Jerks in History

[Linda Anderson]

Here's the opinion of two contemporaries of Sumner: Moorfield Storey and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Quite apart from any opinion on whether Brooks was a hero or a coward, I don't think he intended to galvanize the North by caning Sumner.

"The real effect of slavery, its brutalizing influence on master as well as slave, the essential barbarism of the system, and the danger to the liberty of free citizens which its continuance and extension involved, were brought home to men as by a flash of lightning. Those, who had been slow to read the lesson on the plains of Kansas, had their eyes opened by the strokes of Brooks. It is doubtful in his whole life that Sumner ever struck a blow for slavery as that which, through him, it received through Brooks. From that moment, on both sides of the Atlantic, the real spirit of "Southern chivalry" was revealed. Quotations might be multiplied, but the feeling and resolve of the North are perhaps epitomized best in the entry that Emerson made in his journal: 'Sumner's attack is of no importance...it is only a leaf of the tree. It is not Sumner who must be avenged but the tree must be cut down.'"

Charles Sumner by Moorfield Storey.