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A new perspective on the life of the US politician best known for the infamous assault that paved the bloody road to the Civil War.
In 1856, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks assaulted Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with a cane in the US Capitol, defending his family's honor and the rights of slaveholders. In beating Sumner unconscious, Brooks fueled a nationwide clash over slavery that ended in civil war.
Southern historian Paul Quigley brings Brooks to life more vividly than ever before, revealing how his personal struggles shaped the fateful decision to attack Sumner. Raised in the slaveholding culture of honor and scarred by missed opportunities for glory in the Mexican-American War, Brooks came to believe in the redemptive power of violence. Blending intimate personal history with wide-ranging analysis of political debates, Quigley uses Brooks's life to examine the deeper currents propelling the United States to the brink of destruction. Brooks's story reveals the increasingly fraught relationship between words and violence: When did words such as "liar" or "coward" justify duels? Did abolitionists' verbal attacks on slaveholders warrant physical retaliation? How did the way Americans talked about violence affect the likelihood that it would occur? With the caning, Brooks sparked an ominous national debate over the righteousness of bloodshed in a polarized nation.
Examining enduring issues of masculinity, honor, and free speech,
The Man Behind the Cane shows how words and violent behavior became perilously entangled in the fight over slavery and casts new light on the origins of the Civil War-and the ongoing dangers of political violence in our own time.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Sixty Seconds in the Senate
- Ch. 1: Violence Begins at Home: Lessons on Language, Violence, and Manhood in the Slaveholding South, 1819-46
- Ch. 2: Mexico Will Poison Me: The Disappointments of War, 1846-49
- Ch. 3: Becoming the Man behind the Cane: Fighting Over Slavery in Congress and Kansas, 1850-56
- Ch. 4: In the Shadow of a Cane: Navigating Clashing Cultures of Violence, 1856
- Ch. 5: My Representative Character: Political Violence, Polarization, and the Road to Civil War, 1856-61
- Epilogue: Remembering the Man behind the Cane
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Paul Quigley is the James I. Robertson, Jr. Associate Professor of Civil War History at Virginia Tech, where he also serves as Director of the Center for Humanities and Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. He is author of the award-winning
Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-65 (OUP, 2011).
