The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (3 page)

P
RESTON Brooks had a sharp temper, but essentially he was a gentle man. He was “to the manor born” in upcountry South Carolina in 1819, and during youth and young manhood, his life was generally comfortable. Brooks was not especially talented at any one activity but displayed competence at law, soldiering (in the Mexican War), planting, and politics. He was physically handsome and under normal circumstances gracious and genial. In 1856, at age thirty-four, Brooks was serving his second term in the Congress; his colleagues there judged him undistinguished but affable.
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On May 19, Brooks visited the Senate chamber and heard part of a speech by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Sumner spoke on “The Crime Against Kansas” and said a number of highly inflammatory things about slaveholders in general and about South Carolinians and South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler in particular. In Sumner’s phrase, Butler was a “Don Quixote” who had taken “the harlot, Slavery” as his “mistress.” Sumner pronounced Butler and South Carolina worthless and accused Butler of “an incapacity of accuracy,” among other euphemisms for lying. Senator Butler, an aged uncle of Brooks', was not in Washington when Sumner delivered his oration, and Brooks felt he must answer the Northerner’s harsh words.

Brooks waited until he had read the printed version of Sumner’s speech and debated with himself and friends over when and how best to respond. Then, on May 21, two days after he had heard the speech, Brooks attempted to intercept Sumner outside the Capitol; he failed and grew frustrated as well as angry. The next day, shortly after a noon adjournment, Brooks stalked Sumner in the Senate chamber. He waited impatiently as the room cleared, and Sumner continued to work at his desk. At last Brooks strode to Sumner’s desk, called his name, and stated that his speech had been a libel upon Butler and South Carolina. Sumner started to stand up, but Brooks broke off his prepared statement in mid-sentence and began striking Sumner with a gutta-percha cane. After several measured blows, Brooks lost control and flailed madly at Sumner’s head. Stunned and blinded by his own blood, Sumner attempted first to cover himself with his arms and then to flee. He was so desperate that as he strained to stand up he wrenched his desk from the bolts that secured it to the floor. While Sumner staggered about blindly, Brooks continued his assault until his cane splintered. In less than a minute Sumner lay senseless in the arms of a bystander, and Brooks had strode from the chamber with friends to clean a small cut on his head from the recoil of his cane.
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Although Brooks’ temper fired the intensity of the beating, there is no doubt that the caning of Sumner was premeditated. Nor was Brooks alone in his deed. His immediate confederates advised him and accompanied him to the Senate chamber, and after the fact, Southerners participated vicariously by applauding Brooks and approving his motive if not always his means. The obscure congressman became a hero in the South, and more than a hundred Southerners sent him canes to replace the one he had broken on Sumner’s head. Although Brooks resigned from the House after surviving an attempt to expell him—every Southern Congressman voted no—his constituents in South Carolina returned him in triumph in the subsequent election.
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In several ways the caning of Sumner was a classically Southern More than anything else Brooks’ deed expressed what Robert Penn Warren has called that “instinctive fear—that the massiveness of experience, the concreteness of life will be violated: the fear of abstraction.”
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Although reflection confirms the notion that Brooks’ action was symbolic, Brooks himself seemed more concerned with what was real and direct than he did with pose or gesture. He answered metaphors and innuendoes with blows. To the degree that there was a corporate Southern mind, Brooks acted out its most salient quality: the primacy of the concrete over the abstract, of action over contemplation. At the same time, Brooks gave expression to a characteristic extension of the Southern mental focus on the here and now and real—what W.J. Cash has described as “puerile individualism” and defined as “the boast, voiced or not, on the part of every Southerner that he would knock hell out of whoever dared to cross him.”
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In the South, physical circumstances and folk culture encouraged development of rule by men instead of law and institutions. Paradoxically, while Southerners depended on legal absolutes in Congress to preserve slavery, law on slave plantations was essentially what planters said it was.
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And among the South’s plain folk, individualism expressed as a violent assertion of self was common. Of course, southern individualism was only partially negative; it also fostered a sturdy independence and a secure self-image. But however expressed, individualism hindered the development of a sense of corporate identity in Southern communities and produced a high degree of provincialism as a by-product. At best, individualistic Southerners lived out Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance"; at worst they answered insults with blows in the chamber of the United States Senate.
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Southerners are not the only Americans with a deserved reputation as proud, violent people, but in the Old South, violence tended to be more personal and more socially acceptable than elsewhere. Slavery, after all, depended upon physical force or the threat of force, and from childhood, slaveholders were accustomed to striking their chattels with impunity, because blacks struck whites at the risk of their lives. Planter-class Southerners codified personal violence in a
code duello
that persisted in law or practice long after its abandonment in other sections of the United States. That they also celebrated corporate violence is clear from the relatively high numbers of Southern military schools and militia units that took seriously the study and profession of arms.

The planters’ penchant for violence was a model for the plain folk, if indeed they needed a model. In the rural South, often only slightly beyond the frontier stage of development, the plain folk defended and asserted themselves according to their own code of violent behavior. In addition, nonslaveholders shared responsibility with slaveholders for the internal security of slavery, and plain folk shared with planters legal sanction to “discipline” Southern blacks. Finally, the high degree of personalism which characterized Southern folk culture encouraged direct, personal confrontation. In the case of Charles Sumner’s “Crime Against Kansas” speech, for example, while many critics spoke about “intemperate” language and “malignity,” Preston Brooks took Sumner’s insults personally, nominated himself to defend his uncle’s honor, and confronted Sumner individually and violently.
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Brooks’ action was an enormous personal overreaction, but satisfaction for a personal affront was only part of his motive. As Brooks pointed out, Sumner had insulted not only Butler but also South Carolina and the South. Brooks was simultaneously defending personal and familial honor and attacking a critic of his homeland and way of life. He was acting out the ultimate thrust of Southern culture and polity during the late ante-bellum period: to defend the Southern way of life and assert its superiority over the emerging American norm, even by force.

Most people live in a state of tension between what they are and what they want to be, but this tension was especially intense in the Old South. Southerners lived with a heritage that professed the ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy, but these ideals were not easily reconciled with the reality of slavery, racism, and aristocracy.
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In an attempt to do so, Southerners adopted elaborate defense mechanisms. Behind Brooks’ caning of Charles Sumner lay a culture devoted to the celebration of Southern reality and the identification of the Southern status quo with an ideal romantic vision. Only on this basis—believing themselves to be the last best hope of Western civilization—could Southerners defend themselves against attacks from outside. The corporate Southern mind had become comfortable with the potential for guilt that pervaded a life style largely grounded in slavery. And the Southern belief in most of the rationalizations for that life style gave birth to a national ideology.

Where did the process begin? Perhaps Southern churches are the best place to look for the origins of cultural nationalism in the Old South. There the Southern mind, conditioned by reverence for the concrete and characterized by assertive individualism, blended with a unique religious tradition to mold intellectual and cultural life.

During the middle third of the nineteenth century, one of the most striking characteristics of Southern religious feeling was its homogeneity. Religious skeptics, Jews, and Roman Catholics (except in Louisiana and Maryland) were a small minority among overwhelming numbers of Protestant Christians. Of those, Quakers, Unitarians, and liberal sects were an even smaller minority. The dominant denominations were Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian. In most communities of the seaboard South, Episcopalians and Presbyterians tended to be among the richer classes, yet even these denominations were more orthodox and evangelical than they had been in the colonial era. Hence, the mass of Southern whites acknowledged a fundamental religious emphasis upon sin and salvation. Camp meetings and interdenominational revival services, plus the ease and frequency with which Southerners attended services of various denominations (indicated in the letters and diaries of the period), attest to the religious homogeneity among evangelical Protestants in the Old South. Moreover, the religious emphasis upon a strict moral code provided a common standard of behavior that affected church members and nonmembers as well. However much Southerners railed against the Puritan origins of their New England brethren, they themselves had incorporated much of the Puritan heritage into Southern-style evangelical Protestantism.
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At or near the heart of the faith was the conviction of human sinfulness. Paradoxically, this deep consciousness of sin in this world and perfection in the next served as a bulwark of the Old South status quo. Many Southern clergymen found divine sanction for racial subordination in the “truth” that blacks were cursed as “Sons of Ham,” and justified bondage by citing Biblical examples.
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More subtly, the hellfire-and-damnation emphasis of Southern Protestantism served as a kind of inverse support for the hedonistic aspects of the Southern life style. The Old South probably deserved much of the scorn heaped upon it by Northern critics as being a land of sloth and lust. Seemingly, Southerners indulged in corn liquor and camp meetings with equal zest. Perhaps the practice of their fundamentalist faith satisfied the need for confession and purgation. Hearing their sins exposed and denounced from the pulpit of a church or the stump of a camp meeting, Southern sinners were sufficiently freed from guilt to thank the preacher for a fine sermon and go sin some more. In short, if all are wrong, then none are guilty. The Southern appropriation of Puritanism seemed to offer comfort in the universality of the human condition. Thus, hedonism and fundamentalism coexisted in the Southern soul, and the same conservative faith which inspired John Brown to violence in an attempt to abolish slavery justified the South’s peculiar institution to Southerners.
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Southern Protestantism made severe demands upon Southerners as individuals; the common conviction called upon them to live upright lives in response to the righteous demands of a strict father-God, and, whether they were obedient or rebellious children, they acknowledged the existence of individual moral obligations. About society, however, Southern Protestantism had much less to say. Religion in the South was essentially personal; it did not, as elsewhere, inspire reform or create in believers a zeal to perfect human society. Southerners believed in the power of Protestant Christianity to regenerate individuals, but when the church entered the arena of social justice, it had “quit preaching and begun meddling.”
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It was no accident that Unitarianism and transcendentalism attracted so few Southerners. The Unitarian faith and the transcendental philosophy tended to exalt humanity and to call it to perfection in this world. Southerners were not so optimistic. They perceived reality as rooted in human frailty, and because they could not alter the human condition, they accepted and even celebrated their humanity. Significantly, this was as true among Episcopalians as among Baptists, even though the former expressed themselves with liturgical formality and the latter with emotional spontaneity.

Because the religious response seemed to fulfill whatever introspective and contemplative needs the Southerner had, secular culture, traditional arts and letters, in the Old South tended to reinforce what was instead of inspire dreams of what might be. It was in secular culture that Southerners made visible the romantic vision of their world, demonstrating a peculiarly Southern mutation of the romantic mood which characterized Western Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century. Romanticism in the North and West tended to inspire reform movements and the pursuit of ideals beyond present grasp; flights from reality were onward and upward. Southern romantics tended to pursue ideals which justified or sanctified things as they were in the South. Southerners prized oratory and fought duels as romantic expressions that linked them to a body of sacred tradition. Reading themselves into the novels of Sir Walter Scott, they held jousting tournaments. They recognized a direct line of aristocratic descent among a landed class from feudal lords, through English squires, to themselves. In the Southern “belle”—the lady aloof on her pedestal as ornament and object—Southerners fashioned an ideal for female behavior modeled in part at least upon the medieval concept of courtly love. The male counterpart of the belle was the “cavalier”—the courtly horseman who defied “roundhead” vulgarity. Of course, much of this romantic self-image was myth; yet because it was believed, it was real to the Southern mind.
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