Blood on the U.S. Senate Floor

On May 19 and 20, 1856, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered his “Crime Against Kansas” speech in the U.S. Senate. The printed version ran 95 pages, but the brilliant scholar, writer, and Harvard-trained lawyer gave the speech from memory. A rhetorical and provocative tour de force, Sumner attacked Southerners and their Northern “doughface” allies for the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (which repealed the Compromise of 1820’s ban on slavery in the territories north and west of Missouri) and the ongoing violence designed to force slavery on the Kansas Territory. The act was sponsored by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who claimed he did not care if slavery was voted “up or down” (and whose wife owned about 100 slaves on a Mississippi plantation). 

Sumner’s speech was a biting, sarcastic, and penetrating attack on proslavery Senators intent on spreading slavery into the West. It included personal attacks on proslavery Senators. Comparing South Carolina’s Senator Andrew Butler to Don Quixote, Sumner said the slavery stalwart “believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage” who had “chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.”  

The context makes this even sharper: Rumors abounded that Butler had fathered children with his own slave. Sumner asserted Butler “touches nothing which he does not disfigure with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact. He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.” Butler had recently suffered a stroke, and his speech was impaired. So along with the innuendos about his slave mistress, the invective of the speech was deeply personal. Sumner compared Senator Douglas to Don Quixote’s faithful servant, “the senator from Illinois is the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices.”  

On May 22, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina (a cousin of Senator Butler) quietly slipped into the Senate after adjournment, carrying a heavy metal-tipped cane. Sumner was writing letters at a desk which folded over the head of the occupant, so the New Englander could not get out of his chair without first lifting the desk over his head. Brooks snuck up behind Sumner and, after briefly shouting at him, began to beat Sumner with the cane. He only stopped when the cane broke. Sumner managed to stand up during the attack but then fell to the floor bleeding profusely. While Brooks beat Sumner from behind, another southern representative waved a cane, threatening to hit anyone who interfered with the attack. Sumner eventually returned to the Senate but only after three years recovering from what today would be diagnosed as traumatic brain injury. During this period, the Massachusetts legislature re-elected him to the Senate. (This of course predates the direct election of senators, starting in 1913.) For the rest of his life, Sumner was plagued by the injuries he sustained. 

The caning of Sumner was a dramatic moment on the road to the Civil War. For Northerners, it illustrated the violence and intolerance of the slave South. Brooks ambushed Sumner from behind to defend the honor of his cousin, his state, and slaveholders. As Paul Quigley details in The Man Behind the Cane, an important, elegantly written, and carefully researched book, Brooks was afraid to challenge Sumner “face-to-face” because he feared that Sumner might win a fair fight. At the time, Sumner was 45, and Brooks was 36. Both were tall and in good health. But the “bully” Brooks (as he became known) was taking no chances with the trim and athletic Sumner. Brooks, who became the face of southern “chivalry” because of this near homicide, believed the sneak attack was appropriate because Sumner’s insults had to be avenged.  

The sneak attack “proved” to Northerners (and many in Europe) that slaveowners like Brooks were inherently violent, dangerous, and uncivilized. The attack also illustrated the chasm between southern white slave owning culture and the rest of the nation. Slaveowners like Butler lobbed personal and nasty insults at Northerners, including innuendos about the bachelor Sumner’s sexuality, but when Northerners responded in kind, as Sumner had, they were challenged to duels, threatened with violence, and, in the case of Sumner, nearly killed. Neither Brooks nor his cousin Butler had the rhetorical skills to answer Sumner, whose pen was clearly too mighty. Brooks could only reply with his cane.  

Brooks might have challenged Sumner to a duel, but that would have given him no satisfaction, since Sumner would surely have declined, and no doubt mocked Brooks in yet another speech. In addition, duels were fought between “gentlemen” of equal status, defending their honor in public, highly choreographed confrontations, which could end without shots being fired. Brooks did not consider Sumner a “gentleman”—despite his education and status—and only wanted to violently discipline him, the way he would a social inferior, or one of his own slaves. He did not seek a fair fight between equals.  

While some Southerners were appalled by the assault, most cheered it. Brooks returned to South Carolina a hero who had avenged northern criticism of slavery and southern white culture, by punishing Sumner the way a man might punish a recalcitrant slave. The public and newspapers cheered him on and praised his defense of the South. 

Beyond the event, Quigley examines Brooks the man. Born to wealth and power, he never quite succeeded in rural South Carolina as the “man” he wanted to be. He had an unsuccessful duel early in life. He was an officer in the Mexican-American War, but caught a near-fatal fever and was sent home. His brother gallantly died in the combat—a real hero by South Carolina standards. But Preston looked to many like a shirker or even a coward, coming back from the war in a sick bed. Quigley describes a quick-tempered, spoiled young man (expelled from college after numerous instances of violent behavior including brandishing pistols), who holds office, owns slaves, lives well, has a problem with alcohol, and is never able to truly assert his manhood. The attack on Sumner became his chance for manly success. Quigley shows us just who was “the man behind the cane.” It is not a pretty picture. 

The import of this book, however, is not the story of a maladjusted, ill-tempered, violent young Congressmen, who drank too much, and despite claiming to be a devout Christian, likely had sex (committed adultery) with his slaves, a situation where consent was not possible. The “man” behind the cane may have been uniquely damaged and desperate for personal recognition but nevertheless embodied the values of the slave South and acted on them. His neighbors considered the sneak attack and beating of the unarmed Sumner to be justified and honorable. 

Beyond Brooks’ personal life, the book tells us about slavery, politics, and a society which rejected free speech, intellectual challenges, and open debate. By the time Brooks attacked Sumner, the slave South was essentially a closed society. Free speech was illegal, if that speech challenged slavery, racism, southern rights, or the self-proclaimed right of the South to leave the Union. Brooks was fined a mere $100 for his attack on Sumner and a majority of the House (but not the necessary super majority) voted to expel him. He then resigned from Congress and returned to South Carolina where he was wined and dined. Students at the University of Virginia sent him a cane with a heavy gold head. The mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, gifted him a goblet, a silver pitcher, and a new cane. At a banquet near his hometown. South Carolina’s governor and Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia spoke, while Brooks received “a gold goblet, a silver goblet, two gold headed walking canes & a Pair of So[outh] Ca[rolina] made pistols.” He was finally a hero, and a man’s man. At this banquet a local leader declared that Sumner’s speech was the weapon of an “assassin.” Thus, the South had a hero who stood up to antislavery rhetoric, while equating northern speech with lethal violence. Across the South the cheer, in public events and newspapers was “hit him again.” 

By this time, most Southerners no longer spoke to Northerners and refused to engage in discussions that challenged slavery. The most famous book of the decade, indeed of the 19^th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was banned in the South, even as it won audiences globally. The North and the world knew of her fictional Simon Legree, beating Uncle Tom to death, and then, as if sent from central casting, Preston Brooks walked onstage, nearly beating Senator Sumner to death.  

Even as he became a southern hero, Brooks was vilified in the North and Europe. A Republican songbook for the 1856 presidential election included a new ballad, Bully Brooks. Cartoons mocked his chivalry; editorials called him a coward when he refused to come North to speak. A devastating cartoon showed him beating the bloodied Sumner with a cane, while the civilized, articulate Sumner held a pen in his hand.  

Then, as quickly as Bully Brooks rose to fame, he left the stage, dying from asphyxiation, from an undiagnosed infection, in a Washington, D.C. hotel room in January 1857. Southerners mourned him as a symbol of proslavery heroism. But the descendants of Puritans had the last word. The Boston Atlas explained his “sudden death” by a “virulent and painful disease” could “scarcely fail to impress the public as a signal instance of Divine retribution for atrocious and peculiar crime.” Thus the “bold and arrogant man, while yet boasting of his dastardly outrage … is seized by the throat by an invisible and irresistible grasp, and strangled to death.” 

Quigley notes Northerners learned from Brooks “that free speech must be actively fought for.” Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother) neatly summed up the event: “The symbol of the North is the pen; the symbol of the South is the Bludgeon.” The attack was part of a “long-formed, deeply-laid plan, of destroying free speech in the Republic, and making SILENCE NATIONAL.” The campaign slogan of the Republican Party in 1856, just a few months after the caning, was “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, and Free Men.” After the Civil War, the Republicans would pass the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to make the First Amendment applicable to the states. The Supreme Court would misunderstand this central constitutional change during Reconstruction, but eventually it figured it out. The lesson of Bully Brooks is that speech, debate, and arguments are central to a democracy. Violence and suppression are, in the end, the tools of dictators, kings, and slaveowners. It is a lesson for our own times, too.