it is always in favor of the redress of a wrong. I would trust to the instinct of woman upon subjects of this kind. He could not go into a parlor, or drawing room, or to a dinner party, where he did not find an implied reproach there as an unmanly submission to an insult to his State and his countrymen. Sir, it was hard for any man, much less for a man of his temperament, to bear this.”