“The institution of slavery, which is so fashionable now to decry, has been the greatest of blessings to this entire country,” Preston Brooks told his House colleagues during debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. “Slavery has been the strongest bond of union between these States.”
Not only did “every section of the Confederacy” benefit from slave labor, Brooks pointed out, but the sweat of the African slave gave “employment to the shipping interest of the East, wealth to the manufacturer of the North, and a market for the hemp and live-stock of the West.” Brooks declared that slavery had given the United States “a commerce which excites the admiration and jealousy of the world,” and a power “greater than armies and navies.”
Without any doubt, Brooks said, “enough has been shown to prove the indebtedness of every quarter of the nation to the humble slaves”—the whole country owed a debt of gratitude to the institution of slavery and to the South, which perpetuated its existence and promoted its broad expansion.
In fact, he warned at the time, because slavery benefited every corner of America, failure to enact the Kansas-Nebraska Act—which would breathe new life into the slave-power—would place the country at “greater danger of disunion than at any time since the formation of this government.”
As much as it derived its identity from the bonds of family, the formal customs of Southern gentility, and the virtues of agriculture and religion, Preston Brooks's Edgefield district was undeniably defined by slavery. If South Carolina was the South's staunchest proslavery state, Edgefield stood as its sentinel, fiercely defending the institution against all detractors and attackers, and proudly espousing slavery's contributions, not just on behalf of white Southern agriculturists, Northern industrialists, and Western landowners who profited from it, but to society as a whole, including (so the reasoning went) the slaves themselves. Slaves may have been shackled and subjugated, but, Edgefield's white residents believed, this was the natural order of things; didn't slaves also enjoy the beneficence of orderly plantation life and the benevolence of protective owners?
The Edgefield argument was the South's argument: slavery was inherently good—for the owners and the owned; for the nation's business; for the overall community. Economic and civil order was best maintained and advanced, and life was richer both materially and morally, with a robust, thriving, and unencumbered system of human slavery.
Cotton was king in Edgefield by the mid-1850s, and black slaves served the monarch well. Thanks to its large plantations and large number of slaves, Edgefield district, with the fourth largest population in South Carolina, led the state in the number of cotton bales produced. Slavery was the basis of economic prosperity in Edgefield, and those with slaves profited most. Historian Orville Burton points out that nearly 63 percent of white households owned land and nearly 66 percent of landowners had at least some slaves. With slaves as collateral, planters could obtain credit from cotton factories and could rent or sell slaves if they needed cash. And slaves helped the community at large too—taxes levied on slave-owners provided Edgefield and other districts with revenue to repair roads and provide other services.
Slavery was so woven into the fabric of Edgefield and South Carolina that virtually no white planter could imagine life without it. Not only was it considered essential to the economy, it was viewed as integral to the overall moral and social order of the region and the strength and stability of the entire country; most slave-owners believed the institution of slavery elevated society and civilization in general. A well-run plantation, with an unambiguous and authoritative patriarchal relationship between owner and slave, symbolized an orderly and morally upstanding community. “No Republican government can long exist without the institution of slavery incorporated into it,” declared one minister. The sentiment was echoed by Thomas Green Clemson, the Northern-raised son-in-law of John C. Calhoun, who said: “Slaves are the most valuable property in the South, being the basis of the whole southern fabric.”
Preston Brooks agreed completely, choosing to scold abolitionists and Free-Soilers when he reminded them that they “know nothing of the Negro [slave] character, or of his intimate and inseparable connection with the moral, social, and political condition of the South.” Whites and blacks working together—one as master, one as slave—was best for all involved, Brooks believed. His parents were large slave-owners at their Roselands plantation, and at his own Leaside Plantation near the town of Ninety Six, Brooks owned more than eighty slaves, whose value in 1857 exceeded $50,000. This was in an era when a set of blacksmith tools was valued at $5, Brooks's two-horse wagon was priced at $35, and Columbia lodging-seekers could rent a seven-room apartment, complete with “heat, hot water, and janitor services,” for $45 per month. Slaves were by far a planter's most precious commodity—far outdistancing the plantation owners' next most valuable property, mules and grains, the latter used as feed and sold at market.
To those from the North who sought to interfere in the system of slavery or in black-white affairs in general, Brooks said simply: “If you wish either of us well, let us alone.” This feeling was so pervasive in South Carolina that the mere hint of dissent was, at best, discouraged, and at worst, punished. Vigilance and safety committees were established across the state (and the South) to resist and crush any antislavery sentiments and to root out abolitionists who roamed the South, secretly or overtly spreading their message. The committees often opened mail of those with suspected abolitionist leanings, and while some Southerners objected to this practice on First Amendment grounds, most supported any efforts to blunt the impact of abolitionist thinking. In Mississippi, any “free person” who incited slaves to rebel faced a death sentence. In his early days as a congressman, South Carolina's John Henry Hammond warned abolitionists, “ignorant, infatuated barbarians that they are,” that if they were caught in his home state, they could expect “a felon's death.” He viewed it as an offense against heaven not to kill abolitionists.
Years later, in Hammond's home state, the town of Spartanburg arrested a New York man, posing as a researcher, after he was caught carrying abolitionist pamphlets among his materials. While he awaited trial, public sentiment overwhelmingly favored the ultimate penalty for his transgression: death. But Spartanburg officials delayed his trial, instead using the New Yorker as an example to heighten public awareness about the dangers of abolitionism. Later, cooler heads prevailed, and the man was released and allowed to flee to the North unharmed.
The Southern hatred of abolitionists had deep roots that went well beyond economic concerns. It was a hatred fueled by a visceral fear that abolitionism had the potential to destroy the South's way of life, but—even worse—that the South would become as decadent, disorderly, and godless as the North.
At the heart of Southerners' fear of abolitionism, at the core of the entire planter-plantation-slave dynamic, was the nearly universal and unshakable belief among elite white slave-owners that blacks were inherently inferior.
Plantation owners believed blacks, slaves in particular, were incapable of caring for, providing for, or—God forbid—governing themselves. Slaves required guidance and discipline, in much the same way parents would shelter or reprimand innocent or insolent children. Most planters had convinced them-selves that the plantation model was both the best way to protect blacks from themselves and the best way to protect white society from blacks. Hence, the plantation's strict prohibition against blacks learning to read or write; its religious instruction to save blacks from their heathen tendencies; its detailed written rules governing the whipping, hobbling, and other severe punishment of slaves for a slew of transgressions. James Henry Hammond believed that the black race had been created to be a “mud-sill” upon which a higher level of society could be built. Without such a lower-class foundation, “you might as well attempt to build a house in the air,” he wrote.
Preston Brooks grew up in an environment whose entire structure depended on absolute adherence to and reliance on these beliefs, an agricultural society in which the principle of black inferiority was constantly reinforced. As much as Charles Sumner believed emancipation was virtuous in the eyes of God, Preston Brooks believed any talk of freeing slaves was heresy. How could blacks care for themselves? How could they survive?
“The history of the African contains proof upon every page of his utter incapacity for self-government,” Brooks told his fellow congressmen in 1854. “His civilization depends upon his contact with and his control by the white man.” Brooks asserted that abolitionists who sought liberty for the black man not only were threatening the entire Southern economic structure, but were threatening the well-being of the very people they were allegedly trying to help. Abolitionists were well aware, Brooks said, that “when he [the black man] is left to his own government, he descends to the level of the brute.”
One need look no further than Jamaica, which had emancipated its black slaves in the mid-1830s, to see the constant chaos and mayhem that existed on the island, Brooks argued. If abolitionists had “one drop of genuine philanthropy…in their veins, they would guard [the black] population…from the evils of such a liberty.” Slave-owners repeatedly employed this argument of protectionism to mask the brutality of human bondage and repel calls for emancipation. For Brooks and others, the thought of thousands of free blacks roaming the South represented the most frightening disorder imaginable. The Edgefield Advertiser warned its readers of the dangers of abolitionism and emancipation: “Insolent free negroes would thrust themselves into society and make proposals of marriage with their [white] sons and daughters.”
Southerners were also appalled at Northern abolitionist hypocrisy—not just for enjoying the fruits of economic prosperity that Southern slavery had helped create in the North, but for decrying the mistreatment of slaves at the same time immigrants in Northern cities subsisted in squalor. In the mid-1850s, while Charles Sumner demanded that the federal government force planters to emancipate slaves across the South, Irish immigrants in Sumner's Boston were living in horrendous conditions, suffering from hunger, disease, unsanitary housing, abject poverty, and unceasing religious and ethnic bigotry, the latter often perpetrated by the very class of people to which Sumner belonged.
Preston Brooks and his Southern compatriots repeatedly mocked the North for its failure to recognize the irony. Indeed, slave-owners argued, Northern capitalist greed, manifested by the growth of factories and the unstoppable wheels of industry, had exploited and crushed poor white workers to a much greater extent than slavery had subjugated the black man. South Carolina Congressman Lawrence Keitt scoffed: “The tower of Massachusetts civilization, which hypocritically nestles the… African to her bosom, thrusts aside thousands of the children of her loins, who can scarcely draw the support of their existence from an overtasked industry!”
And what of the obvious and most glaring distinction between slaves and poor immigrants: that slaves were nothing more than property in the South, owned by planters who bought and sold human beings as the business required, who, like Brooks, listed their slaves among their plantation assets, along with plow horses and kitchen china? Why, that was the very point, Southern slaveholders argued; because slaves were the most valuable property on a plantation, their well-being was paramount. Plantation owners had invested far too much capital in their slaves to allow those assets to deteriorate or suffer harm.
According to Preston Brooks and his slaveholding counter-parts, this level of investment created a system of dictatorial benevolence on the plantation that simply did not exist in the ruthless industrial world of the North. Slaves were often considered an extension of the family, albeit vastly inferior members, while in the North, the relentless pace ground workers to dust, and they were simply replaced by others who would soon suffer the same fate. Even punishment of slaves—sometimes mild, sometimes horrific—was simply a means of maintaining order on the plantation and in society, a way of protecting the owner's investment. Virginia author and slavery advocate George Fitzhugh saw slavery as the most mild and humane form of exploitation, a system that was essential for Southern civilization to flourish.
Beyond Northern hypocrisy, Southerners believed they had one more argument on their side: a constitutional one. Notwithstanding the intensity of slavery debates during the Constitutional Convention seventy years earlier, the fact that the Founders had virtually ignored the slavery question in the final document proved not only that it was just and legal, but that the institution was intrinsically important and valuable to the success of the republic.
It also proved, de facto if not explicitly, that the Declaration's claims that “all men are created equal,” endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” simply did not and could not extend to black slaves.
For abolitionists to argue differently, Southern slave-owners said, demonstrated a profound and dangerous ignorance, of both the Founders' intentions and God's plan.
As deeply as they cherished slavery—for cultural, moral, social, economic, religious, and societal reasons—Southerners hated Charles Sumner for his unabashed and brazen efforts to tear down the institution, an unforgivable offense.
His very name was “the synonym of all that is base and odius,” one letter-writer proclaimed to Brooks. A Memphis newspaper called Sumner a “low groveling wicked demagogue, whose character stinks in the nostrils of all rational men.” Another Brooks friend claimed Sumner was hiding behind his “Senatorial robes which he has for so long disgraced” to “shoot his poisoned arrows and fling his filthy” foul-mouthed abuse.
Brooks's second cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler, asserted that Sumner represented a movement “uncontrolled by responsibility and unregulated by intelligence.” He viewed Sumner's constant attacks on slavery as far from principled; Southern planters and politicians believed that the arrogant senator from Massachusetts simply desired to destroy the moral and social order of the South.
That Sumner sought to obliterate the South's most sacred values—love of family, loyalty to region, reliance on slavery—provided enough reasons for Preston Brooks to respond forcibly to the acerbic tone and inflammatory content of “The Crime Against Kansas” speech. But overlaying all of these was one more reason, one that governed and defined the way Preston Brooks lived, loved, and managed his life. Even more important than the sense of order that he held dear was an ingrained and powerful concept that lay at his core.