Palmetto Past & Present: Bully Brooks

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It’s fashionable these days to summarize messy romantic liaisons (often involving three participants) with the term, “it’s complicated.” Those words apply to a famous figure from the past, too.                                                     

Visit any library and you’ll quickly discover Preston Brooks was the Bad Boy of South Carolina history. More than 165 years after his death, he’s still haunted by the nickname “Bully Brooks.” Since August is the anniversary of his birth, it’s the perfect opportunity to revisit this highly flawed figure. And as you’ll soon see, his story is very complicated indeed.

Preston Smith Brooks arrived in this world on August 5, 1819, born at his family’s plantation near Edgefield, S.C. He was the fourth of fifteen children born to Whitfield and Mary Brooks.

The Brooks’ family was typical of the planter class of the antebellum era – but there was nothing typical about young Preston. Strikingly handsome and endowed with great physical strength, he was also highly intelligent, incredibly energetic and fiercely loyal to his family – and to principle. With a hyper-inflated sense of what he perceived to be justice – coupled with a burning desire to correct any perceived injustices – he had a reputation for being thin-skinned and hot-tempered, which is always a dangerous combination.

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Brooks proved that while studying at the College of South Carolina (the forerunner of today’s University). Things were going great, too, until just before he was set to graduate. Toward the end of his studies, Brooks threatened some cops with a gun – and was expelled from the school. Undeterred, Brooks headed back to Edgefield where he read the law, was admitted to the bar and soon became an attorney. He also acquired his own plantation in Cambridge, S.C. (between Edgefield and the town of Ninety Six, S.C.).

Brooks, it seemed, was set for life.

Ever the incendiary and impulsive individual, though, he continued to let his hotheadedness get the best of him. In 1840, Brooks fought a duel with fellow South Carolinian (and future Texas senator) Louis T. Wigfall – who would go on to play a comical role in the surrender of Fort Sumter twenty-one years later. Wigfall’s shot hit Brooks in the hip, requiring him to walk with a cane for the rest of his life.

That cane would enter the history books a little more than a decade-and-a-half later, with one historian referring to it as the “inexorable and unstoppable” force which pushed America to Civil War.

En route to that fateful event, though, Brooks married and started a family – although he lost his young wife shortly thereafter and thereupon married her cousin. In 1844, he was elected to the S.C. House of Representatives after which he served as a militia captain for the Palmetto Regiment in the Mexican-American War. In 1852, he was elected to the U.S. Congress from South Carolina’s fourth district – which was where he limped his way into American history.

Brooks was a state’s rights Democrat who supported slavery (though he was considered part of that faction’s moderate branch). Rival abolitionists in the North opposed slavery. For much of the 1850s, they argued over which side the Kansas Territory would be on when it was admitted to the union as a state. It was a long, complex story – and tensions escalated as each new chapter unfolded.

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The tipping point came in 1856. If things had been hot before, they turned thermonuclear on May 19 when Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner rose to make a major speech.

Full of the smug self-righteousness that typified Boston Brahmins, he was very much like the haughty Charles Emerson Winchester in the M*A*S*H sitcom. Sumner had tried for two months to schedule time on the Senate floor to deliver an oration, with public and press alike eagerly awaiting it.

His Senate colleagues had begged him to take it easy and not go overboard with his rhetoric. Washington, D.C. was a tinderbox just then, and a single spark could ignite an inferno.

The gallery was packed when Sumner finally rose to speak at 1:00 p.m. He immediately jumped into the 112-page speech he had committed to memory with the intensity of a flamethrower and proceeded to bellow for an incredible five hours over two days.

Not only did he attack slavery, but he also shattered Senate decorum by personally attacking two senators by name. Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas was trashed as “a noise-some, squat nameless animal… not a proper model for an American senator.” Douglas was overheard whispering to a colleague, “that damn fool is going to get himself shot by some other damn fool.”

He had no way of knowing how prophetic his words were… albeit erroneous in their prediction of the weapon of choice used by his assailant.

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RELATED | PALMETTO PAST & PRESENT

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Sumner next turned his attention to South Carolina’s aging, silver-haired Andrew Butler, a leading slavery supporter. 

“He has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him… I mean that harlot, slavery,” Sumner stated.

There was a loud, prolonged gasp in the gallery. In the anything-goes morality of the 21st Century, it’s difficult to fully appreciate just how grossly offensive Sumner’s words were at the time. Mid-Victorians considered sex within holy matrimony sacred and all amorous activity outside it among the vilest of sins. Beyond that, the mere discussion of sex – or hint or entendre alluding to it – was considered reprehensibly offensive.

Yet Sumner – from the well of the world’s most deliberative body – had just likened an old man to cavorting with a prostitute.

Butler was Brooks’ second cousin, once removed. Brooks saw Sumner’s words as more than an attack on slavery. It was a slur on his family – and his home. And that made it deeply personal.

Brooks first considered challenging Sumner to one of his trademark duels. But after discussing it with fellow South Carolina Congressman Laurence Keitt, he settled on a different strategy. 

Two days later – on May 22, 1856 – as Sumner sat at his desk in the Senate chamber addressing envelopes, Brooks limped up to him. “Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over. It is a libel on South Carolina and, and on Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.”

As Sumner tried to stand up, Brooks lifted his cane – made of Gutta-percha (think of it as hard plastic) with a gold head – and proceeded to beat him senseless. When other senators rushed over and attempted to intervene, Keitt pulled out a gun to prevent them from coming to Sumner’s aid.

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Sumner slid under his desk in an attempt to shield himself from the savagery of Brooks’ blows – yet the South Carolinian unhinged it from the floorboard. Blood streamed into Sumner’s eyes from the open wound on his head. Brooks kept beating Sumner until his cane shattered – at which point Sumner blindly staggered to the hallway and collapsed in an unconscious heap.

Brooks was also bleeding as he casually walked away, for in his frenzied state he had cut himself.

Brooks never apologized for the attack. A special committee investigated the matter and recommended the South Carolinian be expelled from the House. But the motion failed to receive the two-thirds vote it needed to pass. Instead, Brooks resigned his seat and immediately sought reelection – allowing his constituents to hold a referendum on his conduct. That August, they returned him to Washington, D.C. in a landslide. Admiring Southerners sent Brooks dozens of canes as a show of support. One wrote, “good job;” while another was inscribed, “Hit him again!”

Sumner’s injuries kept him away from the Senate for three years. Though he eventually returned, he never fully recovered, and he lived in chronic pain until he died in 1874 at age 63, still serving as a senator.

As for Brooks, he didn’t have long to celebrate his fifteen minutes of fame. In January 1857 – less than a year after the caning – he developed a bad cough. It grew into croup, an infection of the throat. On January 27, a telegraph message sent the news back to South Carolina.

“He died a horrid death and suffered intensely,” it noted. “He endeavored to tear his own throat open to get breath.”

Brooks was buried his native Edgefield. 

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Political violence of any sort – in any era – is never excusable, and there is no justification for what Brooks did to Sumner. Yet, although history has given Sumner a hall pass in the matter, he bears responsibility as well. He deliberately baited the Southerner with his over-the-top rhetoric – and wound up getting more than he had bargained for.    

The violence that began that May day in 1856 escalated from there. It wasn’t long till many members of Congress began carrying weapons for their own protection. 

In my own collection I have a letter from 1859 written by young David Perkins, who became senator Douglas’ private secretary. Tensions on Capitol Hill were still raging at a fever pitch three years after Sumner’s beating.

“I have already witnessed two or three excitements among the Members and two, in particular, amounting almost to a disrespectable [fist] fight,” Perkins wrote.

In fact, Keitt – the pistol-brandishing congressman who aided and abetted Brooks’ caning – two years later attempted to choke Pennsylvania representative Galusha Grow during an argument on the floor of the U.S. House.

“The caning had an enormous impact on the events that followed over the next four years,” historian Stephen Puleo wrote in his book, The Caning. “As a result of the caning, the country was pushed, inexorably and unstoppably, to civil war.”

Things would only worsen until eventually simmering down on a sunny April Sunday afternoon in Appomattox, Virginia.   

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …

J. Mark Powell is an award-winning former TV journalist, government communications veteran, and a political consultant. He is also an author and an avid Civil War enthusiast. Got a tip or a story idea for Mark? Email him at mark@fitsnews.com.

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