By: Jacob Friefeld
It was May 22, 1856, the United States Senate had adjourned for the day and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts sat in his chair, feverishly writing at his desk. Unbeknownst to Sumner, a guest was waiting in the chamber for those around the Senator to part ways. Once Sumner was alone, the guest, Preston Brooks, a member of the House of Representatives from South Carolina, approached him. Upon his approach, Brooks stated, referring to a speech given by Sumner two days earlier, “I have read your speech twice and carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina and on Mr. Butler also, a relative of mine.” Then, without warning, Brooks lifted his cane and began raining blows on Sumner’s head. As each successive swing of the cane reached its mark, Sumner found himself powerless to stop the beating as the desks were fastened to the chamber floor trapping the Massachusetts Senator in his chair. Before the deed was done, Brooks had landed twelve to fifteen blows on the now bloodied Sumner’s head.[1]
To the modern observer and to the majority of Northern observers, this attack may have seemed ruthless, unprovoked, and a punishment not in proportion with an insulting speech. However, in the Southern man’s mind, the speech and the beating corresponded perfectly. A different construction of the body in the minds of Northern and Southern men caused this difference in view.
The Brooks-Sumner affair has been the subject of various past historical inquiries; however, all these approaches take Southern honor for granted as something abstract and emotional.[2] These studies also take for granted the Southern defense of Brooks’ actions, never questioning the language used in the defensive arguments. Upon a closer analysis of the debate that took place between North and South after Brooks completed his bloody deed two separate conceptions of the male body come to light. One conception was based in the material world where, as the old saying goes, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me;” the other was steeped deeply in a world of honor in which names, lies, and sharp rhetoric could harm one’s very body. Different conceptions of masculinity in the nineteenth-century American North and South shaped these conflicting views.[3]
In this case, Southern planters and slave owners (the primary architects of the dominant male discourse in the South) created the conception of manhood that guided Southern response. On the other hand, Northern wage workers, small businessmen, and professionals of the emerging middle class were engaged in mapping a new industrialized masculinity.
While Southern masculinity was deeply entrenched in an ethos of honor, Northerners defined their manhood in the marketplace.[4] Although Southern honor predated slavery in America, it was always tied up with hierarchy and rejection of the lowly and honor-less.[5] Early in the history of Jamestown, indentured servants and apprentices filled the role of the less honored, while masters were able to keep the honored position that their clean hands afforded them.[6] However, by the 1850s, Southern men defined their manhood against black slaves, who were dominated and incapable of possessing honor, and against women, who derived their honor from others, namely their husbands and fathers.[7] Furthermore, certain aspects of Southern culture such as lying and physical appearance held a heightened place of importance, a place these cultural facets did not occupy in the North.[8] In the slavery system, the words of the master had to be accepted as truth because he was a man of honor and the slave was not.[9] This was also true outside of slavery; when Southern men of honor interacted, they took each other’s words as truth and even if a lie was being told, it was not considered such unless pointed out by another man. In other words, a “liar” did not own a lie; instead, it was given to him by someone else.8 Consequently, the Southern honor system placed no positive value on the truth; rather, one found value in not being called a liar.[10] If a lie was given, it constituted a serious breach of the accused’s honor and the conflict needed to be settled through a duel.[11] However, if a spoken untruth went unrevealed, all was well because the appearance of truth and honor had been upheld. Additionally, concern for appearances explains why Southerners usually reacted violently against practical jokes while Northerners considered practical joking a part of friendly interaction.[12] Rattling the world of appearances in the South could be a deadly game.
On the other hand, industrial era Northern culture had no place for honor based on hierarchy and expressed through dueling. Ideal Northern manhood was increasingly the domain of the middle class. In the North, unlike in the South, from approximately the age of six, young boys occupied a sub-cultural world separate from (but deeply related to) dominant adult society.[13] Northern fathers of the middle class, no longer working on the farm, did not need their sons to help with their work. The release from traditional family work gave boys time to hike, explore, swim, and horseback ride.[14] Boyhood had no set ending, but there were events that ushered boys into adulthood. Leaving home, marriage, or holding one’s first steady job could serve as appropriate points of passage into polite adult society.[15] Once a young boy became a man, he proved his masculinity in the marketplace. Success in the competitive business world required self-control and sober planning rather than the spontaneity and impulses of boyhood.[16] As a result, competition and achievement outside the home created an aggressive masculine work space, leaving women to create a feminine home space that provided a realm of femininity against which Northern men could define their manhood.[17] Also, these men, responding to a fear of dependence on wage labor, increasingly defined their manhood as white against others such as free and enslaved blacks and Europeans who had not yet been assimilated into white manhood.[18]
If a young man did not exercise his positive white manhood as an entrepreneur, he could also find a masculine domain within the law.[19] With firm admission standards through the Bar and forms of hierarchy and training, the professional lawyer had replaced the part-timer of the colonial years. As professionalism took hold in the law, literary pursuits were increasingly looked down upon as a waste of a lawyer’s time. Unlike their pre-professional predecessors who saw themselves as men of letters, men who practiced professional law were considered reasoned men of action who could get things done.[20]
Preston Brooks fit perfectly into the dominant southern gender constructions of his time. Born in the summer of 1819 to wealthy, well respected parents in South Carolina, Brooks’ early life was privileged and filled with lessons of honor and family loyalty. He served for a short while in the South Carolina Assembly until the Mexican American War broke out in 1846. He battled typhoid during the war and was unable to win any real fame or honor in battle, a fact highlighted by his community’s neglect of his contributions in the war during a ceremony meant to honor veterans who fought in Mexico. So enraged was Brooks over the slight that he almost fought a duel with one of the veterans who had been honored. Seeking the fame he never found in Mexico, Brooks ran for and won election to the House of Representatives in 1853.[21]
Charles Sumner, on the other hand, provides a more conflicted sketch of gender construction. Sumner was a member of the middle class and a non-dueling proponent of self-controlled manhood. Along with his material condition and self-controlled ideology, Sumner’s practice of law made him a creation of ideal Northern masculinity. However, several of Sumner’s other relations and beliefs removed him from the mainstream concept of Northern manhood. Although he was a lawyer brimming with potential, he saw lawyers “as one of the veriest wretches in the world.”[22] His sour view of lawyers and the law (and his need to get away from them) led him, to the dismay of his colleagues, to take a trip to Europe. A friend warned Sumner that if he took the trip, he would return “[...] with a cane, moustaches and an additional stock of vanity—that’s all.”[23] Ironically, had Sumner actually returned from his 1837 trip with a cane, he might have been able to defend himself from Brooks nineteen years later. The cane, moustache, and vanity that Sumner’s friend warned against showed a disdain for dandyism—excessive concern for one’s appearance. Northern American men saw Dandyish behavior as womanly and irrational—the antithesis of manhood.
Sumner’s involvement in reform movements, most importantly the antislavery movement, led him to argue for the integration of Boston’s Public Schools in 1849 and made him a pariah among the majority of American citizens who wanted neither abolition nor integration.22 Though his antislavery views were unpopular in traditional Northern circles, his dedication to the rational principle of individual liberty and equality guided him through hostile political storms. It was his dedication to the cause of individual liberty and his rejection of the racism implicit in white manhood that made Charles Sumner a conflicted character when considered against dominant masculine paradigms in the North.
So, it is within the context of self-controlled Northern manhood and Southern masculinity deeply tied to honor that Sumner gave his three part speech, “The Crime against Kansas, the Apologies for the Crime, the True Remedy,” on May 19 and May 20, 1856. In his speech, Sumner attacked slavery, Senator Andrew Pickens Butler’s truthfulness, and the State of South Carolina. In doing so, the lawyer Sumner no doubt saw himself as building a case against a “criminal” whom his speech was “dragging into the day.”[24] However, Sumner’s trial-like arraignment of slavery and Senator Butler seemed more brutal and vicious to Southern gentlemen. In his speech Sumner characterized Butler as someone who had “raised [himself] to eminence on [the senate] floor in championship of human wrongs.”[25] Characterizing slavery in a negative light by considering it a “human wrong” was a manipulation of the Southern man’s world of appearances. The man of honor portrayed slavery as a positive institution; to characterize it in any other way would be a form of giving a Southern man a lie and an assault on his honor. Similarly, Sumner went on to speak of slavery as Butler’s mistress “who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight [...]”25 In this case, Sumner metaphorically unmasks the institution of slavery from its positive place in Southern society while simultaneously unmasking Butler, not as the paternal lover of a decent institution, but as a complicit party in the activities of a shameful practice. Unknowingly, as he built his case against slavery and Butler, Sumner played the deadly game of manipulating the world of Southern appearances and specifically Senator Butler’s honor.
Sumner did not only use metaphors and general attacks on slavery to slight Butler’s honor, he also painted him as a liar. He suggested that Butler’s characterization of Senators who supported a free Kansas as “sectional and fanatical” was “lack[ing] all grace of originality, and all sentiment of truth.”[26] Sumner went on to discuss Butler’s arguments on the Kansas question claiming within those arguments that there was no coherency in his speech regarding the issue, “nor was there any possible deviation from truth which he did not make.”[27] Pounding his point home Sumner asserted that “[Butler] cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder[...].”[28] To Sumner, a Northern man, his charges of blunders and outright lies were accusations supported by facts that needed to be answered by Butler. The Senator from Massachusetts did not realize that the Southern world of appearances rested on the acceptance of an honorable man’s word; Sumner had given Butler a lie and would have to pay the price.
Some prices, once paid, have costs of their own. After Brooks walloped Sumner, the press in both sections went wild with the story. In the days that followed Preston Brooks’ assault on Sumner, the Southern press answered in a united voice. The Charleston Mercury decried “Senator Sumner’s gross attack upon Senator Butler in his absence, which caused Mr. Brooks’ castigation of him.”[29] The Mercury suggested that Sumner’s “gross attack” was equal to Brooks’ attack in the Senate chamber setting each act as equal in relation to the body. The Daily Morning News out of Savannah admitted that they were “as much opposed to brute violence as any of Sumner’s mock sympathizers; […]but Sumner commenced the warfare[…].”[30] Referring to Sumner’s speech as the beginning of warfare paints Sumner’s “Crime against Kansas” as a brutal physical attack rather than the rhetorical attack Sumner had meant it to be. Since he fired the first shots of the war, the men in the South thought Sumner should have expected a beating of this magnitude in response to his offense. Yet another article appearing in the Daily South Carolinian maintained that “Charles Sumner [was] the ruffianly and wanton assailant in this matter. He [was] the party upon whom the condemnation of the public should fall.” The article continued, suggesting that “Brooks did no more than any honorable man would have done under similar circumstances[…].”[31] This article reiterated that Sumner was the instigator of violence and had to be acted upon as he acted against the honor of Brooks’ family. Another article claimed that “Mr. Brooks’ constituents [did] not regard, and [could not] be made to regard, his difficulty with Mr. Sumner as a sectional or a political one.” Instead Brooks’ constituents saw him as a man “not disposed to act from prudential considerations when the honor of his state and the reputation of a relative have been ruthlessly and deliberately assailed.”[32] Each of these articles paints Sumner’s attack as somehow physically upsetting the person of Senator Butler, a brutal attack that his relative, Preston Brooks, avenged. No doubt, some Northern opinion sources found Sumner’s speech in poor taste. The Boston Courier admitted that “Mr. Sumner’s personal attack upon [Butler] was[…]unmannerly and indecent, in the highest degree[…]”[33] Although this Northern viewpoint opposed Sumner’s speech, it did so in the realm of decency and manners befitting a middle class man; the South disliked the speech for the way it assaulted Butler’s very being.
Southern papers did not always refer directly to Sumner’s speech as a violent attack, but sometimes alluded to its violent nature. This was the case in an article commenting on a meeting of students considering the Brooks-Sumner affair at the University of Virginia where “Several very eloquent speeches were delivered, all of which fully approved the course of Mr. Brooks, and a resolution was passed, to purchase for Mr. B a splendid cane.”[34] The article did not refer to Sumner’s violence, but it did find Brooks’ shellacking in proportion with Sumner’s speech and considered that act worth rewarding as one would honor a hero returned from battle. The Hinds County Gazette also failed to point out the particular violence of Sumner’s speech when it claimed that the paper “expect[ed] to see [Massachusetts] apologise for and whitewash Mr. Sumner’s coarseness in the Senate.” Moreover, in a speech to the Senate, Butler characterized the Brooks-Sumner affair as a series of “Events which [grew] out of the commencement of a controversy for which the Senator from Massachusetts […] should be held exclusively responsible[…].” He continued his speech saying that had he been present to hear Sumner’s speech “he would have demanded […] that [Sumner] should review that speech and retract or modify it[…].” Butler went on to say that if Sumner “refused this, what [he] would have done [he could] not say; yet [he could] say that [he] would not have submitted to it.”[35] In a similar vein, when it was testified that Senator Toombs of Georgia was “at a distance looking on but offering no assistance[…],” Toombs corrected the record saying “that he not only gave no assistance, but that he approved of what Mr. Brooks had done.”[36] These accounts implicitly accused Sumner of brutality as they all approved of Brooks’ violent response.
While some Southern papers were critical of Brooks, the lion’s share of the Southern press was complimentary. Among the critical Southern newspapers, most were from the Border States, and the press grew increasingly critical of Brooks the farther North one went. The previously mentioned article in the Boston Courier that looked at Sumner’s speech as “unmannerly and indecent, in the highest degree,” pointed out that outrage over Sumner’s remarks was not limited to the South, but the characterization of those remarks as “unmannerly and indecent” rather than as some kind of brutish attack on Butler starkly points out the difference in each region’s conception of the body.33 The writers in the Courier did not see Sumner’s speech as a physical attack on Butler’s honor, rather they saw it as a mere lapse in character.
This sentiment was echoed in the May 29th New York Observer and Chronicle which refused “to excuse the remarks of Mr. Sumner which were the grounds of the assault.” The publication went on to assert that the speech was not a “justification for such a brutal assault,” continuing on to say that “When any man descends to the use of vile and vituperative language, he injures only himself!”[37] The Observer and Chronicle agreed with the Boston Courier that Sumner’s speech was in poor taste, but the New York magazine refused to grant that his remarks may have injured Senator Butler. Rather, the article argued that only Sumner was injured by his own remarks. The idea that Sumner rather than Butler was injured by the “Crime against Kansas” speech shows a complete disregard for Southern conceptions of honor; instead, the Observer and Chronicle was acting within a Northern masculine paradigm that was concerned with self-control and character.[38] Because Northerners were concerned with the reaction to Sumner’s speech rather than with what his words had done to Butler’s honor, Brooks’ actions were interpreted as “A cowardly attempt to beat down freedom of speech” in a May 23rd New York Times article.[39] The National Era journal also alluded to the threat posed to freedom of speech saying that “To assail a member of the Senate for words spoken in debate [...] is a grave offence, not only against the rights of a member, but the Constitutional privilege of this body.”[40] So, while the majority of men in the South were concerned with the defense of Butler’s honor, the North’s primary concern was with what they saw as the South’s disdain for freedom of speech.[41] The North failed to realized that Southern men were willing to accept any sort of speech as long as it did not attack the honor that was tied so closely to their physical selves.
In spite of having differences over Sumner’s speech, there were similarities in the words used regarding the Brooks-Sumner crisis in both North and South. Words such as brutality and assault were used in Northern and Southern opinions on the affair; however, in the South, Sumner’s attacks on Butler were seen as brutal while in the North, Brooks’ caning of Sumner was conceived as brutal. Such is the case in the May 23rd New York Times that headlined an article depicting Brooks’ attack as an act of “Disgraceful Brutality of a Member of Congress.”[42] In its May 24th edition, the paper lionized Sumner’s speech that the Southerners considered a physical attack on Senator Butler as one “of the ablest [speeches] ever made in the body which he is a useful and honorable member.”[43] The paper went on to depict Sumner as “parliamentary and polished [...]” while it accused Brooks of “cowardly ruffianism [...].” The sentiment was the same in a circular published on May 29th that found “nothing unparliamentary in Mr. Sumner’s characterization of Butler” while it considered Brooks’ response “an outrage.”[44] Perhaps the most damning response to the crisis came from the Maine Farmer that suggested “If the House of Representatives do not expell Brooks, the people ought to give the whole of them leave to stay at home in future.” The paper went on to claim that it was “because such crimes [had] been winked at [...] that they increase[d] among them.”[45] So, in the same way that Southerners had depicted Sumner’s speech as a cowardly attack and Brooks’ response as an honorable defense, Sumner’s speech was depicted by many in the North as well written while Brooks’ response was seen as a cowardly assault. Even among those who thought Sumner’s speech in poor taste, they did not see it as equaling a physical attack and believed Brooks’ cane-work a brutal response.
It took seven years of war and death during the American Revolution to give North and South a “fundamentally pure” blood sacrifice with which to bind their two different cultural systems into a single union.[46] Sumner’s blood sacrifice eight decades later signaled the beginning of the end of that union. While the Brooks-Sumner affair showed two very distinct constructions of the male body, it also showed a lack of understanding. The ferocious way in which the sections argued and failed to see the other’s side paints a picture of a North and South that did not see each other as having very different cultural points of view. Instead, Northern and Southern men looked upon each other as similar parts of one nation based on their common independence and paternalist systems. Consequently, when the crisis of secession reared its head four years later, Northerners and Southerners looked at each other as having absurd views within a shared value system. It was in such confusion that North and South went to war—confusion that had already begun to surface in the Senate in 1856 when two conceptions of the body collided in honor and blood.
[1] “Latest Intelligence,” New York Times, 23 May 1856, 1. David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 3rd ed. (Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2009), 246-247. The description of the beating contains information from both of these sources. Brooks’ words in each of them are consistent.
[2] Three different conclusions regarding Brooks-Sumner can be found in the following: Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 252-253; Michael D. Pierson, “’All Southern Society Is Assailed by the Foulest Charges:’ Charles Sumner’s ‘The Crime against Kansas’ and the Escalation of Republican Anti-Slavery Rhetoric,” New England Quarterly, 68 no. 4 (December 1995), 534; Manisha Sinha, “The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War,” Journal of the Early Republic, 23, no. 2 (Summer 2003), 235.
[3] In breaking down gender constructions, I use Michel Foucault’s work dealing with cultural discourse as a tool. I am inclined to accept the following definition of culture: “[...] The sum of the intellectual achievements of individual[s], which their fellow [men/women] have accepted in whole or in part and which have influenced the [society’s] way of life.” Ayn Rand, “Don’t Let It Go,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, (New York: Signet, 1984), 280.
[4] Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing As a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, The Pro-Slavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). I rely heavily on Greenberg’s work to unravel the discourse-like language of honor in which southern masculine life was based.
E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Rotundo’s book was equally helpful in my quest to place Northern masculinity.
[5] Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics & Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 4.
[6] Ibid, 16.
[7] Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 78. Discusses how the slave buyer imagined what he could be and how he could fulfill his desires through the person he purchased. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 11.
[8] Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, xii-xiii.
[9]Ibid, 11.
[10] Ibid, 33-34.
[11] Ibid, 18.
[12] Ibid, 12-13.
[13] Rotundo, American Manhood, 31-32.
[14] Ibid, 35.
[15] Ibid, 53-54.
[16] Ibid, 55.
[17] Ibid, 3.
[18] David R. Roediger The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 13.
[19] Michael Grossberg, “Institutionalizing Masculinity: The Law as a Masculine Profession,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, eds. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 134.
[20] Ibid, 134-135. More scholarship needs to be done to fully explain how the North and South became so different. I suggest the powerful politics of maternalism played an important role in the different conceptions of masculinity. While cities grew in the North, northern women created social bonds and communities that played on the womanly role of mother in order to influence politics. These womanly communities lent considerable weight to the Northern anti-dueling movement. In the far more agrarian South, maternalism did not develop and dueling survived. Please note, this is just a hypothesis—a seed of an explanation. For further reading on maternalism: Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835, ( New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977) and Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980, 1981, 1982).
[21] William L. Barney, “Preston Smith Brooks”, in the American National Biography Online, http://www. anb.org.flagship.luc.edu/articles/04/04-00153.html?a=1&g=m&n=Preston%20Brooks&ia=-at&ib=-bib&d=10&ss=0&q=1 (Accessed July 8, 2009).
[22] Frederick J. Blue, “Sumner, Charles,” the American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org.flagship.luc.edu/articles/04/0400969.html?a=1&f=%22Charles%20Sumner%22&d=10&ss=1&q=2 (Accessed July 8, 2009).
[23] Donald , Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 34.
[24] Charles Sumner, The Crime Against Kansas, the Apologies for the Crime, the True Remedy: Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber 19th and 20th May, 1856 (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1856), 6.
[25] Ibid, 9.
[26] Ibid, 10.
[27] Ibid, 85.
[28] Ibid, 86.
[29] “Senator Sumner’s Speech,” Charleston Mercury (South Carolina), 26 May 1856, Column C.
[30] “Sumner Sympathy,” Daily Morning News (Savannah, Georgia), 31 May 1856, Column B.
[31] “Mr. Sumner and His Sympathizers,” Daily South Carolinian, 12 June 1856, Column E.
[32] “The Brooks and Sumner Case—Close of the Debate—Resignation of Mr. Brooks,” Charleston Mercury, 18 July 1856, Column B.
[33] “Senator Sumner and Mr. Brooks,” Boston Courier as reprinted in the Charleston Mercury, 29 May 1856, Column B.
[34] “Another Cane for Mr. Brooks,” Fayetteville Observer (North Carolina), 2 June 1856, Column C.
[35] “Mr. Brooks and Mr. Sumner: Extracts from the speech of Hon. A.P. Butler of South Carolina, in the Senate, June 12, 1856,” Charleston Mercury, 23 June 1856, Column A.
[36] “Mr. Sumner’s Testimony: Excitement in the Senate,” Charleston Mercury, 31 May 1856, Column G.
[37] “Congressional Outrage,” New York Observer and Chronicle, 29 May 1856, 174.
[38] Judy Hilkey, Character Is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America, (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Hilkey discusses a conception of masculinity that saw a strong character as paramount to success.
[39] “The Cowardly Assault on Mr. Sumner,” New York Times, 23 May 1856, 1.
[40] “Deadly Assault on Charles Sumner,” National Era 10, no. 491(29 May 1856), 86.
[41] Sinha, “The Caning of Charles Sumner,” 250. Sinha points out that Northerners were appalled at the way in which silencing Sumner with a beating resembled the silencing of a slave who had no right to free speech.
[42] “Disgraceful Brutality of a Member of Congress,” New York Times, 23 May, 1856.
[43] “Mr. Sumner’s Speech,” New York Times, 24 May 1856.
[44] “News of the Week: Ruffianism in Congress,” Circular, 29 May 1856, 74.
[45] “Savage Brutality,” Maine Farmer, 29 May 1856, 2.
[46] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 144.