CAPITOL
PUNISHMENT
When mudslinging in Congress led to actual bloodshed
Our
recent politics have brought the editorial handwringers out in
force, decrying a new outbreak of “partisanship,” as
when, at the end of the impeachment process, The New York Times
declared that “Americans yearn for a Congress that can actually
accomplish something. Reverting to more party warfare will hurt
both sides. The trick will be for lawmakers to look beyond their
trenches to see where the public interest lies.” Has all
the mudslinging that has come to cover Washington really ushered
in a dangerous new era of division? The answer is less clear than
it might appear to those who managed to spend the Clinton impeachment
hearings glued to C-SPAN. An objective observer could even conclude
that our two major parties have never been closer on most issues,
domestic and foreign.
In
a Northern view of the assault, Brooks beats Sumner as the South
Carolinians colleagues watch in amusement.
Yet
the rhetoric has been extreme, and political rhetoric has a nasty
habit of creating its own reality. This is the case even in the
claustral, clubby atmosphere of the United States Congress, and
anyone who thinks that body reached a new low over the past year
need only recall the caning of Charles Sumner.
Sumner
had been elected to the Senate in 1851. A tall, darkly handsome
man, he soon established himself as a brilliant orator, an unyielding
foe of slavery, and a classic Puritan prig. According to his biographer
David Donald, he boasted of having “never allowed himself,
even in the privacy of his own chamber, to fall into a position
which he would not take in his chair in the Senate.”
Indeed,
Sumner seems to have spent most of his time in his chamber writing
and rehearsing the prodigious speeches he would give, from memory,
on the Senate floor. Longfellow wrote that he delivered them “like
a cannoneer ramming down cartridges,” speeches crammed with
facts, figures, biblical and classical allusions, and Latin quotations
but never jokes. "You might as well look for a joke in the book
of Revelations,” Sumner himself liked to say.
He
possessed at least two more attributes characteristic of his native
Massachusetts: a sharp tongue and the unshakable conviction that
he was doing the work of the Lord. He had, above all, a talent
for seeking out his adversaries weak spots. He was particularly
adept at needling Andrew Pickens Butler, an older senator from
South Carolina whom Sumner had sat next to when he was first in
the Senate. Butler had been fond of the younger man, asking him
to verify his own classical quotations. Sumner was fond of Butler
too, opining in his typically solipsistic manner that “if
he had been a citizen of New England [Butler] would have been
a scholar, or, at least, a well-educated man.”
Yet
if Sumner was a blunt man, an unsparing man, he was also no more
or less than a man of his time. His passing insults were more
than answered in kind. Indeed, the whole decades-long national
debate over slavery can be seen as one of steadily escalating
insults, each one building upon the last until what had begun
as a debate over the basic humanity of African-Americans ended
with whites on both sides questioning the humanity of each other.
It was this development, as much as anything, that would make
the Civil War inevitable.
In
the Senate, things came to a head in May of 1856, with a speech
in which Sumner coined the phrase “The Crime Against Kansas.”
This was his incendiary crescendo, a brilliant oration given over
the course of two days, at the height of the real fighting going
on out West. Before the packed Senate galleries Sumner quoted
Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Dante, Milton and Cervantes. Butler was
Don Quixote with his Dulcinea, “the harlot, Slavery.”
Sumner averred that “the Senator touches nothing which he
does not disfigure with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes
of fact . He cannot ope his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.”
For that matter, if “the whole history of South Carolina
[were] blotted out of existence ," civilization would lose “surely
less than it has already gained by the example of Kansas ”
The
speech was a sensation and not the first time Sumner had transgressed
the very generous bounds of what was regarded as reasonable political
discourse at the time. “That damn fool will get himself killed
by some other damn fool," the Democratic leader Stephen Douglas
muttered afterward. At least one other member of Congress was
thinking along the same lines.
“I
felt it to be my duty to relieve Butler and avenge the insult
to my State,” wrote Preston S. Brooks, a cousin of Butler
who had been elected to the House from South Carolina and who
had sat watching with rage from the gallery while Sumner attacked
his absent relative.
But
how to do this? To Brooks, Sumners speech had already proved him
no gentleman and therefore unworthy of being challenged to a duel.
He deserved nothing more or less than a public whipping, but there
was another problem. Charles Sumner was a very large man, strong
and well built. Brooks was nearly as big, a six-foot thirty-six-year-old
veteran of the Mexican War, but he remained afraid that Sumner
might simply grab the whip out of his hand if he approached him
directly. Under Brooksıs peculiar interpretation of the code duello,
Sumner was such an inferior creature that he would have to sneak
up on him.
He
proceeded to do just this. On the afternoon of May 22, 1856, Brooks
spotted his prey writing at his desk in a nearly empty Senate
chamber.
“Mr.
Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a
libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of
mine" Brooks began, standing before the desk and clutching a thick
gutta-percha cane with a gold head in one hand. Sumner began to
stand up, and Brooks's nerves seem to have snapped. He left off
his speech and began to strike the senator on the head with the
cane. Sumners legs were trapped under his heavy desk, which was
bolted to the floor, but this did not deter his assailant. All
but mesmerized by the flogging he was meting out, Brooks flailed
away until Sumner ripped the desk out of the floor and staggered
up the Senate aisle, blinded by his own blood, and collapsed on
the floor. Even then Brooks did not relent, beating his unconscious
victim until his cane broke.
Sumner
was eventually helped to a Senate anteroom and then to his home,
where he murmured incredulously, “I could not believe that
a thing like this was possible.” Long after his physical
wounds had healed, he was plagued by nightmares, headaches, and
other symptoms of posttraumatic shock. It would be three years
before he resumed his full duties in the Senate, but he did eventually
regain his place, remaining a staunch abolitionist and battling
valiantly for the rights of black Americans during the war and
Reconstruction.
Preston
Brooks was fined three hundred dollars, but his fellow Southerner's
blocked the House from expelling him.
“Every
Southern man sustains me. The fragments of the stick are begged
for as sacred relicts [sic],” Brooks later crowed, and he
was soon inundated with commemorative hickory sticks and gold
canes from throughout the South. A group of Charleston merchants
bought him a cane inscribed “Hit him again,” and Southern
newspapers enthusiastically seconded the idea. The Richmond
Enquirer advocated caning Sumner “every morning" and
concluded: “We consider the act good in conception, better
in execution, and best of all in consequences. These vulgar abolitionists
in the Senate must be lashed into submission.”
Brooks's
celebrity was cut short by his death from the croup in January
of 1857. He was much mourned in the South and given a grand funeral
service in the House. Yet his eulogists were shortsighted. Throughout
the North, Brooks's death was seen as a divine judgment. Mass
rallies denouncing his “cowardly attack” had already
been held in every major city and even many small towns from New
England to Iowa. In Boston five thousand people crowded into Faneuil
Hall to denounce “not only a cowardly assault upon a defenceless
man, but a crime against the right of free speech and the dignity
of a free State.”
The
enemy on each side was now very much less than human. Many white
Northerners for the first time saw the institution of slavery
as something that directly affected their own freedom. Even Ralph
Waldo Emerson was now convinced that Preston Brooks was the product
of a culture in which man was “an animal, given to pleasure,
frivolous, irritable, spending his days in hunting and practising
with deadly weapons to defend himself against his slaves and against
his companions brought up in the same idle and dangerous way.”
Anticipating
Lincoln and the war ahead, Emerson concluded, “I do not see
how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute
one state. I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get
rid of freedom.”
We
are fortunate enough not to be faced with any such irreconcilable
issues (with the possible exception of abortion rights). This
makes it all the more imperative that we do not cause needless
harm by demonizing each other as members of irreconcilable, “alien”
cultures. We should particularly keep this in mind when the editorial
writers return with another of the periodic alarms, this one over
“class warfare.” In early July, for instance, an opinion
piece in The Wall Street Journal urged Republicans to press
for new tax cuts, or “instead of class warfare between the
Haves and the Have-Nots, we may well have a war between the resentful
Haves and the resentful Almost-Haves.” Rhetorical class war
may be the natural state of a state, but while dollars and cents
can always be compromised, deciding what constitutes a human being
of course cannot.
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
