CONGRESSIONAL RUFFIANISM
The official reports show that the proceedings of the American
Congress, while in the main conducted with becoming propriety and
decorum, have occasionally been dishonored by angry personal
altercations and scenes of ruffianly violence. These disorders
increased as the great political struggle over the slavery question
grew in intensity, and reached their culmination in a series of
startling incidents.
Charles Sumner, one of the Senators from the State of Massachusetts,
had become conspicuous, in the prevailing political agitation, for
his aggressive and radical anti-slavery speeches in the Senate and
elsewhere. The slavery issue had brought him into politics; he had
been elected to the United States Senate by the coalition of a small
number of Free-soilers with the Democrats in the Massachusetts
Legislature.
The slavery question, therefore, became the dominant principle and
the keynote of his public career. He was a man of liberal culture, of
considerable erudition in the law, of high literary ability, and he
had attained an enviable social eminence. Of large physical frame and
strength, gifted with a fine presence and a sonorous voice, fearless
and earnest in his opposition to slavery, Charles Sumner was one of
the favorite orators of the early declamatory period of the Republican
party.
He joined unreservedly in the exciting Senate debates, provoked by the
rival applications from Kansas for her admission as a State. On the
19th and 20th of May, 1856, he delivered an elaborate speech in the
Senate, occupying two days. It was one of his greatest efforts, and
had been prepared with his usual industry. In character it was a
philippic rather than an argument, strong, direct, and aggressive, in
which classical illustration and acrimonious accusation were blended
with great effect.
It described what he called "The Crime against Kansas"; and the
excuses for the crime he denominated the apology tyrannical, the
apology imbecile, the apology absurd, and the apology infamous.
"Tyranny, imbecility, absurdity, and infamy," he continued, "all unite
to dance, like the weird sisters, about this crime."
In the course of his speech he alluded, among others, to A.P. Butler,
of South Carolina, and in reply to some severe strictures by that
Senator during preceding debates, indulged in caustic personal
criticism upon his course and utterance, as well as upon the State
which he represented.
With regret [said Sumner], 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
principle, sometimes of fact. He shows an incapacity of accuracy,
whether in stating the Constitution or in stating the law, whether
in details of statistics or the diversions of scholarship. He
cannot open his mouth but out there flies a blunder.
[Illustration: CHARLES SUMNER.]
Butler was not present in the Senate on either day; what he might have
said or done, had he been there, can only be conjectured. The immediate
replies from Douglas and others were very bitter. Among pro-slavery
members of both Houses there was an under-current of revengeful
murmurs. It is possible that this hostile manifestation may have
decided a young member of the House, Preston S. Brooks, a nephew of
Senator Butler, to undertake retaliation by violence. Acquainting
Henry A. Edmundson, another member, with his design, he waited on two
different occasions at the western entrance to the Capitol grounds to
encounter Mr. Sumner, but without meeting him.
[Sidenote] 1856.
On the 22d of May, two days after the speech, Brooks entered the
Senate Chamber on the same errand. The session had been short, and
after adjournment Sumner remained at his desk, engaged in writing. The
sessions were at that time held in the old Senate Chamber, now
occupied by the Supreme Court. The seats were arranged in semicircles,
with a railing to separate them from a narrow lobby or open space next
the wall; a broad aisle ran from the main door to the desk of the
presiding officer. Mr. Sumner's seat was in the outside row next to
the railing, at the second desk to the right from the entrance and the
main aisle. Occupied with his work, Mr. Sumner did not notice Mr.
Brooks, sitting across the aisle to his left, and where in
conversation with a friend he was manifesting his impatience that a
lady seated near Mr. Sumner did not take her departure from the
chamber. Almost at that moment she arose and went out; quickly
afterwards Brooks got up and advanced to the front of Sumner's desk.
The act attracted the attention of Brooks's friend; he was astonished,
amid the bitterness of party feeling, to see a South Carolina
Representative talk to a Massachusetts Senator. His astonishment was
quickly corrected. Leaning upon the desk and addressing Sumner with a
rapid sentence or two, to the effect that he had read his speech, that
it was a libel upon his absent relative, and that he had come to
punish him for it, Brooks began striking him on the head with a
gutta-percha walking-cane, of the ordinary length and about an inch in
diameter.
Surprised, blinded and stunned by the blows, Sumner's first instinct
was to grapple with his assailant. This effort, however, was futile;
the desk was between them, and being by his sitting posture partially
under it, Sumner was prevented from rising fully to his feet until he
had by main strength, in his struggles, wrenched it from its
fastenings on the floor. In his attempt to follow Brooks they became
turned, and from between the desks moved out into the main aisle. By
this time, through the repetition of the heavy blows and loss of
blood, Sumner became unconscious. Brooks, seizing him by the
coat-collar, continued his murderous attack till Sumner, reeling in
utter helplessness, sank upon the floor beside the desk nearest the
aisle, one row nearer the center of the chamber than his own. The
witnesses variously estimated the number of blows given at from ten to
thirty. Two principal wounds, two inches long and an inch deep, had
been cut on the back of Sumner's head; and near the end of the attack,
Brooks's cane was shivered to splinters.
There were perhaps ten or fifteen persons in the chamber, and after
the first momentary pause of astonishment half a dozen started to
interfere. Before they reached the spot, however, Lawrence M. Keitt,
another South Carolina Representative, came rushing down the main
aisle, brandishing his cane, and with imprecations warning lookers-on
to "let them alone." Among those hastening to the rescue, Mr. Morgan
arrived first, just in time to catch and sustain the Senator as he
fell. Another bystander, who had run round outside the railing, seized
Brooks by the arm about the same instant; and the wounded man was
borne to an adjoining room, where he was cared for by a hastily
summoned physician.
Among Mr. Sumner's friends the event created a certain degree of
consternation. The language which provoked the assault, whatever might
be thought of its offensive character, was strictly parliamentary,
uninterrupted either by the chair or by any member. The assault itself
was so desperate and brutal that it implied a vindictiveness deeper
than mere personal revenge. This spirit of bullying, this resort to
violence, had recently become alarmingly frequent among members of
Congress, especially as it all came from the pro-slavery party.
Since the beginning of the current session, a pro-slavery member from
Virginia had assaulted the editor of a Washington newspaper; another
pro-slavery member, from Arkansas, had violently attacked Horace
Greeley on the street; a third pro-slavery member, from California, had
shot an unoffending waiter at Willard's Hotel. Was this fourth instance
the prelude of an intention to curb or stifle free Congressional
debate? It is probable that this question was seriously considered at
the little caucus of Republican Senators held that night at the house
of Mr. Seward. The Republicans had only a slender minority in the
Senate, and a plurality in the House; they could do nothing but resolve
on a course of parliamentary inquiry, and agree on an attitude of
defense.
Sumner's colleague, Henry Wilson, made a very brief announcement of
the occurrence to the Senate on the following day, and it at once
became apparent that the transaction would assume an almost strictly
party character. As no Democratic Senator proposed an inquiry, Mr.
Seward moved for a committee of investigation; upon which James M.
Mason, of Virginia, proposed that the committee should be elected by
ballot. The result was that no Republican was chosen upon it; and the
committee reached the conclusion that it had no power in the premises,
except to report the occurrence to the House. In the House the usual
committee from the three parties was raised, resulting in two reports.
The minority, sustained by the vote of sixty members, pleaded a want
of jurisdiction. The majority recommended the expulsion of Brooks, and
expressed disapprobation by the House of the course of his colleague,
Edmundson, in countenancing the assault, and of the act of Keitt in
his personal interference. But the necessary two-thirds vote for the
expulsion of Brooks could not be obtained; a vote of censure was
therefore passed by a large majority. The discussion of the report and
resolutions occupied the House several days, and whatever effort
members made to disguise their motives, their actions, either of
condemnation or of excuse, arose in the main clearly enough from their
party relations. Under the forms of parliamentary debate, the South
and the North were breathing mutual recrimination and defiance.
The public of both sections took up the affair with equal party zeal.
From the North came resolutions of legislatures, outbursts of
indignation in meetings and addresses, and the denunciation of Brooks
and his deed in the newspapers. In the South the exactly opposite
sentiment predominated. Brooks was defended and eulogized, and
presented with canes and pitchers as testimonials to his valor. When
the resolution of censure had been passed, he at once resigned his
seat in the House, and going home to his constituents, was immediately
reëlected. Within three weeks he reappeared at the bar of the House,
with a new commission from his Governor, and was sworn in and
continued his service as before. The arrogant address which preceded
his resignation contained the remarkable intimation that much more
serious results might have grown out of the incident. "No act of
mine," he said, "on my personal account, shall inaugurate revolution;
but when you, Mr. Speaker, return to your own home, and hear the
people of the great North--and they are a great people--speak of me as
a bad man, you will do me the justice to say that a blow struck by me
at this time would be followed by a revolution; and this I know."
Under the state of public sentiment then prevailing at the South, it
would have been strange if the extraordinary event and the succeeding
debate had not provoked other similar affairs. Mr. Sumner's colleague,
Senator Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts (afterwards Vice-President of
the United States), in his speech characterized the assault as
"brutal, murderous, and cowardly." For this language Brooks sent him a
challenge. Wilson wrote a reply declining the encounter, but in the
same letter announcing that "I religiously believe in the right of
self-defense, in its broadest sense."
One of the sharpest denunciations of the assault was made by Anson
Burlingame, a Massachusetts Representative (afterwards United States
Minister to China, and still later Chinese Minister to the United
States). "I denounce it," he said, "in the name of the Constitution it
violates. I denounce it in the name of the sovereignty of
Massachusetts, which was stricken down by the blow. I denounce it in
the name of humanity. I denounce it in the name of civilization, which
it outraged. I denounce it in the name of that fair-play which bullies
and prize-fighters respect." For this, after some efforts had been
made by friends to bring about an amicable understanding, Brooks sent
him also a challenge. Mr. Burlingame accepted the challenge, and his
second designated the Clifton House in Canada as the rendezvous and
rifles as weapons. Burlingame at once started on the journey; but
Brooks declined to go, on the excuse that his life would not be safe
on such a trip through the North.
Broadened into national significance by all these attendant
circumstances, the Sumner assault became a leading event in the great
slavery contest between the South and North. It might well rank as one
of the episodes of the civil war then raging in Kansas, out of which
it had in reality grown, and with which it was intertwined in motive,
act, and comment. In result the incident was extremely damaging to the
South, for it tended more than any single Border-Ruffian crime in
Kansas to unite hesitating and wavering opinion in the North against
the alarming flood of lawlessness and violence, which as a rule found
its origin and its defense in the ranks of the pro-slavery party.
Certainly no phase of the transaction was received by the North with
such popular favor as some of the bolder avowals by Northern
Representatives of their readiness to fight, and especially by
Burlingame's actual acceptance of the challenge of Brooks.
The shock of the attack, and the serious wounds received by Mr.
Sumner, produced a spinal malady, from which he rallied with great
difficulty, and only after severe medical treatment and years of
enforced abstinence from work. As the constituents of Brooks sent him
back to the House, so also the Legislature of Massachusetts, in
January, 1857, with but few dissenting votes, reëlected Sumner to a
new senatorial term, beginning the 4th of March. He came to Washington
and was sworn in, but within a few days sailed for Europe, and during
the greater part of the long interim between that time and the
succeeding Presidential campaign his seat in the Senate remained
vacant.
It was on the 4th of June, 1860, that he again raised his voice in
debate. Some changes had occurred: both Butler and Brooks were
dead;[1] the Senate was assembled in its new hall in the north wing
of the Capitol extension. But in the main the personnel and the spirit
of the pro-slavery party still confronted him. "Time has passed," he
said, "but the question remains." A little more than four years
before, he had essayed to describe "The Crime against Kansas"; now, in
an address free from offensive personalities but more unsparing in
rhetoric and stronger in historical arraignment, he delineated what he
named the "Barbarism of Slavery." Picturing to ourselves the orator,
the circumstances, and the theme, we can comprehend the exaltation
with which he exclaimed in his exordium: "Slavery must be resisted not
only on political grounds, but on all other grounds, whether social,
economical, or moral. Ours is no holiday contest; nor is it any strife
of rival factions--of White and Red Roses; of theatric Neri and
Bianchi; but it is a solemn battle between Right and Wrong, between
Good and Evil.... Grander debate has not occurred in our history,
rarely in any history; nor can this debate close or subside except
with the triumph of Freedom."
With this speech Sumner resumed his place as a conspicuous figure and
an indefatigable energy in national politics and legislation, tireless
in attacking and pursuing slavery until its final overthrow.
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[1] Preston S. Brooks died in Washington, January 27, 1857; Andrew P.
Butler died in South Carolina, May 25, 1857.