EIGHT
A SON OF SOUTH CAROLINA
“The South has been the goose of the golden egg to the North,” thundered Preston Brooks in March 1854, during the congressional debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, “which Free-Soilers, [with] their…fanatical tampering, are threatening to destroy.”
It was Brooks's first speech since his election to Congress in 1853. Unlike Charles Sumner, Preston Brooks sought neither fame nor limelight when he arrived in Washington, but inter-woven with his service was a deep desire to attain glory and uphold honor for himself and his state. In the same way that Sumner's Boston upbringing and dysfunctional family life shaped his antislavery views and his invective in speeches and debates, Preston Brooks's steadfast loyalty and devotion to family, state, and Southern mores and customs fueled his staunch proslavery views. They combined to ensure that, at this particular moment in history, he—more so than anyone else—would be the one to retaliate against Sumner for his insulting speech.
Thanks to his actions after “The Crime Against Kansas” speech, the man whose political outlook and sentiments were once considered overly moderate and “a little too national” in the eyes of his Edgefield, South Carolina, constituents, would become the standard-bearer and the avenging angel for the most radical elements of the slaveholding South.
In the weeks following the pivotal event of his life, Preston Brooks would be almost unanimously vilified by Northerners as “Bully Brooks,” “hotheaded,” “evil,” “hot-tempered,” a “dastardly ruffian,” “black and wicked,” a “coward and an assassin,” even “mentally unbalanced,” all characterizations that were understandable in light of his actions, but mostly inaccurate.
In fact, with the exception of his rambunctious college years and the two years leading up to May 22, 1856—commencing with the debate on Kansas-Nebraska in 1854—the South Carolina congressman had spent most of his adult life building a reputation as a reasonable, even gentle, moderate who judged men on their character and issues on their merits.
Virtually everyone who knew Brooks described him as amiable and unselfish. Newspapers described him as a man “of kind heart and the most tender sensibilities” who maintained an “imperturbable dignity” and was “considerate and kind” in his relations with others. One publication referred to him as “earnest, sincere, so full of enthusiasm, that few could resist the influence of his spirit.” A political colleague called him “generous, kind, and even gentle in his nature,” taking more pleasure in repairing “a wrong done by himself than in one inflicted on him by another.” Another ally pointed out that even during a period of “unusual party bitterness,” Brooks maintained many warm friendships among his political opponents.
Brooks himself deplored acts of needless violence. He warned a friend that defending honor through violence was “the bane and plague of humane society.” After he was wounded in a duel, he pledged to the doctor who treated him that he would never again engage in dueling “for in my conscience I do think it to be wrong.” He intervened to prevent duels and, after becoming a member of Congress, suggested that any member who brought a concealed weapon into the House of Representatives should be expelled.
Even at a young age, he developed a reputation for prudence and sound judgment. As a twenty-five-year-old aide-de-camp to South Carolina Governor James Henry Hammond, Brooks volunteered and was selected to discreetly remove Massachusetts lawyer and politician Samuel Hoar from Charleston. Hoar was an uninvited emissary of the Massachusetts legislature who had come to South Carolina to investigate the treatment of black seamen who were Massachusetts citizens. The South Carolina legislature asked Hammond to remove Hoar and gave the governor “unlimited power for that purpose.”
Hammond, fearing mob violence against Hoar, felt it was “of the greatest importance that all should be concluded decently and with such a tone of quiet and air of dignity,” and above all, wanted the expulsion to occur without violence (though he did authorize the use of force to remove Hoar). The governor wanted to “show the world that we are acting more from principle than impulse.” As for the man he selected for the delicate mission, Hammond said: “Brooks is young and ardent, but not without judgment.”
Politically, Brooks was a moderate, at least in South Carolina, and he supported the national Democratic Party from his first days in the House. He opposed his state's so-called “Irreconcilables,” who believed South Carolina's interests were not served by the national Democrats, and whose most extreme members advocated immediate secession from the United States.
His reputation as a moderate followed Brooks upon his election to Congress. After a speech, one constituent said he was “pleased with the nationality of his address” and impressed with the way Brooks “repelled all local prejudices and sectional jealousies.” During debate about the transcontinental railroad, and in particular, whether the massive project should be built along a Southern or Northern route, Brooks pleaded with fellow members of Congress to “suppress all sectional feelings,” arguing that “sectional jealousies are the bane of national advancement.” While some loyal South Carolinians found his national legislative positions unnerving, Brooks held the view that “my devotion to my state…requires not to be propped by cultivation of sectional sentiments.”
Northerners were impressed with Brooks's moderate demeanor and willingness to seek common ground. New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith found Brooks to be a “frank, pleasant man.” The National Era, an antislavery journal, said Brooks was “always a Southern gentleman” when he expressed his opinion, and the New York Times described Brooks as “a man of generous nature…warmly attached to his friends” who was “by no means relentless or vindictive towards his foes.”
Preston Brooks's reputation as an even-tempered moderate soon had colleagues looking to him to broker discussions and agreements among those with more entrenched views. This often thrust Congressman Brooks into the diplomat's role—something his former college faculty members would never have believed possible.
Perhaps Preston Brooks sought to fashion himself as a political peacemaker to atone for the pugnacity of his university years. College life revealed impulsive and even violent components of Brooks's personality that bubbled to the surface in the mid-1850s after years of dormancy. He learned to control these emotions as he matured, but these latent tendencies influenced his behavior years later, and they were an important part of his unfolding persona.
Brooks's rebellious antics deeply irritated the staff and faculty at South Carolina College in Columbia. Indeed, after his fellow Edgerfieldian, Louis Wigfall, graduated in 1837, Brooks became the leading troublemaker at the school, the “chief disturber of faculty peace…destined for [a] spectacular career in the realm of violent personal conflict,” according to the college historian. While his solid scholarship and good grades protected him in some cases, he had poor study habits, enjoyed the taverns in Columbia a little too much, and was never far from expulsion.
Brooks was first called before the faculty as a freshman for traveling far from the college without permission, but because of his high class rank, he was not disciplined. As a sophomore, he was suspended for missing too many classes and church services. Upon his readmission, Brooks was reprimanded several times for “drifting up town to Briggs' Tavern and other attractive, though forbidden, haunts.”
In South Carolina, dueling was a common way to settle differences, but ironically, it was Brooks's refusal to duel that led to his first campus fight. In January 1838, Brooks was seeking the presidency of the school's Clariosophic Society, a prestigious debating club. A fellow student, Lewis R. Simons, had promised not to run against Brooks, but apparently went back on his word. Brooks told acquaintances that Simons was a “falsifier” and Simons challenged Brooks to a duel. Brooks refused, pointing out that college rules prohibited duels. He agreed to give Simons a “boy's satisfaction,” a fistfight. The following day, as Brooks walked to meet Simons, his friends informed him that Simons had armed himself with a pair of pistols and that Brooks should do the same. He refused at first, but then he accepted a gun from a friend.
When the two met, Simons again challenged Brooks to duel. When Brooks refused again, Simons pulled a horsewhip from beneath his cloak and began to strike Brooks, who drew his pistol. Simons cried that he was unarmed. Brooks tossed away his pistol and the two engaged in fisticuffs. The faculty expelled Simons, the instigator of the incident, and suspended Brooks to “reflect on the matter” until the following April.
When Brooks returned, he continued to frequent taverns and was careless about attending class, but easily passed his final exams in November 1839. Presumably, graduation lay just a few months ahead.
But another incident interfered. This time, Brooks received an exaggerated and perhaps incorrect report that his brother had been detained in a Columbia jail and was suffering from “ignominious treatment.” Brooks rushed to the guard house bran-dishing pistols and threatened to shoot police who had mistreated his brother. Officers quickly disarmed him and sent him on his way, but the exasperated South Carolina College faculty had had enough. Weary of his belligerence and his casual attitude toward his studies, they voted to expel him. His fellow class-mates and the former governor of South Carolina petitioned on his behalf, but to no avail. The future congressman never received his bachelor's degree.
It was this last college incident that offered a telltale glimpse of Preston Brooks's distant future. He had rushed headlong and rashly to assist a family member against insurmountable odds—armed officers—based on little more than a rumor. He had to know that his actions, combined with his previous transgressions, would further sully his reputation at the college and perhaps jeopardize his standing. Yet, in Preston Brooks's world, virtually nothing trumped fierce loyalty to family in importance, risks be damned.
* * *
Like many Southerners, Preston Brooks viewed family as the most important unit in his life. As strained as Charles Sumner's relationship was with his father, as aloof as Sumner behaved toward his siblings, Preston Brooks lived at the opposite end of the familial spectrum. A devoted son, brother, husband, and father, Brooks was deeply committed both to his immediate family and to extended kin. By all indications, Brooks was happiest with his family; again, in sharp contrast to Sumner. “Family meetings are the purest and to me the most delightful of human enjoyments,” he wrote. He was married twice; for two years to Caroline Means Brooks, who died after a lengthy illness (one report called her “always delicate in health”), and then to her cousin, Martha C. Brooks, with whom he had four girls. “God bless these children,” he wrote. “I love them all as the apple of my eyes, and their sweet mother more than all.”
Brooks showered his wife with affection and attention. When a pregnant Martha suffered a fractured leg in a buggy accident in August 1849, Brooks stayed by her side and attended to her care unceasingly. Martha was brought to her mother's house to heal and Preston stayed for a week, showing her how to use crutches and tending to her needs. After two months, with Martha showing little improvement, Preston enlisted the services of a Columbia doctor who operated on Martha's leg. Brooks then cared for his wife every day afterward. Two weeks after the surgery, Martha could walk by herself and Preston took her home. She gave birth to a healthy daughter, Caroline, after this ordeal. Brooks prayed that “God bless and preserve to me one of the best of wives.” He often referred to Martha as “my precious wife,” and “my beloved wife,” and repeatedly asked God to protect and heal her.
In July 1851 Preston Brooks had watched as his three-year-old daughter, Sallie, fought desperately for her life. It wasn't that the death of children was so unusual in South Carolina during the early 1850s—sadly, it was not. But as Sallie, whom Brooks also called Yettie, had been born when Brooks was away at war in Mexico, he developed a deep and tender bond with the child upon his return. He was jubilant that Yettie's first word was “papa,” and she captivated him from the time father and infant laid eyes on each other. As she neared death, there was only a deep pall over the Brooks household.
“My child is now dying,” Brooks wrote, after Yettie had caught cold and became feverish. He recounted that only days earlier, “Yettie had said to her mother…that she had such a bad cold that she could not say her prayers.” In his diary, a devastated Brooks wrote: “It is hard, very hard to give up one so sweet. Her mother is unconscious of her present condition and is asking the poor babe if she knows her. My heart bleeds… My God I pray to Thee to let this affliction prepare my heart and make it acceptable to Thee.” When Yettie died, Brooks recalled tenderly: “Poor sweet ‘Yettie’ was the [most] fearless and sweetest tempered child we had.” Brooks described Yettie as “amusing” and added: “If a child can be said to be humorous at 3 years and 3 months of age, she was so—dearest Sallie has been all we could desire.” A pained Brooks wrote of watching as Yettie's nurse “closed both [the child's] eyes” and took “our poor babe from us.”
A loving husband and father, Brooks was a deeply caring son, too. As the health of his father, Whitfield Brooks, Sr., deteriorated in 1851, Preston prayed for his well-being and wrote: “A better husband and Father never lived…. He is a noble man in virtue and generous tender parent.” At Christmas, Preston realized that the holiday would be the last with his father; Whitfield was not even well enough to come to the dinner table. When his father passed, Preston wrote: “I was with him during the last day and a half and he died in my arms. A kinder parent never lived nor a juster man.” Later, Brooks wrote that he hoped God would bless Whitfield's spirit and “preserve his memory fresh in our hearts.” Doing so would “enable us to emulate his example and appropriate his principles to our conduct.” Preston hoped his father's wisdom and character would serve as inspiration to future generations: “Sacred be the page wherever his name be mentioned,” he implored.
Martha's buggy accident and the deaths of Brooks's father and daughter were followed in April of 1853 by more bad news, a miscarriage—a relatively common occurrence for the time, but still deeply saddening for the Brookses, who had hoped to have another child after Yettie's passing. In the early morning of April 12, Martha had become ill and “threatened with a miscarriage,” Brooks wrote. At first light, he sent for a doctor, but the physician's efforts proved fruitless. Just after 9:00 A.M., Martha “lost a perfectly formed baby boy.” Brooks described the tragedy as “a sore disappointment as we have never before had a son.” Yet, he refused to become mired in self-pity, focusing instead on the blessings he had received in life. “God has been good to me,” he wrote. “I know how very much more of good I have received than was deserved. [I] believe that an habitual dependence upon the providence of the Almighty…is real wisdom.” Such an outlook allowed Brooks to “very much [be] inclined toward thankfulness, even when overtaken by what the human mind would regard as a calamity.”
Martha's miscarriage, which prompted Brooks's philosophical and spiritual reflection on hardship, came at the conclusion of six years of personal pain for the Brooks family, beginning when Preston's brother, Whitfield, Jr. was killed in action in Mexico in 1847. A devastated Brooks buried Yettie next to Whitfield, Jr.—Brooks noted in his diary the ironic juxtaposition of Whitfield's death and Yettie's birth during the war. Whitfield, Jr.'s death was crushing to Preston, who was home from battle recovering from typhoid fever when his brother died. Preston was consumed with guilt when he learned of Whitfield, Jr.'s death, believing that by leaving his combat post, he had not adequately discharged his duty and thus had let his brother down.
These deep familial relationships were part and parcel of Preston Brooks's South, and more specifically, of South Carolina's Edgefield district, where the bonds of kin and region were intertwined and virtually unbreakable.
Insults to his parents or siblings obviously cried out for vengeance, but even indignities inflicted upon his extended family demanded rapid redress and justice. Like any self-respecting South Carolinian, Brooks would never tolerate the belittlement of his region or his state. “Whatever insults my state insults me,” Brooks declared. In some ways, this devotion was among Preston Brooks's most admirable character traits. In other ways, this unswerving loyalty would prove to be a curse.
Like Charles Sumner, Preston Brooks had deep roots in his home state and region. His grandfather, Zachariah Brooks, fought with a South Carolina regiment in the American Revolution. His father, Whitfield, who had some training as a lawyer, ultimately became one of Edgefield's most respected planters, and was described as “a man of science, of liberal education and polished manners.” The Brooks family estate, Roselands, was located near the village of Ninety Six in the northern part of the Edgefield district (it became a county in 1868) and was one of the community's largest plantations.
Located on South Carolina's western border—part of its lower Piedmont district, about midway between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, separated from Georgia by the Savannah River—Edgefield prided itself on its deep influence and leadership statewide. Edgefield residents saw them-selves as representatives of South Carolina and the South, strongly espousing the complex Southern ideals of honor, self-reliance, paternalism, classism, loyalty, local governance, and the virtuousness of agriculture, community, and leadership. By the Civil War, the Edgefield district had produced five governors (the region has produced ten governors to this day), two United States senators (including Butler), and was one of the most powerful regions in South Carolina. Edgefield was also home to two Civil War governors and Confederate General James Longstreet. In the words of one historian: “As South Carolina led the South—first in nullification, then in proslavery and prosouthern arguments, and later in secession—Edgefield led South Carolina.” The town of Edgefield, which would become the county seat, boasted South Carolina's oldest newspaper, the Edgefield Advertiser, and a classic municipal centerpiece, the Edgefield Court House, which was built in 1839 and anchors the town square, the community's gathering space for civic events and commerce.
Some of the state's staunchest proslavery, pro–states' rights, and promilitary voices emanated from Edgefield, as did many of its most daring and rebellious troublemakers. One editor applauded Edgefield as having “more dashing, brilliant, romantic figures, statesmen, orators, soldiers, adventurers, daredevils, than any other county in South Carolina, if not of any rural county in America.” Families like the Brookses, the Butlers, and the Pickenses “gave to their village and county a character that was South Carolinian, more intense, more fiery, than was found elsewhere…. They seemed to be harder riders, bolder hunters, more enterprising and masterly politicians.”
For Preston Brooks, Edgefield provided a strong training ground for his political future and the foundation from which to pursue public office. Here, he strengthened already deep family bonds—the Brookses were related through marriage to the most important families in the district, including the Butlers and the Pickenses; became devoted members of the elite in the Episcopal Church; and forged a leadership position among the wealthy planter class that owned the majority of slaves in Edgefield. Brooks loved Edgefield; its history, its people, its sense of community, its streak of independence and roguishness; its boldness and brashness.
Nearly 40,000 people, 60 percent of them black, lived in the Edgefield district, which was larger than all Southern cities save for Charleston and New Orleans. Yet for Brooks and other members of the planter elite, the region had the distinct feel of a small, close-knit town. Unlike Boston and other industrial cities of the north, with their factories, railroads, tenements, crowded and disease-ridden immigrant neighborhoods, crime, prisons, impersonal way of life, and utter lack of control, Brooks saw Edgefield as a paragon of pastoral orderliness, a hard-working agricultural district where stately mansions and enormous plantations stood adjacent to small homes and one-mule farms; an intimate setting where extended families and personal relationships defined the community's essence, and where business was conducted face-to-face; a place where, even after people moved away, they often returned to visit.
Of course, Edgefield relied on the strength of one other critical economic and social system that wove its way throughout the district's orderly tapestry, one that existed throughout South Carolina and throughout the South, the ingredient that also distinguished it markedly from Northern cities like Boston. Preston Brooks's economic fortunes depended on it, and he supported it, was defined by it socially and culturally, and in his own way, loved it every bit as much as he loved Edgefield and South Carolina.
The South embraced it and was sustained by it. The North sometimes denounced it, but more often wrestled with how to justify it. And it presented the single most vexing contradiction to the nation's promise that all men were created equal. In the South, its oft-used euphemism was “our peculiar institution.” Stripped of verbal niceties, its actual name bespoke the stark rawness of the issue that had divided and haunted America since her founding.
Slavery.