By late June, as bitter debate still consumed Congress, as anger swept across North and South, as Republicans reveled in their nomination of John C. Frémont and dreamed of success in November, Senator Charles Sumner had endured weeks of pain, misery, and deep melancholia.
While thousands thronged halls, churches, and town squares to either praise or denounce him, while dynamic speakers electrified crowds by declaring him either a courageous defender of freedom's principles or an unsalvageable reprobate, Sumner remained mainly confined to his room and his bed, lonely and debilitated.
Much of the time he was unable to think clearly, and even when he was lucid, he despaired at his inability to partake in the monumental debate that swirled around him, though he occupied its center. Slavery was still the underlying issue, but the caning of Sumner had gripped imaginations and poisoned debate like nothing ever had—not the Fugitive Slave Law, not the Kansas-Nebraska Act, not the Missouri ruffians who crossed the border to terrorize Lawrence and Topeka.
“My fingers are quite unused to the pen,” Sumner wrote in a shaky hand to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on June 13, but Sumner said he could not let another day go by without thanking Longfellow for his friendship. He had longed for the companionship of friends during his suffering, whose support he welcomed with a “throbbing grateful heart.”
He certainly had been heartened by well wishes from friends, colleagues, and like-minded citizens. One supporter thanked him for a “glorious speech,” and the Colored Citizens of Boston, who gathered at the Twelfth Baptist Church, offered their sympathies and condemned the “brutal, murderous assault” against a “statesman” who had long offered his services “in our behalf.” A grateful Sumner nonetheless declined an offer by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to assume his medical expenses. Responding on Sumner's behalf, Rep. Anson Burlingame wrote that the matter should “not be pressed” and instead proposed: “Whatever Massachusetts can give, let it all go to suffering Kansas.” Similarly, when a prominent lawyer proposed a fundraising testimonial on Sumner's behalf, the senator acknowledged his thanks but gratefully declined. “I trust you will not deem me too bold if I express a desire that the contributions intended for the testimonial to me may be applied…to the recovery and security of Freedom in Kansas,” Sumner wrote.
Sumner was trying to press on, but in the weeks following the caning he was weak and disoriented. Longfellow wrote to him on June 24: “And how is it with you? Are you making the best of it? Are you getting well?” Dr. Perry reported that his patient complained of “oppressive weight or pressure of the brain,” which intensified when he engaged in conversation or became excited. It often came on in waves—a sullen Sumner described it as a “fifty-six pound weight” upon his head. At the same time he lost both “flesh and strength,” his appetite was irregular, and he often lay awake all night in terrible pain. “Increased sensitivity of the spinal cord” and “weakness in the small of his back” made his walk unsteady. “Every step he took seemed to produce a shock upon the brain,” Dr. Perry said. “After slight efforts he would lose almost entire control of the lower extremities.”
To escape Washington's June heat and aid his recuperation, Sumner was able to move to his friend Francis P. Blair's home in Silver Spring, on the outskirts of Washington. For nearly four weeks, he lay “22 hours out of 24 on my back,” but by June 23, though he was “still very feeble,” he could “totter a mile around the garden…hoping daily for strength which comes slowly.” On the same day, he felt strong enough to write to Richard Henry Dana, thanking his friend for his speech at the Cambridge indignation meeting and asking him to pass along Sumner's thanks to Dana's daughter for her expressions of sympathy. He also apprised Dana of his condition, pointing out that his head and back injuries had caused his “whole system to be overthrown & I am obliged to keep on my bed much of the day.” Sumner lamented that, since the caning, he had written “only five letters” and only two on public matters. “When this will end I know not,” he fretted.
Silver Spring proved too close to the action in the nation's capital. Numerous visitors called on Sumner at Blair's house, exhausting the senator. A weary Sumner went to Washington on June 25 in answer to a summons to appear before the grand jury sitting on the Brooks assault case. When Sumner finished his testimony, he felt a little better and decided to return to work. He remained in Washington for three days, wrote and dictated letters, and visited with friends who called upon him (including Dana, who was about to sail for England). This overexertion led to a serious relapse. Exhaustion consumed him and he returned to Silver Spring; for a week his doctors prohibited visitors as Sumner fought fever and his wound again suppurated. Dr. Lindsly, after examining the pale Sumner, wrote that Sumner should refrain from any public duties for “some time to come.” Lindsly also advised Sumner to “go into the country [to] enjoy fresh air.”
On July 4, New York Senator William Seward was allowed to visit Sumner at Silver Spring and he found the patient bedridden and lethargic, “like a man who has not altogether recovered from paralysis, or like a man whose sight is dimmed and his limbs stiffened with age.” Sumner was able to converse and expressed curiosity about goings-on in the Senate, but even he admitted that his “vivacity of spirit” was gone.
Seward was deeply concerned about Sumner's condition. It had been more than six weeks since Sumner's beating and his colleague not only seemed devoid of energy, but had turned into a sickly old man virtually overnight. “He is much changed for the worse,” Seward wrote on Independence Day of 1856. “It is impossible to regard him without apprehension.”
There was little doubt that Charles Sumner needed more peaceful surroundings. On July 7, he arranged his affairs in Washington and headed north for further rest. In the coming months, he would stop in Philadelphia, then Cape May, New Jersey, and later, venture high into the mountains of Cresson, Pennsylvania, desperately seeking the restoration of his full health.
One of his last acts before leaving Washington was to write to District of Columbia U.S. attorney Phillip Barton Key, informing Key that he would not be available to testify at Preston Brooks's trial in U.S. Circuit Court. Key had written to Sumner twice about arranging a voluntary appearance on behalf of the prosecution, believing there was no “impropriety” in doing so; perhaps it would even help the case against Brooks. Sumner had fulfilled his legal obligation when he had testified before the grand jury, and, particularly in his current state, that would have to suffice. “I repeat now what I expressed to the Grand Jury,” Sumner said, “I have no desire to take any part in this proceeding.”
On July 7, 1856, Preston Brooks appeared before Judge Thomas H. Crawford in the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia to stand trial for the caning of Charles Sumner. He was charged with assault by the U.S. attorney, rather than a more serious crime such as attempted murder, one of the several prosecutorial decisions Phillip Barton Key made that benefitted Brooks. Those decisions are best understood in the context of Key's Democratic background.
Key, a strong states'-rights Democrat, was the son of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner” but also the former U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., under President Andrew Jackson. Phillip Key's sister was married to a prominent Ohio Democratic congressman, and his uncle was Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who one year later would become famous for a landmark and controversial decision in support of slavery and the slave power. Like Taney, Key had little sympathy for Sumner and his abolitionist friends, and admired noble, wealthy planters such as Brooks and the Southern way of life they defended.
It is difficult to say for certain how much Phillip Barton Key's personal beliefs entered into his approach to the case against Brooks. However, as historian Williamjames Hull Hoffer notes, in addition to charging Brooks with a lesser crime, Key insisted on reading into the record his exchange of letters with Sumner in which the Massachusetts senator explained that his continued illness prevented him from appearing in court to offer testimony. Some Sumner supporters would say later that this was a tactical error, perhaps deliberate on Key's part, that made Sumner appear both arrogant and exaggerative of his incapacity. In his own testimony later, Brooks objected to Sumner's absence and hinted that his victim had overstated the severity of the attack.
Brooks also had a strong defense team, who put Southern lawmakers on the stand to testify that Sumner had engaged in his own premeditated offense—delivering “The Crime Against Kansas” speech. What had the abolitionist senator expected as a response?
One day after the trial began, on July 8, a sympathetic Judge Crawford found Brooks guilty (there was no jury) and sentenced him to a fine of $300, significantly less than the $1,000 fine he had predicted he'd receive. Sumner supporters were incensed, claiming the “paltry fine” clearly showed the proslavery temperament of the federal courts in the District of Columbia and the overall proslavery leanings of Washington, D.C., in general. Brooks paid the fine and walked out of court. Later, his supporters in the South raised the money to reimburse him. The legal proceedings of the caning incident were officially concluded. The next day, Preston Brooks would face a congressional jury of his peers—the full House of Representatives was scheduled to begin deliberations on whether he should be expelled.
Brooks was ready. “I can't fight every body who denounces me,” he wrote to his brother, Ham, “[but] I shall do my full duty [and not] shrink from any issue which involves a yielding of the constitutional rights or a taming of the lofty spirit…of the southern portion of the Confederacy.” Brooks sought to allay his brother's concerns that he might face physical harm once the full House hearings began, assuring him that he was always armed “and will use my weapons if attacked.” Nor would he hear of Ham traveling to Washington to defend him. “You…must not think of [it],” he wrote. “I have as many friends as I want and never intend to permit a friend to be involved on my account.” Brooks's confidence was bolstered by his belief that, despite the threats he had received, his enemies did not have the stomach for a physical confrontation. He reassured Ham: “The dogs may bite when I kick them but, will never dare assail me, though I have fifty letters saying I shall be killed.”
* * *
His bravado aside, Preston Brooks was beginning to feel the pressure that accompanies fame or infamy.
To the entire North, he was an object of scorn, representative of the incivility and increasing barbarism of slave-owners. To his beloved South, he wore the mantle of courageous hero, someone with the guts to finally silence the arrogant abolitionists after their years of insolence and repeated interference in Southern affairs. Brooks was not comfortable in either role. “The responsibility of my position is painfully heavy,” he admitted to his brother, Ham, “for I have lost my individuality in my representative capacity.” In his new role as “exponent of the South,” Republicans—“Black Republicans” as the most radical abolitionists were labeled by Southerners—were “war[r]ing in my person.” It pained him that Northerners considered him “a fair sampling of every slaveholder” or “the type, the result, of the effect of slavery.” Later, he would say with regret: “I feel that my individuality has in great measure been destroyed.”
This would not change when the full House took up the investigating committee's recommendation to expel Brooks. The brazenness and ferocity of the caning had awakened long-buried, almost primal responses from Congressional members, and they would direct either their fury or their jubilation not toward Brooks the man, but toward Brooks the symbol: diabolical miscreant to the North, avenging angel to the South. The political order in Washington was unraveling. Debate had deteriorated, mistrust had multiplied, and compromise was no longer seen as a sign of political virtue and maturity, but merely as weakness.
The tension was palpable when members crowded into the steamy House chamber on July 9 to debate Preston Brooks's future. To consider expelling a member was weighty enough, but every representative knew that the debate over the next few days was about far more than a lone man's fate; the nation's future could hang in the balance. Congressmen were well aware that whatever their decision, one side would be angry, perhaps irreconcilably so. Voting to expel Brooks would satisfy the North and infuriate the South; letting Brooks retain his seat would send renewed outrage through the Northern states.
Despite the stakes and the hot weather (“I feel very languid and indisposed to exertion” admitted Thomas L. Clingman of North Carolina), representatives did not shy away from the chamber or the debate. One after another, members of the House stood and delivered lengthy speeches, in part to educate their colleagues and in part to ensure that their remarks were reprinted in the more than three thousand newspapers that Americans relied on to get their information.
Their positions were predictable. One Tennessee congressman claimed that Brooks, “instead of deserving punishment, merited the highest commendation.” Sumner, he said, “did not get a lick more than he deserved,” and that he, as well as some members of the House deserved “a good whipping.” Through the course of their speeches, Southerners generally agreed with Rep. James L. Orr of South Carolina, who argued that Brooks felt he had a “high and holy obligation resting on him to step forward and repel the insult made on the character of his state and his relative.” Orr parroted the Southern belief that Brooks had little choice but to assault Sumner, that Sumner's intentional provocation in “The Crime Against Kansas” demanded nothing less, and that Sumner's injuries were far from serious.
Orr also accused the North and the Republicans of using the caning for their own political purposes. He noted that eighty members of the House had voted that very morning to reprint a hundred thousand extra copies of the House committee report investigating the caucus—“one third of which is the offensive speech in full.” Why would they do so? “It is intended as an electioneering document for the Republican Party…part of a systematic effort to mislead and inflame the public,” Orr said.
Northerners disagreed vehemently on all counts. New Jersey's Alexander Pennington said Orr's “arrow” was “pointless, though poisoned, and fell wide and short of its mark.” Setting the tone for the remarks of virtually every other Northern member, Pennington called the caning “a gross and unparalleled outrage committed upon the Constitution.” While he ascribed “no murderous purpose” to Brooks, he believed the “deadly weapon [was] wielded in a murderous manner.” This could not stand in a nation that cherished the right of free speech. If individuals were protected by the First Amendment against lawsuits, fines, and imprisonment for speaking out, was it not also reasonable to protect them against the “bludgeon of the bully, the ruthlessness of the ruffian, and the assaults of the assassin?”
And on and on it went, for nearly six full days inside the sweltering House chamber, with neither side offering quarter nor compromise. Every Northern representative sounded themes similar to Pennington—that the caning was an attack against the laws of the nation. Orr spoke for virtually all Southerners (though three Southern lawmakers did agree that the House at least had jurisdiction to censure Brooks)—they maintained that Brooks's action was in retaliation for personal insults against his relative and his region. These arguments spoke volumes about how far apart North and South were on this issue, and by extension, on the issue that lay at the root of the caning: slavery. Debate did not soften battle lines between sections; instead, the two sides dug in and reinforced their positions.
When debate was exhausted, House Speaker Nathaniel Banks of Sumner's home state of Massachusetts requested a roll-call vote on the committee's motion to expel Brooks from the House. For one of the first times in recent memory, the slave power was outnumbered, but not by enough. A two-thirds majority vote was required to pass the expulsion resolution, and Preston Brooks knew the Republicans did not have the votes. Three weeks earlier, Brooks had predicted that about 120 members of the House would vote in favor of his expulsion and 70 would vote against the measure; while those numbers would fall short of the two-thirds majority required to expel him, he admitted such a margin would be “censure enough for me.” Brooks actually had underestimated his support.
After nearly a week of debate, the House voted 121 to 95 to expel Brooks, a full 23 votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. All but one of the majority votes were from the free states. Thirteen free-state Democrats voted with Southerners against the expulsion resolution. The House also fell short of the necessary two-thirds majority to officially censure South Carolina's Lawrence M. Keitt, and the vote to censure Henry Edmundson was defeated outright.
Immediately after the humiliating though mostly symbolic July 14 vote, a proud and wounded Preston Brooks requested and was granted permission to address the House.
Brooks had remained silent during the debate about his future, trusting his defense to his colleagues and friends “who are abler and more learned than myself.” He believed the issues under discussion transcended his particular interests and deed, and affected his constituents, the House, and “the Constitution itself.” Now, though, it was time.
Flanked by Senators Butler and Mason, who remained seated, Brooks stood tall and surveyed the packed House galleries, his neat wavy brown hair, natty goatee, piercing eyes, and defiant demeanor all reflecting his position as a Southern gentleman and a proud representative of Edgefield and South Carolina.
He began, as his Southern brethren had argued, by insisting that the caning was a “personal affair,” carried out in retribution for Sumner's attack on Butler and South Carolina. Had he not responded, Brooks believed he would have forfeited his own self-respect, “and perhaps the good opinion of my countrymen.” By taking actions into his own hands, Brooks said he meant “no disrespect” to the Senate nor to the state of Massachusetts.
But beyond those acknowledgments, Brooks expressed no contrition for his attack against Sumner, nor did he believe the House had any authority to censure him, let alone vote on expulsion. Interrupted by both applause and hisses—Speaker Banks threatened to clear the House galleries of spectators—Brooks argued that if he had committed any “breach of privilege,” it was against the Senate and not the House, yet the Senate had chosen not to act on the issue. The House's argument that its authority extended to every member regardless of where transgressions occurred was absurd on its face, Brooks said. “How far does your authority extend?” he asked. “Across the Potomac? To my own home?” Would Brooks be punished by the House if he returned to South Carolina, found that “one of my slaves had behaved badly in [his] absence,” and ordered the slave flogged?
Of course not, Brooks argued. The Constitution itself provided him with the authority to “inflict [punishment] upon my slave, who is my property.” Thus, the House's claim that it had the power to wield authority over the behavior of its members outside the chamber was irrational, immoral, and unconstitutional. “If your authority goes into the Senate Chamber, even when the Senate is not in session, why should it not go into the ante-rooms and down the steps of the Capitol?” Brooks wondered sarcastically. “Why not pursue me into the Avenue, into the steamboat, to my plantation.” And yet, Brooks argued, that's exactly what his House colleagues had done, and in so doing, his peers had judged him “to posterity as a man unworthy…of a seat in this Hall. And for what?”
Brooks scoffed at Pennington's assertion—even while he insulted him personally for his girth—that the attack on Sumner had carried with it “an intent to kill.” Nonsense, Brooks declared. “If I desired to kill the Senator, why did I not do it? You all admit that I had him in my power.” Brooks reiterated that it was precisely because he wanted to spare Sumner's life that he chose an “ordinary cane” as his weapon. Otherwise, he might have committed a murderous act that he would have “regretted the balance of my natural life.”
Disgusted with most House members who voted to expel him, Brooks said he had been pursued with “unparalleled bitterness,” and yet he would not give them the satisfaction of renouncing his actions in any way. “If they are satisfied with the present condition of this affair, I am,” he said. He thanked his friends and especially offered his gratitude to colleagues from non-slave-owning states who voted against his ouster. Even a few of those who voted to expel him likely “have been extorted by an outside pressure at home,” rather than holding the genuine belief that Brooks should be removed against his will from the House. And while he “owed respect” to those who voted against him without resorting to personal attacks, Brooks hoped they would understand that, from this moment forward, “my self-respect requires that I shall pass them as strangers.”
Preston Brooks knew how the vote would turn out. He knew Republicans would lack the two-thirds majority to expel him, but he was deeply rankled and insulted that a simple majority of members would declare him unfit to serve in the House any longer. He had “long foreseen” the outcome, was “altogether prepared for it,” and as such, had ten days earlier placed a letter announcing his resignation with the governor of South Carolina, “to take effect the very instant that I announce my resignation upon this floor.”
Defiant and unbowed, Brooks finished his remarks before the House with an expected but still dramatic flourish: “And now, Mr. Speaker, I announce to you and to this House, that I am no longer a member of the Thirty-Fourth Congress.” Brooks strode from the House chamber, and, after being thronged at the doorway by sympathetic Southern women who embraced and kissed him, left the Capitol building.
Preston Brooks's absence from the House of Representatives was short-lived. On July 28, South Carolina held a special election in Brooks's congressional district to fill the seat he had resigned. Legally eligible to seek reelection, Brooks did so (as did Keitt, who, two days after Brooks, resigned in the wake of his own censure). He urged his loyal constituents to return him to office “with an unanimity which will thunder into the ears of fanaticism the terrors of the storm that is coming upon them.”
He ran without opposition and remained in Washington in the weeks prior to the election, two factors that would normally depress turnout. Instead, his constituents turned out in huge numbers to show their support—Brooks received nearly eight thousand votes, 30 percent more than his 1854 regular election total.
On August 1, he returned to the House chamber, approached the rostrum, and Speaker Banks administered to him the oath to support the Constitution of the United States. Three weeks after his dramatic resignation, Congressman Preston Brooks resumed his seat as the representative of South Carolina's Fourth District.
Even more remarkably, in the regular Congressional election in the fall of 1856, though some of the initial excitement of the caning would subside, Brooks would again run unopposed and carry the day without a single dissenting write-in vote in the entire congressional district. “For inflicting merited punishment, the entire South has applauded and commended me, and placed me in the position as representative,” Brooks would assert.
Such universal adulation incensed Sumner's supporters, but at the same time, Brooks's meteoric rise to fame in the South provided powerful fuel to stoke the fires of the Republican Party sweeping across the North.