This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [4]
The chamber where the Senate met was nearly empty. A few senators lounged about near the doorways, chatting, or worked at their desks. Sumner scribbled away, and then he realized that someone was standing beside him, trying to get his attention.
“I have read your speech twice over, carefully,” this man was saying. “It is a libel on South Carolina and on Senator Butler, who is a relative of mine.”
Then the man raised a walking stick high in the air and brought it down as hard as he could on Senator Sumner’s head.
The man with the cane was a South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, nephew to Senator Butler; a youthful six-footer of robust frame, sometime cavalryman in the Mexican War. He struck again and again with a full-arm swing, and a man who saw it said that he came down with the cane like a dragoon using his saber and striking to kill. Caught between the chair and the immovable desk, Sumner tried desperately to get up. He was heard to gasp: “O Lord!” — and then, with a great convulsive heave, he wrenched the desk loose from its fastenings and reeled to his feet. Brooks struck again; the cane broke, and Brooks went on clubbing him with the splintered butt.
Now Sumner was on the floor, blood on his head and clothing, and men were running down the aisle to him. Brooks stopped beating him and strolled away, remarking: “I did not intend to kill him, but I did intend to whip him.” Sumner was helped to his feet and made his way to the lobby, where he fell on a sofa, half unconscious. A doctor came and dressed his wounds — the scalp was badly cut, the doctor said afterward, but beyond that the wound did not seem very severe — and someone helped Sumner to a carriage and got him back to those rooms that were always maintained in perfect order in anticipation of some violent incident.7
Sumner disrobed, found his clothing saturated with blood, and sent for his own doctor — who, after examination, took a much graver view of his injuries than the doctor in the Senate lobby had done. He pronounced Sumner’s condition most serious and ordered him to get into bed and stay there.
Concerning which there was much argument, then and later — the idea perhaps being that to pound a senator into speechlessness was no especial threat to the processes of democratic government unless the man’s life was actually endangered. The doctor who had treated him in the lobby declared contemptuously that as far as he could see Sumner might have ridden by carriage all the way to Baltimore without ill effect if he had wanted to — his wounds were not critical. But Sumner’s own doctor disagreed violently, and so did all of Sumner’s friends, and so for the matter of that did Sumner himself. For three years he did not return to the Senate chamber. He traveled to England and France for medical treatments, some of which were agonizing; his spine had been affected, the foreign specialists told him, and for a long time he walked and talked like a man who had had a partial stroke.
Thus there would be many who would consider Sumner a tragic martyr, just as others would call him a faker who had been properly beaten for loose talk; and young Brooks would be a hero in the South, the recipient of innumerable gifts of canes, one of which bore a plate with the inscription: “Hit him again.” He did not have long to live, this impulsive young congressman; within a year he would die of a bronchial infection, clawing at his throat for the air his lungs could not get; and in the