Preston Brooks's caning of Charles Sumner, including the events leading up to and following it, is filled with larger-than-life personalities, dramatic episodes, and far-reaching implications for America. This book is a work of narrative history that rests on a sturdy foundation of primary and secondary sources: layers of scholarship and research. This Bibliographic Essay lists my sources and how I use them, and the Acknowledgments contain additional details about my research.
I have tried to tell this rich story with as much accuracy as the historical record allows. Everything that appears between quote marks is contained in a diary, letter, government document, court transcript, piece of congressional testimony, newspaper, magazine article, journal, pamphlet, or book. I have taken no poetic license. My conclusions are based on an examination and interpretation of the sources and my knowledge of the characters and events; these also provide the underpinnings for any conjecture that I engage in (as all historians and nonfiction authors must do from time to time). In those few instances when I do speculate about people or events, I make these clear to the reader.
The source material for The Caning is so rich that I feel as though I've spent a great deal of time over the last few years in the 1850s, and while on my journey to the past, got to know Charles Sumner and Preston Brooks especially well.
Sumner, of course, was a prolific speaker and writer. His Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, David Donald, estimates that Sumner's fifteen-volume Works, which the senator compiled in the last few years of his life, represents less than half of his public utterances. He wrote often, on broad topics, to a vast array of people. Just as rich were the thousands of letters people wrote to him during his career; those also offer a wonderful glimpse into the tenor and tone of the times. I've examined as many of Sumner's letters as possible during the time period and topics covered by this book, scores of letters he received, many of his speeches, and several volumes of his Works—and I've only read a fraction of his writings.
Brooks's career did not last long enough for him to be as prolific as Sumner, nor was he as naturally inclined to write as the Massachusetts senator, but his papers contain enough of his observations about the caning, slavery, his family, and his region to get a real feel for what drove him as a man, a congressman, and a Southerner. Those letters written to and about Brooks, also contained in his papers, amplified a number of these topics—the correspondence about his untimely death was particularly powerful and interesting.
Below I provide a list of primary sources and for certain ones included a brief explanation of how I used them and why they were important. I have grouped secondary sources according to topical categories when appropriate.
I have referred to the primary or secondary source (mostly newspapers in the latter case) chronologically closest to the event for greatest accuracy and veracity. For example, Sumner's Works, written late in his life, may, in some cases, represent what the “1870s Sumner” wished or hoped he had said in earlier years; thus, to describe, say, Sumner's convalescence in July 1856, I tried to draw on letters or other documents from that month. While this was not possible in all cases, I was able to adhere to this approach most of the time, since Sumner wrote—and was written to—so frequently, since the Preston Brooks papers contained many colorful, in-the-moment letters and documents, and because so much of the caning investigation was part of an extensive public record.
I drew on hundreds of articles from several nineteenth-century newspapers as secondary sources throughout the book. Northerners and Southerners relied on papers for their news and for interpretations of events. I mention many of these papers within the text, and I used other newspaper articles for background. The newspaper references were derived from three main sources: the New England Historic Genealogical Society's (NEHGS) wonderful collection of nineteenth-century newspapers (www.newenglandancestors.com); the Furman University Department of History Secession Era Editorials Project (http://history.furman.edu/editorials/see.py), a remarkably ambitious compilation; and newspaper clippings included in a scrapbook collected by Preston Brooks's great-granddaughter, which is part of the Preston S. Brooks Papers at the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina (USC).
Rather than list the newspapers separately in the topical areas that follow, I've included them here since I used them throughout the book to capture the feel of the time period. This list does not represent all the publications I referred to, but provides readers with a good sampling:
Albany Evening Journal
Atchison (KS) Union
Boston Courier
Boston Daily Advertiser
Boston Daily Atlas
Boston Daily Evening Transcript
Boston Investigator
Boston Post
Charleston (SC) Mercury
Charleston (SC) Standard
Chicago Press and Tribune
Columbian (SC) South Carolinian
Daily Lawrence (KS) Republican
Edgefield (SC) Advertiser
Illinois State Register
Jefferson City (MO) Inquirer
Kansas Crusader of Freedom
Leavenworth (KS) Times
Lecompton (KS) Union
The Liberator
Macon (GA) Messenger
Milledgeville (GA) Federal Union
Montgomery (AL) Journal
New Orleans Times-Picayune
New York Times
New York Tribune
Pittsburgh Gazette
Raleigh (NC) Register
Richmond (VA) Enquirer
Richmond Whig
Spartanburg (SC) Spartan
Springfield (IL) State Journal
Wilmington (NC) Daily Herald
A final note: When an author writes about a subject that touches the Civil War in any way—the run-up, the war itself, the aftermath—he can't help but rub elbows with some of America's greatest historians. There is no way to read or refer to all of the great books written about this momentous time period. The books I list below are but a fraction of the thousands written about the Civil War Era, but in my view, they are among the best and most important, and they provided me with invaluable material for this work.
PRESTON BROOKS, CHARLES SUMNER, AND THE CANING AND ITS AFTERMATH
Primary Sources
CHARLES SUMNER
To understand and analyze this complex man—before, during, and after the caning episode—I drew extensively on the enormous collection of letters to and from Sumner contained in The Papers of Charles Sumner, 1811–1874, on 85 reels of microtext at the Boston Public Library. These comprise letters contained in the Charles Sumner Papers at Harvard's Houghton Library plus letters located in nearly two hundred other repositories in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Canada. This vast collection helped me paint the portrait of Sumner the man, as well as Sumner the antislavery crusader, and also provided an illuminating look at how American citizens viewed Sumner and the critical issues of the day.
I owe a debt of gratitude to editor Beverly Wilson Palmer for producing the masterful The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, Volumes 1 (1830–1859) and II (1859–1874) (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), which was my constant companion during the research and writing of The Caning. It is no surprise that Palmer, a Sumner scholar, chose letters that revealed Sumner's character as well as his beliefs; I found this collection particularly helpful when sketching Sumner's European sojourns.
Sumner's speeches, including “The Crime Against Kansas” and “The Barbarism of Slavery,” and many other writings, are also contained in his exhaustive The Works of Charles Sumner (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1875); I mainly made use of Volumes 1–7 of the fifteen-volume collection. Both major speeches were also reprinted in newspapers across the North and are available from numerous Internet sources.
I consulted both the Charles Sumner Papers and the Theodore Parker Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society for original transcripts of some of Sumner's speeches, and a heartfelt correspondence between Sumner and Parker while Sumner was convalescing.
PRESTON BROOKS
The most complete collection of correspondence to, from, and about Preston Brooks and his family is contained in the Preston S. Brooks Papers at the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. These include letters from Southerners to Brooks about the caning; a collection of letters about Brooks's Mexican War experience; a Brooks diary recopied by his wife Martha (which contains, among other things, Brooks's heartbreaking recollections of the death of his three-year-old daughter Yettie in 1851, and his overall feelings about family); a lengthy diary kept by Brooks's father; and a scrapbook collected by his great-granddaughter that contains newspaper clippings and other documents relating to his death (including colorful details of the long journey made by the Edgefield contingent transporting Brooks's frozen body from Washington back to his South Carolina home).
In addition, this collection contains the remarkable eight-page handwritten “Statement of Mr. Brooks on the Sumner Assault,” dated May 28, 1856 (six days after the caning), in which he candidly outlines his motives and actions. It also contains poignant letters—to Mrs. Brooks and others—from those in attendance when Brooks died suddenly in January 1857.
Lawmakers' comments on Brooks's life and death are also contained in extensive testimony recorded in the Congressional Globe (precursor to the Congressional Record), 34th Congress.
I also found helpful “Speeches of the Honorable Preston S. Brooks, and Proceedings of Congress on the Occasion of His Death,” in the Southern Quarterly Review (February 1857), which contains excerpts from his speeches and articles about his death. Brooks's speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act (March 15, 1854) is contained in the Congressional Globe, 33rd Congress, 1st Session, Appendix.
The information in the book about the disposition of Preston Brooks's estate and the value of his slaves is contained in the “Inventory of the Personal Estate of Preston S. Brooks” housed at the Edgefield, South Carolina Archives, and also in an exhaustive bound collection of slave records entitled, Slave Records of Edgefield County, South Carolina by Gloria Ramsey Lucas (Edgefield, S.C.: Edgefield County Historical Society, 2010).
Finally, information about Brooks and the Southern planter lifestyle is captured in Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder, edited by Carol Bleser (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988).
THE CANING AND ITS AFTERMATH
Primary source material about this extraordinary event and its fallout is extensive and varied. The entire episode, including testimony of the House of Representatives investigation, follow-up speeches from lawmakers, testimony from Brooks, Sumner, and other witnesses, as well as the Brooks expulsion hearing, is contained in the Congressional Globe. A wealth of information is included in the Alleged Assault upon Senator Sumner (House Report, No. 182, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 1856), but extensive additional information appears in the appendix and other places within the Congressional Globe. I also consulted the Globe for debates and discussion on the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the tumultuous situation in Kansas that led up to Sumner's “Crime Against Kansas” speech.
In addition, the Journal of the House of Representatives (July 15, 1856) contains the resolution calling for Brooks's ouster and outlines the arguments of his actions.
I also examined the United States Senate report from the “Select Committee appointed to inquire into the circumstances attending the assault committed upon the person of Hon. Charles Sumner, a member of the Senate” in The Reports of the Committees of the Senate of the United States (First Session of the 34th Congress, 1855–1856).
The Resolutions of the Legislature of Massachusetts Relative to the Recent Assault upon the Hon. Mr. Sumner (June 11, 1856) is an interesting document sent to the U.S. Congress, expressing the Massachusetts legislature's outrage over the “brutal and cowardly” assault on Sumner.
Numerous pamphlets were published at indignation meetings in the North, summarizing the speeches and sentiments at the rallies protesting Brooks's attack on Sumner. Among others, I examined A Full Report of the Speeches at the Meeting of Citizens in Cambridge, June 2, 1856, in reference to the Assault on Senator Sumner in the Senate Chamber at Washington; and Proceedings of a Public Meeting of the Citizens of Providence on the Evening of June 7, 1856. Also, a pamphlet ridiculing Brooks for his August 29 speech in Columbia, South Carolina, was printed in Boston entitled: “Disunion Document, No. 1: Speech of Honorable Preston S. Brooks delivered at Columbia, South Carolina.” The pamphlet asked the provocative question: “Which party is the sectional and disunion party?” And then it urged Massachusetts citizens: “Read the following account of the reception of the Assassin Brooks at Columbia, S.C. with his speech, and then answer the question.”
For an excellent compilation of primary sources, as well as short analyses that bridge the primary documents, see Lloyd Benson's The Caning of Charles Sumner (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2003), which contains Sumner's “Crime Against Kansas” speech; letters to and from Sumner and Brooks; period newspaper editorials; and Congressional documents associated with the investigation. I found Professor Benson's work a valuable clearinghouse for some of the critical primary sources associated with the caning.
Extensive primary-source material on the caning is available as part of the excellent Cornell University Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection, which I accessed frequently at http://dlxs.library.cornell.edu/m/mayantislavery.
Finally, the story about Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar expressing his opinion that the caning was an “awful blunder” for the South appears in Mary Chesnut's A Diary from Dixie: The Civil War's Most Celebrated Journal, Written 1860–1865 During the Conflict by the Wife of Confederate General James Chesnut, Jr. (New York: Gramercy Books, 1997, a facsimile of the 1905 edition). Lamar's tribute speech to Charles Sumner after Sumner's death is reprinted in several places. I made use of the version at www.bartleby.com/268/10/6.html (accessed February 28, 2012), and also of extensive excerpts about Lamar in President John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage (reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1961).
Secondary Sources
UNPUBLISHED WORKS
For a compelling overview of the caning, particularly from the Southern sense-of-order perspective, I recommend Joel Harlan Gradin's Ph.D. dissertation, “Losing Control: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Breakdown of Antebellum Political Culture” (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1991).
I also found helpful another paper that looked at the caning from a Southern perspective entitled: “Preston Brooks in the Verbal and the Visual: Showing Face to Save Face and Avoid Disgrace in the Antebellum South,” an honors thesis for a bachelor's degree in history by Margot Bernstein (Williams College: 2010).
ARTICLES, ESSAYS, AND PERIODICALS
I made use of the following in my research for Sumner, Brooks, and the caning in general:
“Charles Sumner.” United States Magazine, 3 (July–December 1856), 355–358.
Dietrich, Ken. “Ever Able, Manly, Just and Heroic: Preston Smith Brooks and the Myth of Southern Manhood.” Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (2011), 27–38.
Fleming, Thomas. “When Politics was Not Only Nasty… But Dangerous.” American Heritage (Spring 2011), 56–63.
Friefeld, Jacob. “Honor and Blood: Brooks, Sumner, and Conceptions of the Body in Nineteenth-Century America.” Historyroll.com (September 2010), 11 pages.
Gienapp, William E. “The Crime Against Sumner: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Rise of the Republican Party.” Civil War History (September 1979), 218–245.
Mathis, Robert Neil. “Preston Smith Brooks: The Man and His Image.” South Carolina Historical Magazine (October 1978), 296–310.
Slusser, Daniel Lawrence. “In Defense of Southern Honor: Preston Brooks and the Attack on Charles Sumner.” CalPoly Journal of History, 2 (2010), 98–110.
BOOKS
The finest biography on Sumner is the two-volume work by David Herbert Donald, and I especially consulted the first volume, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), which discusses the caning and Sumner's convalescence in detail. I spent some time with the second volume, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), to understand Sumner's stances during the Civil War and Reconstruction, as well as the magnitude of his death.
I also found extremely helpful the contemporaneous four-volume work by Edward Lillie Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878–1893), which contained many primary sources (speeches and letters) as well as Pierce's well-written—if overly charitable—narrative.
The definitive Brooks biography has yet to be written, but I consulted several books that contained references to Brooks and provided a flavor for the plantation South of which he was a part. These include: Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father's House Are Many Mansions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Lacy K. Ford, Jr., Origin of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford, 1988); Daniel Walker Hollis's multivolume history of the University of South Carolina, Vol. 1, South Carolina College (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), which provided primary source documents related to Brooks's rebellious days as an undergraduate student.
Also, see Alvy King's biography, Louis T. Wigfall: Southern Fire-Eater (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), which chronicles the feud between the Brooks and Wigfall families; Ernest M. Lander, Reluctant Imperialists: Calhoun, the South Carolinians, and the Mexican War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., Fanatics and Fire-eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), which provided analyses on the power of the press in the 1850s; Charles Grier Sellers, Jr., The Southerner as American (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); and Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
In addition, I found two other books helpful to gain perspective into Preston Brooks's South: (author unnamed) The Story of Edgefield (Edgefield, S.C.: Edgefield County Historical Society, 2010); and a short publication written by Katharine Thompson Allen and edited by Elizabeth Cassidy West, The University of South Carolina Horseshoe: Heart of the Campus (Columbia: Produced by the University of South Carolina Archives, University Libraries, University of South Carolina, undated).
For another short academic treatment of the caning and related issues, plus brief analyses of other major issues of the time, see Williamjames Hull Hoffer's The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN
Primary Sources
As mentioned, scores of Charles Sumner's letters and multiple pages in the Congressional Globe deal with the debate about Kansas and with John Brown—both Brown's murderous ram-page in Kansas and his raid on Harpers Ferry. This section highlights additional sources that focus on Kansas and John Brown.
There is rich and valuable information on the dire situation in territorial Kansas at www.territorialKansasonline.org (accessed frequently), which contains diaries, letters, legislative proceedings, and other primary sources.
In addition, the Assumption College E Pluribus Unum Project, a collection of documents and analyses of three American decades (1770s, 1850s, 1920s) contained some excellent primary sources that help analyze the situation in Kansas. I accessed this collection frequently at www.assumption.edu/ahc/Kansas.
Similarly, there is a fine collection of sources, including affidavits and testimony from the families of John Brown's murder victims in Pottawatomie, at West Virginia's online Archives and History site: www.wvculture.org/history (accessed frequently).
James Henry Hammond's “Cotton Is King” speech before the United States Senate in March 1858, during the discussion on the admission of Kansas, is reprinted in numerous publications and online sites. See www.sewanee.edu/faculty/Willis/Civil_War/documents/HammondCotton.html for the reference I cited (accessed February 6, 7, 2012). Senator Andrew Butler's June 12, 1856, speech on whether Kansas should form its own constitution as it prepared to enter the Union is available at www.hti.umich/edu (accessed frequently).
Senator Stephen Douglas's committee's lengthy report (March 1856) relative to the “Affairs of Kansas” is available in the Congressional Globe (34th Congress, 1st Session).
Secondary Sources
UNPUBLISHED WORKS
For an interesting and well-researched look at the relocation of New Englanders to Kansas Territory, I found helpful Tracee M. Murphy's history master's thesis, “The New England Emigrant Aid Company: Its Impact on Territorial Kansas, 1854–1857” (Youngstown State University, 1999).
ARTICLES, ESSAYS, PERIODICALS
Of the plethora of articles on John Brown and Kansas, I found the following particularly helpful.
Harold, Stanley. “Border Wars.” North & South, 12, January 2011, 22–31.
Horwitz, Tony. “Why John Brown Still Scares Us.” American History, December 2011, 38–45.
Linder, Douglas O. “The Trial of John Brown: A Commentary.” University of Missouri at Kansas City online faculty projects (www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/johnbrown (accessed several times), 2005.
SenGupta, Gunja. “Bleeding Kansas.” Kansas History (Kansas Historical Society), 24, no. 4 (Winter 2001–2002), 318–341.
Stottelmire, Marvin. “John Brown: Madman or Martyr?” Brown Quarterly, 3, no. 3 (Winter 2000) (http://brownboard.org (accessed frequently)
BOOKS
It is important to emphasize that virtually every book that deals with the runup to the Civil War deals with the Kansas issue and with John Brown—I have listed most of these in a later section of this essay.
However, I want to mention two that deal specifically with Brown that I found invaluable: Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), which focuses on Harpers Ferry; and David S. Reynolds's excellent biography, John Brown: Abolitionist (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2005).
In addition, much of the scene in which John Brown meets Charles Sumner and touches his bloody coat in Boston is drawn from James Freeman Clark's “Charles Sumner: His Character and Career,” in Memorial and Biographical Sketches (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878), a near contemporaneous account written just a few years after Sumner's death.
DRED SCOTT, REPUBLICAN PARTY, LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES
Primary Sources
DRED SCOTT
A wonderful digital collection of primary sources in the Dred Scott case is available from Washington University in St. Louis, entitled The Revised Dred Scott Case Collection. The collection contains more than 110 documents and is fully text-searchable. I accessed it frequently at http://digital.wustl.edu/d/dre/index.html.
Charles Sumner refers to Dred Scott frequently in his letters and papers, and discussion of the case also occurs in Congress and is recorded in the Congressional Globe (including the full 1865 debate over whether Congress should have commissioned a bust of Chief Justice Roger Taney upon his death).
In addition, documents related to the case are contained in James Buchanan, 1791–1868, a collection of documents and bibliographic aids, edited by Irving J. Sloan (New York: Oceana Publications, 1968).
For a document that straddles the line between a primary and secondary source, see Samuel Tyler's Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, LL.D. (Baltimore: John Murphy & Co.), an 1872 account that contains numerous primary sources, including letters to and from Taney, bridged by Tyler's narrative.
REPUBLICAN PARTY
For a fine collection of primary sources on the emergence and growth of the Republican Party, see Proceedings of the First Three Republican National Conventions of 1856, 1860, and 1864, including proceedings of the antecedent national convention held at Pittsburg [sic], in February, 1856, as reported by Horace Greeley (Minneapolis: Charles Johnson, 1893).
In addition, an 1856 congressionally commissioned short biography of John Charles Frémont entitled Life of John Charles Frémont (New York: Greeley & McElrath), provided a revealing look into the subject's life, including a collection of speeches and other writings.
Also, for a wide collection of primary sources, opinion pieces, and letters, see the contemporaneous The Republican Scrap Book: containing the platforms, and a choice selection of extracts, setting forth the real questions in issue, the opinions of the candidates, the nature and designs of the slave oligarchy, as shown by their own writers, and the opinions of Clay, Webster, Josiah Quincy, and other patriots, on slavery and its extension (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1856).
I also made frequent use of the University of Pennsylvania's Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image collection entitled: The Crisis of the Union: Causes, Conduct and Consequences of the U.S. Civil War, available at http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/sceti/civilwar/index.cfm
LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES
The best primary sources for the Lincoln-Douglas debates are Paul M. Angle, ed., Created Equal? The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1958, which also contains detailed newspaper accounts of the debate days across Illinois; Harold Holzer, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text (New York: Fordham University Press), 2004; and Lincoln's own Lincoln: Speeches, Letters, Miscellaneous Writings, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (New York: Library of America), 1989.
Secondary Sources
ARTICLES, ESSAYS, PERIODICALS
Again, I consulted numerous articles about the Dred Scott case, the growth of the Republican Party, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. I found the following most helpful:
Denton, Sally. “Frémont Steals California.” American Heritage, 60, no. 4 (Winter 2011), 30–39.
Fehrenbacher, Don E. “The Republican Decision at Chicago.” In Norman A. Graebner, ed., Politics and the Crisis of 1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961).
————. “Comment on Why the Republican Party Came to Power.” In George H. Knoles, ed., The Crisis of the Union, 1860–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965).
Gienapp, William. “Formation of the Republican Party.” In L. Sandy Maisel and William G. Shade, eds., Parties and Politics in American History (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 59–81.
————. “The Crime Against Sumner: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Rise of the Republican Party.” Civil War History (September 1979), 218–245. (See above bibliographic reference to this important article under Charles Sumner, Preston Brooks, and the caning).
McPherson, James. “Politics and Judicial Responsibility: Dred Scott v. Sandford.” In Robert P. George, ed., Great Cases in Constitutional Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 90–93.
Sunstein, Cass R. “Dred Scott v. Sandford and Its Legacy.” In Robert P. George, ed., Great Cases in Constitutional Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000),, 63–89.
BOOKS
I found the following books most helpful for information about Dred Scott, the Republican Party, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
William E. Baringer, Lincoln's Rise to Power (Boston: Little Brown, 1937); Andrew Wallace Crandall, The Early History of the Republican Party, 1854–1856 (Boston: Gorham Press, 1930); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), an excellent analysis of the major constitutional questions this landmark case sparked; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Mark A. Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Michael F. Holt, Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969).
Also, see Walker Lewis, Without Fear or Favor: A Biography of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), a largely sympathetic work of the man whose career and historical legacy was defined by Dred Scott; Corinne J. Naden and Rose Blue, Dred Scott: Person or Property? (New York: Benchmark Books, 2005); David Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); and Charles W. Smith, Jr., Roger B. Taney: Jacksonian Jurist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936).
ABOLITIONISTS, SECESSION, SLAVERY, AND THE RUN-UP TO THE CIVIL WAR
Primary Sources
Again, these topics are covered in great detail in several of the primary sources I've already cited (Sumner papers, Brooks papers, Congressional Globe, numerous digital collections). The sources included in this section are additional documents that I examined in connection with this topic heading.
The postelection letter (November 9, 1860) from Mississippian R. S. Holt to his brother, Joseph, in which he warns of slaves poisoning their masters in the wake of Lincoln's election, is contained in the Library of Congress's Joseph Holt Papers, a copy of which was included in the Milledge Bonham Papers at the South Caroliniana Library. In addition, Bonham's telegraph from Washington, D.C., to Charleston (December 19, 1860), threatening to meet Northern invaders with “bloody flags,” is also contained in this collection.
Jefferson Davis's October 11, 1858, speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston is available in numerous locations and repositories. I accessed it by way of the fine digital collection at Rice University, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, which I accessed frequently at http://jeffersondavis.rice.edu/.
The Congressional Globe of December 17, 1857, contains a number of lengthy tributes to Senator Andrew Butler upon his death.
For Daniel Webster's famous March 7, 1850, speech on the Fugitive Slave Law, and several responses (including John C. Calhoun's), see the appendix to the Congressional Globe, beginning on page 269. I also referred to two handbills that helped crystallize the debate and provide context for Sumner's viscerally negative reaction to Webster. The first, published in May of 1850 by Gideon and Co. in Washington, D.C., was titled Letter from Citizens of Newburyport, Mass., to Mr. Webster in Relation to his Speech Delivered in the Senate of the United States on the 7th of March, 1850, and Mr. Webster's Reply. The second, published in August 1850, also by Gideon and Company, was entitled Correspondence Between Mr. Webster and His New Hampshire Neighbors.
For a comprehensive look at the depth of the opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law in Sumner's hometown of Boston, I found helpful the nineteen-page Massachusetts Senate Report No. 51 (March 24, 1851), titled Joint Special Committee on So Much of the Governor's Address as Relates to Slavery and on Petitions Praying to the Legislators to Instruct Their Senators and to Request Representatives in Congress to Endeavor to Procure a Repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law.
For a powerful overview of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Thomas Sims case from the point of view of Boston abolitionists, see the collection of writings from Thomas Wentworth Higginson, edited by Howard N. Meyer, titled The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1823–1911 (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000). In addition, see Massachusetts Senate Document No. 89, April 9, 1851, for an in-the-moment account of Sims's capture and confinement just days after his arrest.
For more about the abolitionist movement and slavery, I made use of the Frederick Douglass Papers, many of which are online from the Library of Congress at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/doughtm/doughome.html (accessed several times). I also examined the words of Douglass in his three autobiographies: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1849); My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). In addition, numerous writings, speeches, and illustrations of notable abolitionists and other antislavery champions are available at the Library of Congress's The African-American Mosaic at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/afam006.html and at the Massachusetts Historical Society's Images of the Anti-slavery Movement in Massachusetts at http://www.masshist.org/data-base/essay2.cfm?queryID=70. I accessed both sites frequently in my efforts to immerse myself in Charles Sumner's world.
For the secession crisis, I relied on a number of primary sources, two of which were included as an appendix to Charles B. Dew's Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Cause of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001). These included: a speech in pamphlet form titled Address of Hon. W. L. Harris, Commissioner from the State of Mississippi, Delivered before the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, on Monday, Dec. 17th, 1860 (Milledgeville, Georgia, 1860); and Letter of Stephen F. Hale, commissioner from Alabama, to Governor Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky, Dec. 27, 1860.
I also looked at secession documents in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C., 1880–1902), focusing mainly on Vol. 1, available through the Cornell University Making of America series at http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moawar/waro.html (accessed frequently). Also, see Yale Law School's Lillian Goldman Law Library's The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, which includes: Confederate State of America: Declaration of Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp (accessed frequently); and The Civil War Trust's “Secession Acts of the Thirteen Confederate States” at http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/secessionacts.html (accessed frequently).
Secondary Sources
ARTICLES, ESSAYS, PERIODICALS
Nearly countless articles and essays have been written about this broad topic. However, I relied on the following for direct references and background reading:
Brooks, Elaine. “Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.” Journal of Negro History, 30, no. 3 (July 1945), 311–330.
Deppisch, Ludwig, M.D. “The National Hotel Disease.” The Grog Ration: A Publication of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BUMED), 4, no. 1 (January–February 2009), 1–5.
Fellman, Michael. “Theodore Parker and the Abolitionist Role in the 1850s.” Journal of American History 61, no. 3 (December 1974), 666–684.
Johnson, Linck C. “Liberty Is Never Cheap: Emerson, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the Antislavery Lecture Series at the Broadway Tabernacle.” New England Quarterly, 76 (December 2003), 550–592.
Levy, Leonard W. “Sims' Case: The Fugitive Slave Law in Boston in 1851.” Journal of Negro History, 34, no. 1 (January 1950), 39–74.
Loewen, James W. “The First to Secede.” American Heritage, 6, no. 4 (Winter 2011), 13–16.
Pease, Jane H., and William H. Pease. “Confrontation and Abolitionism in the 1850s.” Journal of American History, 58, no. 4 (March 1971), 923–937.
Von Drehle, David. “The Civil War 1861–2011: The Way We Weren't.” Time (April 18, 2011), 40–51.
Vose, Caroline E. “Jefferson Davis in New England.” Virginia Quarterly Review (Autumn 1926), 557–568, accessed February 6, 2012 at http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1926/autumn/vose-jefferson-davis/
BOOKS
In addition to the books already listed that cover the abolitionist movement, I found helpful Tilden G. Edelstein's Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Atheneum, 1970), a work about one of Boston's most militant abolitionists; Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830–1860 (New York: Harper and Row, 1960); Henry Mayer's comprehensive and electrifying biography All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998); my own A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850–1900 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010); and Wendy Hamand Venet's Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991).
For books focusing on secession, I relied on some outstanding works, including: Shearer Davis Bowman, At the Precipice: Americans North and South During the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Steven A. Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970); David Detzer's fast-moving Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, 2001); Charles B. Dew's dramatic overview of one of America's most dramatic three-month time periods, Apostles of Disunion (see citation in the “Primary Sources” section of this topic); Clifford Dowdey, The Land They Fought For: The Story of the South as the Confederacy 1832–1865 (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1955), William W. Freehling's excellent overview, The Road to Disunion (Vol. II): Secessionists Triumphant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Nelson D. Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), in which he examines the unlikely confluence of events that had to—and did—coalesce to lead to war; and Robert Rosen, A Short History of Charleston (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1982).
I was also assisted immeasurably by comprehensive works that focused specifically on slavery. These included: John W. Blassingame, Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), which discusses the rich cultural and family life that many slaves deliberately kept hidden from their masters; David Brion Davis's excellent Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), which makes many of the same arguments as Preston Brooks and other slave-owners; Don Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), which focuses on U.S. proslavery policies; Eugene D. Genovese's classic and exhaustive analysis of slavery, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1972); Peter Kolchin's synthesis of 250 years of slavery in America, American Slavery: 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); and Stephen Yafa's study of the crop that made slavery's continuance possible and profitable, Big Cotton: How a Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map (New York: Viking, 2005).
Works by some of America's best historians provided me with insights on the run-up to the Civil War. These works included Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1961); Catton's This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1955), in which the author maintains that Preston Brooks's assault on Charles Sumner was the first blow of the Civil War; William and Bruce Catton, Two Roads to Sumter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963); and Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). Also, David Donald followed his classic Sumner biography with a magnificent biography years later of our sixteenth president, simply titled Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
For a valuable summary on the 1856 and 1860 presidential campaigns, I turned to William A. DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents: From George Washington to Bill Clinton (New York: Wing Books, 1993). For a discussion on how trade and production drew the nation closer to civil war, see Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009); Ernest B. Furgurson details the chaos in the nation's capital during the war in Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004); and I found invaluable Constance McLaughlin Green's Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), to get a feel for life and conditions in D.C. during the caning years. Michael F. Holt provided political context for the slavery extension debate in The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004). J. William Jones published an 1890 family-authorized book on the president of the Confederacy that I found helpful, entitled The Davis Memorial Volume of our Dead President, Jefferson Davis, and the World's Tribute to His Memory (Richmond, Va.: R. F. Johnson); and Colonel Alexander K. McClure, Recollections of Half a Century (Salem, Mass.: Salem Press Company, 1902) offered context on America in the latter half of the nineteenth century, including the Civil War run-up and the conflict itself.
It is hard to imagine learning about the Civil War or its causes without consulting James M. McPherson's one-volume masterpiece, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Nor is it possible to overlook Allan Nevins in the pantheon of great Civil War historians. I consulted his The Emergence of Lincoln (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950); and his two-volume Ordeal of the Union epic: Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852 and A House Dividing, 1852–1857 (both New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947). For Boston's role in the Civil War, the standard-bearer is Thomas H. O'Connor's Civil War Boston: Home Front & Battlefield (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997).
Finally, for other fine and important books on the national run-up to war, see David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper, 1976); Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Erich H. Walther, The Shattering of the Union: America in the 1850s (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2004); and Paul I. Wellman, The House Divides: The Age of Jackson and Lincoln, from the War of 1812 to the Civil War (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1966).