The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War

On May 22, 1856, Preston Smith Brooks, a South Carolinian congressman, assaulted a seated Charles Sumner, antislavery senator from Massachusetts, in the Senate chamber. Brooks rained blows on Sumner's head and shoulders with his cane while Representative Laurence M. Keitt, a secessionist colleague from South Carolina, kept others at bay. Brooks later described the caning in a letter to his brother, "I struck him with my cane and gave him about 30 first rate stripes with a gutta perch cane. . . . Every lick went where I intended. For about the first five of six licks he offered to make fight but I plied him so rapidly that he did not touch me. Towards the last he bellowed like a calf." Stunned by the assault, Sumner was unable to slide out of his chair and was pinned under his desk, which was hinged to the floor. He finally managed to extricate himself by tearing the desk off the floor, only to fall down unconscious, covered with blood. Sumner suffered from several bruises and cuts; two serious wounds on the head exposed his skull and had to be stitched. In his frenzy, Brooks had received a minor cut in his head from the backlash of his cane. He continued to hit Sumner until a northern representative physically restrained him. The cane had shattered from the attack, and Brooks pocketed its gold head, declining the Senate page's offer to retrieve the fragments from the floor.1According to the oft-repeated story, Brooks had become enraged on learning of Sumner's "The Crime Against Kansas" speech, which, he felt, had insulted South Carolina and his "relative," Senator Andrew Pickens Butler. He decided to "punish" Sumner and after lying in wait for him for a day, came upon him at his Senate desk. Brooks and his defenders claimed that Sumner incited the attack by using unusually offensive language.2 As some historians have argued, Sumner's famous speech and Brooks's subsequent assault and the reactions to the caning north and south of the Mason Dixon line revealed the fundamental political divide over racial slavery in the country.3 Instead of looking at the sectionalism the caning inspired or treating it as merely an incident of personal warfare, this article analyzes the discussion on slavery, race, and ideology that the event inspired and its aftermath, when Sumner emerged as one of the foremost voices for emancipation and black rights in the national political arena.Most historians have failed to note sufficiently this public discourse on slavery and race and the efforts of abolitionists and free African Americans in shaping it. The assault became a departure point for contemporaries to explore the meaning and relationship among slavery, race, democracy, and republican government in nineteenth-century America. Observers drew upon analogies from slavery to describe and explain the caning and debated its ramifications for white men's democracy. The issues of slavery and race defined both southern defenders' and northern critics' reading of the event. Convenient racialist dichotomies of "black slavery" and "white liberty" fell apart. The caning dramatically illustrated, instead, how the question of racial slavery could fracture the world of white republicanism. Like other conflicts over slavery, it helped clarify, to quote W. E. B. Du Bois, that "the true significance of slavery . . . lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy."4 The cause of the black slave was inevitably tied to larger questions of representative government in the United States.Public discussions of the event reveal how the concepts of freedom, democracy, and citizenship were not static but constantly contested. Commentators, North and South, evoked ideas about race and gender to challenge or police the boundaries of republican citizenship and political participation. For southerners, Brooks' s actions were manly and honorable, vindicating not just his family but also his state, section, and slavery. But changing manhood ideals in the North led most northerners to view the caning as a barbaric assault on the very fabric of American democracy. …