All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Preston Smith Brooks: Ken Deitreich, “ ‘Ever Able, Manly, Just and Heroic’: Preston Smith Brooks and the Myth of Southern Manhood,” The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (Columbia: South Carolina Historical Association, 2011), 27–38; Thomas John Balcerski, “Intimate Contests: Manhood, Friendships, and the Coming of the Civil War,” (PhD diss. Cornell University, 2014), 337, https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/39014/1/tjb36.pdf; Stephen Berry and James Hill Welborn III, “The Cane of His Existence: Depression, Damage, and the Brooks–Sumner Affair,” Southern Cultures 20, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 5–21; Stephen Puleo, The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War (Yardley, Penn.: Westholme, 2014), 93.

  Then an exceptional opportunity appeared: George Frisbie Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 1:24–26; Sumner, Works, 3:382.

  Hammond had ordered: Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 252; Carol K. Bleser, ed., Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 140.

  The declaration of war: Deitreich, “Ever Able, Manly, Just and Heroic,’ ” 27–38; Berry and Welborn, “The Cane of His Existence,” 5–21; Burton, In My Father’s House, 96.

  Seeking the distinction: Balcerski, “Intimate Contests,” 348; Manisha Sinha, The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 188–89; Lacy K. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 346; Ulrich B. Phillips, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911), 2:368.

  Within the House: CG, 33rd Congress, 1st Session, 374, 77.

  As Brooks was being squeezed: Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 61; W.T. Thayer, “Assault Upon Senator Sumner,” New York Evening Post, May 23, 1856.

  Laurence M. Keitt: Berry and Welborn, “The Cane of His Existence”; CG, 33rd Congress, 1st Session, 1073–74.

  “Between the South and these men”: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 442–43.

  A few days later, Brooks and Keitt joined: Berry and Welborn, “The Cane of His Existence,” 21.

  On May 8, 1856: Balcerski, “Intimate Contests,” 359.

  Brooks’ intimate circle: Blumenthal, Wrestling with His Angel, 315; Sara B. Bearss, “Henry Alonzo Edmundson,” Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia, 2016, http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Edmundson_Henry_Alonzo; CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 253.

  Edmundson recalled: “Alleged Assault on Senator Sumner,” 59.

  While Edmundson and Brooks talked: Elsie M. Lewis, “Robert Ward Johnson: Militant Spokesman of the Old-South-West,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 13, no. 1 (Spring 1954): 16–30; James M. Wood, “Robert Ward Johnson,” The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture, http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=1682.

  Early on the morning of the 22nd: “Alleged Assault on Senator Sumner,” 59–60; Burton, In My Father’s House, 94.

  Edmundson noticed that Brooks was hovering: “Alleged Assault on Senator Sumner,” 60, 63.

  Sumner was bent over: Ibid., 25.

  “At the concluding words”: Burton, In My Father’s House, 94.

  But Sumner made no effort: Sumner, Works, 4:268–70; “Alleged Assault on Senator Sumner,” 37.

  While Brooks beat Sumner: “Alleged Assault on Senator Sumner,” 29, 34, 38–39, 47–49, 57.

  Congressman Edwin Morgan: Ibid., 40, 24; “New York for Free Speech,” New York Tribune, May 31, 1856.

  The three men: Miller, Lincoln and His World, 4:147.

  Senator John Slidell: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 1304–5.

  Standing over Sumner: “Alleged Assault on Senator Sumner,” 49–50.

  Bassett the doorkeeper: Isaac Bassett, “A Senate Memoir,” unpublished manuscript. U.S. Senate Historical Office, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/art/special/Bassett/tdetail.cfm?id=17.

  The nearest physician: Ibid., 51; William James Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 75; Haynes, Charles Sumner, 208.

  The doorkeeper of the House: “Alleged Assault on Senator Sumner,” 54–55.

  Even before Sumner delivered: Ibid., 59; CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 1347.

  Butler described Brooks’s “temperament”: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 630–35.

  Brooks later told a friend: Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 367.

  For all the reasons Brooks: “Alleged Assault on Senator Sumner,” 61.

  While there are no first-hand narratives: “Slave Schedules, Edgefield County, S.C.,” 1850 Federal Census, Ancestry.com.

  Brooks was tapped to enforce: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 630–35; “The Ruffianly Assault of Senator Sumner,” New York Times, May 24, 1856.

  Brooks had done his work: Johnson, “Recollections of Charles Sumner,” 482.

  CHAPER TEN: ARGUMENTS OF THE CHIVALRY

  After leaving Sumner: Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 2:482–83.

  His appeal was greeted: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 1279–80.

  Five days later, on May 28: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 1317.

  On the same day that the Senate committee was formed: Puleo, The Caning, 144–45.

  “The feeling is pretty much sectional”: Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 348.

  “This is not an assault, sir”: “Attack on Sumner,” New York Tribune, May 28, 1856.

  Brooks was acclaimed: Sumner, Works, 4:277.

  “The whole South sustains Brooks”: “Washington,” Charleston Mercury, May 28, 1856; Sumner, Works, 4:278–79.

  Southern newspapers boldly made the threats: “Doings in Congress,” New York Tribune, May 23, 1856.

  Douglas’s purported threat: “We Mean to Subdue You,” Illinois State Journal, May 26, 1856.

  Across the North: “The Sumner Outrage,” New York Tribune, May 31, 1856; Sumner, Works, 4:305–6.

  On the Sunday after the attack: Francis Power Cobbe, ed., The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, Volume 4 (London, Trübner, 1863), 288–91.

  “It is the best”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Miscellanies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 11:236.

  “You can have little idea”: Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 301–2.

  The timing fell: Ibid., 300–302; William E. Gienapp, “The Crime Against Sumner: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Rise of the Republican Party,” Civil War History 25, no. 3 (September 1979): 218–45.

  “By great odds”: Alexander K. McClure, Colonel Alexander K. McClure’s Recollection of Half a Century (Salem, Mass.: Salem Press, 1902), 393–94; Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 300.

  Edward Everett: Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850’s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 215–16.

  The Massachusetts legislature’s resolution: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 1306; Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 2:487–88.

  On June 2: “Alleged Assault on Senator Sumner,” 1–5.

  The minority report: Ibid., 19.

  On June 12: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 625–26.

  The next day Henry Wilson: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 1399–1405.

  Senator Clement Clay: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 1405.

  Congressman Anson Burlingame: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 656.

  Brooks promptly sent word: Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall o
f the Slave Power in America, 2:491–93; “Brooks and Burlingame Difficulty,” New York Tribune, July 28, 1856.

  Brooks faced criminal charges: “Brooks Defence of Himself,” New York Times, July 10, 1856; Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 3:487.

  Two days later the House debate: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 734–39, 913–14.

  The House on July 14: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 831–33; “More About Bully Brooks and His Exit,” New York Tribune, July 15, 1856.

  Since the assault: “Another ‘Painful Occurrence’ in the City of Washington,” New York Times, May 28, 1856; “Intelligence from Washington,” New York Times, July 10, 1856.

  “Today I speak for South Carolina”: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 833–38.

  Three weeks later, on August 1: Puleo, The Caning, 174.

  On his thirty-seventh birthday: J.F.H. Claiborne, Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1860), 2:318–20.

  Brooks went on a tour: Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner, 93; Michael W. Cluskey, ed., The Political Text-book, Or Encyclopedia: Containing Everything Necessary for the Reference of the Politicians and Statesmen of the United States (Philadelphia: J.B. Smith, 1859), 85–86.

  Brooks had overnight become an iconic figure: Sumner, Works, 4:275.

  Throughout his life, Brooks: Berry and Welborn, “The Cane of His Existence”; Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 2:495.

  Brooks caught a cold: Berry and Welborn, “The Cane of His Existence” ; Virginia Clay-Clopton, A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay of Alabama, Covering Social and Social and Political Life in Washington and the South (London: Wm. Heinemann, 1905), 51.

  Privately, James Henry Hammond reflected: “Hon. Preston S. Brooks,” Southern Quarterly Review 30 (November 1856): 369; Berry and Welborn, “The Cane of His Existence.”

  Later that year, just before Christmas: Puleo, The Caning, 266.

  In Edgefield’s Willowbrook Cemetery: Ibid., 222–23.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: EXTERMINATING ANGEL

  Two days after the sack: George Washington Brown, The Truth at Last: History Corrected. Reminiscences of Old John Brown (Rockford, Ill.: Abraham E. Smith, 1880), 69–70.

  Earlier that day, Brown: Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown: 1800–1859: A Biography After Fifty Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 151–56.

  John Brown had followed: James Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860), 82.

  Brown heard the voice of God: Ibid., 69.

  Brown viewed antislavery politics: John Edwin Cook, The Life, Trial, and Execution of Captain John Brown (New York: Robert M. DeWitt, 1859), 15, 21.

  Just as Brown had no use: Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford: Park Publishing, 1882), 337–41.

  As much as Brown pored: Zoe Trodd and John Stauffer, eds., Meteor of War: The John Brown Story (Maplecrest, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 2004), 84; Ted A. Smith, Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 166.

  Brown’s self-flagellation: Cook, The Life, Trial, and Execution of Captain John Brown, 8.

  John Brown presented himself: David Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 19–25; Jonathan Edwards, The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade and of the Slavery of the Africans (Boston: Wells & Lilly, 1822), 3.

  John Brown, born in 1800: Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 33, 43; Villard, John Brown, 4; James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 95.

  In 1839: Richard J. Hinton, John Brown and His Men (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894), 23.

  Brown had by now begun: Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 66–94; Edward J. Renehan, Jr., The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 23.

  The greater his adversity: Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 56–57.

  He moved to Springfield: Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 58; Hinton, John Brown and His Men, 27; Louis A. Decaro, Jr., “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown (New York: NYU Press, 2005), 149; Imani Kazini, “Black Springfield: A Historical Study,” Contributions in Black Studies 1, no. 2; http://ourpluralhistory.stcc.edu/resistingslavery/thomas.html.

  Through his relationships: Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 103; Henry Highland Garnet, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America,” 1843, digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/8.

  On a speaking tour: Douglass, Life and Times, 277–81.

  Douglass claimed from that moment: Ibid., 282.

  Through Douglass, Brown met Willis Hodges: Theodore Hamm, ed., Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn (New York: Akashic Books, 2017), 16–17; Trodd and Stauffer, eds., Meteor of War, 56–58.

  Nearly broke and scrambling: Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, 65–66; Franklin B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), 59.

  Brown called the North Elba colony: Nichole M. Christian, “North Elba Journal; Recalling Timbuctoo, A Slice of Black History,” New York Times, February 19, 2002.

  Back in Springfield in 1851: Sanborn, Life and Letters, 124–26; Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, 74.

  When Senator Charles Sumner spoke: Charles Henry Barrows, The History of Springfield in Massachusetts for the Young (Springfield, Mass.: Connecticut Valley Historical Society, 1909), 138.

  By May 7, 1855: Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 133; Villard, John Brown, 84.

  As the nascent Republican Party was organizing: G.W. Brown, Reminiscences of Old John Brown: Thrilling Incidents of Border Life in Kansas (Rockford, Ill.: Abraham E. Smith, 1880), 5; Frederic May Holland, Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1891), 247–48; John R. McKivigan and Madeleine Leveille, “The ‘Black Dream’ of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier 20, no. 2 (Fall 1985), New York History Net, http://www.nyhistory.com/gerritsmith/dream.htm.

  By the time Brown arrived at Osawatomie: Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 108–9; Redpath, The Public Life of Captain John Brown, 86, 88, 92; G.W. Brown, Reminiscences of Old John Brown, 8.

  But after the free state leaders were charged: Villard, John Brown, 151; Sanborn, Life and Letters, 337.

  At two in the morning: Report of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas, 105–7.

  Brown and his men washed: Sanborn, Life and Letters, 273; Villard, John Brown, 165–66.

  After the Pottawatomie massacre: Villard, John Brown, 114, 184; Sanborn, Life and Letters, 259.

  John Brown was an outlaw: Ibid., 439.

  “War! War!”: Villard, John Brown,189, 193–97; Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 114.

  John Brown went into hiding: Villard, John Brown, 248.

  The romantic legend: Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown, 112–14, 119.

  The proslavery forces: Squatter Sovereign, August 26, 1856.

  The New York Times reported: “Reported Battle at Osawatomie,” New York Times, September 6, 1856.

  “God sees it”: Villard, John Brown, 248.

  On July 20: Richard D. Webb, Life and Letters of Captain John Brown (London: Chapman & Hall, 1861), 426.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

  Once Charles Sumner felt capable: Seward, Seward at Washington as Senator and Secretary of State, 282.

  Sumner consulted four physicians: Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 315–17.

  Though he was an invalid: New York Tribune, August 17, 1856; Gienapp, “The Crime Against Sumner,” 245.

  On November 3, 1856: Sumner, Works, 4:368–85.

  The Massachusetts General Assembly: Frank P
. Stearns, Cambridge Sketches (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1905), 162–74; Pearson, The Life of John A. Andrew, 58–61.

  In early January 1857: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Memoirs of John Brown (Concord, Mass.: J. Munsell, 1878), 45; Renehan, The Secret Six, 109.

  The enraptured Sanborn: Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 487; Renehan, The Secret Six, 111.

  George Luther Stearns: Hinton, John Brown and His Men, 721.

  On January 8: George L. Stearns to John Brown, January 8, 1857, Boyd B. Stutler Collection, West Virginia Archives and History, http://www.wvculture.org/history/jbexhibit/bbsms10-0022.html; Renehan, The Secret Six, 116; Sanborn, Life and Letters, 368.

  Brown returned to Boston: Ibid., 372–74.

  Sanborn took Brown to Concord: Franklin Sanborn, “John Brown in Massachusetts,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1872; Renehan, The Secret Six, 118; Henry David Thoreau, Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 12:437.

  After the legislature rejected his request: James Redpath to Elias Nason, April 10, 1874, West Virginia Archives and History, http://www.wvculture.org/history/wvmemory/jbdetail.aspx?Type=Text&Id=1023.

  A week later, Sumner returned: “Charles Sumner in Washington,” Chicago Tribune, March 7, 1857; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 327.

  On March 7, 1857: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 1:394–97.

  The ancient Château de Tocqueville: Johnson, “Recollections of Charles Sumner,” 299.

  “Mr. Sumner is a remarkable man”: Carl Schurz, Eulogy on Charles Sumner (Boston: Rockwell & Churchill, 1874), 32.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: CREATION

  “For it is the solecism of power”: Henry C. Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln (Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1892), 126.

  On May 26, 1856: Ibid., 53.

  Before he rode the railroads: Henry C. Whitney, Lincoln the Citizen, Volume 1 of a Life of Lincoln (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1909), 189, 233–34.

  A few months earlier: Walter Stahr, Stanton: Lincoln’s War Secretary (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 78; Whitney, Lincoln the Citizen, 234.