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

Abstract

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

The Politics of Emasculation: The Caning of Charles Sumner and Elite Ideologies of Manhood in the Mid‐Nineteenth‐Century United States

“…3 In a recent essay, Manisha Sinha claims that while Brooks was manly and Sumner was feminine in Southern eyes, Northerners saw Sumner as a 'restrained, manly intellectual and Brooks as an uncontrolled brute'. 4 Reactions to the caning were actually more complicated than this. While Northern intellectuals like Robert Winthrop, for example, repudiated Sumner's lack of rhetorical restraint, Southerners such as future-secessionist Gazaway B. Lamar of Georgia denounced the caning as 'unmanly'.…”

“…7 The caning of Charles Sumner has long been seen as a critical moment in the transition away from conciliatory approaches to sectional strife. 8 The gendered dimensions of this episode demand attention, however, because the impulse towards conciliation or confrontation was born, in large part, out of notions about what a gentleman was and how he should act. Though non-elites would bear the brunt of the military conflict to come, there is little evidence to suggest that they were any more committed to the principles of compromise or consensus than Sumner and Brooks were.…”