The Mansion Spring Lecture Series: The Cane of his Existence: "Righteous Violence" and the Brooks-Sumner Affair

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Dr. James Welborn presents The Cane of His Existence: "Righteous Violence" and the Brooks -Sumner Affair lecture April 12 at 6 p.m. in the Mansion Education Room. Preston Smith Brooks of Edgefield, South Carolina, very early exhibited a propensity for violence, long before he battered Massachusetts’ famed abolitionist, Senator Charles Sumner, with a gutta-percha cane. The attack on Senator Sumner and divergent reactions to it north and south only fortified the image of Brooks as a Southern Hotspur; the symbol of southern male recklessness as shaped by the barbaric slave regime. But acceptance of this caricatured “Bully Brooks” oversimplified the complex moral purview of Preston Smith Brooks in particular and antebellum southern white men in general. Their plaguing inability to wholly reconcile the tensions between their honor and their piety produced the wrathful ethic of righteous honor that enabled the white South to eventually make war on the North. The Brooks-Sumner caning personified the pervasive violence in this process, and served as an early salvo in the sectional exchange of shots that ultimately erupted into national civil war.


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