charles sumner and abollition and lawrence kansas and preston brooks and andrew butler

Though, as the previous essay describes, Sumner's "Crime Against Kansas" speech did have some "content" to it, his language throughout was so vituperative and baiting, so over-the-top, as we would say today, that it called down not only the rancor of the South but also the cane of Rep Preston Brooks. But why would a US Representative cane a US Senator, since they don't even occupy the same chamber? And what was the connection between Sumner and Brooks?

As luck, or the South Carolina gene pool, would have it, Brooks was the nephew of US Senator Andrew Butler, also of South Carolina. Butler was, along with Sen. Stephen Douglas, one of the most outspoken supporters of KS as a slave state, and was the leading light in the Senate to push through a bill to that effect. The one thing that silver-maned Southern Senators could not abide, the one thing that would slice through their apparently courtly manner and impeccable courtesy, was if a Northern Senator would besmirch their honor. And besmirch it Sumner did. He not only attacked Butler's intelligence and, implicitly, his sexual mores, but also assailed the lack of culture of South Carolina itself. This essay probes some of Sumner's unforgettable insult language.

Insulting Senator Butler

You know you are in for a rollicking good time when Sumner says: "But, before entering upon the argument, I must say something of a general character, particularly in response to what has fallen from senators who have raised themselves to eminence on this floor in championship of human wrongs. I mean the senator from SC..." He then likens Butler and Douglas to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. He goes on the attack against Butler, who was absent during the speech:

"The senator from SC has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight--I mean the harlot, slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse in his words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator. The phrenzy of Don Quixote in behalf of his wench Dulcinea del Toboso is all surpassed....Heroic knight! Exalted senator! A Second Moses come for a second exodus!"

Further Mastery of the Ad Hominem Abusive

After many pages of argument, he returns to attack Butler. This essay will go on too long, but the attack is too good to miss:

"With regret [My comment--sure, Charles] I come again upon the senator from South Carolina, [Mr. Butler,] who, omnipresent in this debate, overflowed with rage at the simple suggestion that Kansas had applied for admission as a State; and, with incoherent phrases discharged the loose expectoration of his speech, now upon her representative, and then upon her people. There was no extravagance of the ancient Parliamentary debate which he did not repeat; nor was there any possible deviation from truth which he did not make, with so much of passion, I am glad to add, as to save him from the suspicion of intentional aberration. But the senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure -- with error, sometimes of principles, sometimes of fact. He shows an incapacity of accuracy, whether in stating the Constitution or in stating the law, whether in the details of statistics or the diversions of scholarship. He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder."

What is Senator Butler's problem, according to Sumner? It must be because he is one of those dumb Southerners from South Carolina. One of the things the senator "disfigured" when he "touched" was history. Sumner then excoriates Butler for misreading simple biographical facts about Ben Franklin. Then he moves in for the kill. Butler is not only ignorant about Franklin, but ignorant of his own state's history.

"Has he read the history of "the State" which he represents? He cannot surely have forgotten its shameful imbecility from slavery, confessed throughout the revolution, followed by its most shameful assumptions for slavery since. He cannot have forgotten its wretched persistence in the slave trade as the very apple of its eye, and the condition of its participation in the Union. He cannot have forgotten its constitution, which is republican only in name, confirming power in the hands of the few, and founding the qualifications of its legislature on a "settled freehold estate and ten negroes." And yet the senator, to whom that "State" has in part committed the guardianship of its good name, instead of moving, with backward treading steps, to cover its nakedness, rushes forward, in the very ecstasy of madness, to expose it by provoking a comparison with Kansas."

As a matter of fact, in Sumner's mind, Kansas has already, in two years, exemplified more virtue than SC had accumulated in its two centuries of existence. "Already in Lawrence alone there are newspapers and schools, including a high school, and throughout this infant Territory there is more academic mature scholarship in proportion to its inhabitants, than in all South Carolina."

Conclusion

I am sure that when US Rep. Preston Brooks sunk his cane, a cane which one source said was used on unruly dogs, into Sumner's back and head while Sumner sat at his desk busily franking copies of this speech, Brooks thought that he was protecting Southern honor from Sumner's smirch. What it did, however, was just the opposite. Horrified observers and editorialists were heard muttering, 'If a Southerner does this to a US Senator, what must he do to a Negro who shows the slightest disrespect?'

The final essay describes Sumner's rising from the ashes of this beating to lead the fight for Negro equality after 1865.

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