Tracing the "Sacred Relicts": The Strange Career of Preston Brooks's Cane

There are two related but distinct histories of Civil War causation. One dwells in pamphlets, editorials, and the Congressional Globe. It features constitutional quarrels, roll-call votes, and political stratagems. This history generated mountains of paper and is indispensable to understanding the sectional conflict, but it can leave a wide gap between antebellum politicking and wartime carnage. This is where the second, more visceral, history helps. It envelops us in dust kicked up by Kansas partisans; it puts John Brown's rough-hewn pikes in our hands, reminding us of when Edmund Ruffin calculated the value of disunion; it drops us into the sweaty, jostling crowd at Charleston's Institute Hall to watch the Democratic Party self-destruct. This history plumbs the experience of sectional strife. It gives us politics as lived by real people with senses and feelings as well as interests and ideologies. When it embraces objects, this history puts us in touch with disunion. Few episodes better suit this history than Preston Brooks's caning of Charles Sumner. The May 1856 incident produced an array of material artifacts, from bloody garments to a damaged desk to the cane itself. These items dominated contemporary discussions and later remembrances of the assault, and they underscore the materiality of political history and historical memory.

This essay addresses both, focusing on the cane rather than the caning. The assault transformed Brooks's humble walking stick into a bitterly contested artifact. Its physicality—its dimensions, composition, and durability—framed discussions of the attack. The essay first examines the cane's physical presence in contemporary debates over the assault's meaning. Described as a club, stick, bludgeon, cudgel, or simply "the gutta-percha," it was a vital clue for those attempting to divine the causes and implications of Brooks's deed. Observers weighed the gravity of the attack in the heft of the weapon. Did the cane's splinters, for instance, reveal its feeble flimsiness? Or did they highlight the assailant's savagery? Then the essay traces the cane's disjointed post-1856 history: fragments circulated for decades, variously treated as relics of the Old South and curiosities of a bygone age. The fate of the largest portion of the stick is murkier. Ultimately, authenticity matters less than what these stories reveal about materiality and memory. People who remember the Sumner assault still seek physical contact with artifacts, particularly the cane, which may now reside at a Boston museum. Its convoluted path to the Bay State culminated in a gesture that at once reflected personal friendship, historical preservation, and sectional reconciliation. Passed from hand to hand for more than six decades, the cane forged several unique relationships. At first a token of southern solidarity, it was repaired and then refashioned through additional gift exchanges, first into a practical tool of self-defense, then into a historical curiosity that bridged old regional divisions, and finally into a museum piece. Its final private owners ultimately decided that the cane, once an emblem of the slave power, belonged to the people of Sumner's home state of Massachusetts.

The caning grew out of the ferocious debate over slavery's expansion. For combatants who saw the west as the key to the nation's future, western territories were political battlegrounds. After 1854, the most important of them was Kansas. On May 19 and 20, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts addressed the territorial controversy in a speech titled "The Crime against Kansas." In deliberately provocative language, he denounced slavery as economically stifling, morally corrupt, and unrepublican. He likened slavery expansion to rape, and he condemned its defenders, including aged South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler.¹

Butler's family was deeply rooted in the rich plantation lands of Edgefield District, a hotbed of proslavery politics. Among his cousins was Preston Brooks, a thirty-six-year-old lawyer, congressman, planter, and veteran duelist who walked with a limp. He often carried a cane, including one he received as a gift in early 1856 from a North Carolina friend named Vick.² Brooks had been aligned with...