Note: this edition carries both my column from last week and this week's follow-up. HERE is a link to last week's column.
A Liberal
Dose
November 10,
2022
Troy D.
Smith
“Have We
Reached Our Preston Brooks Moment?”
I am writing this before election day, but the
election will have come and gone by the time it sees print. As I sit here on
what to you was this past Sunday night, I can’t help but think that it is quite
likely that the anger, and the violent rhetoric, which has me so worried will
have increased -no matter who wins what, or who controls Congress. Last week I
was outraged by the (very predictable to anyone paying attention) attempted
murder of the House Speaker’s husband in their home. Little did I know what was coming -because, from some corners, it surprised even me.
I was not surprised that some conservatives (and Elon
Musk, however we describe him) were repeating a totally fabricated story that
Mr. Pelosi was attacked by a gay prostitute he had hired. I was not surprised
that Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted a photo of a pair of underwear and a hammer, saying
it was his Paul Pelosi Halloween costume. I wasn’t surprised that other people
were posting similar bad jokes that minimized -and seemed to celebrate -the brutal
assault of a senior citizen over politics, and more broadly made light of the
very dangerous place Donald Trump has led us. I was surprised by some of the people who joined in. There is no
minimizing, no successful false equivalency, of events like this and the
attempted rebellion on January 6. My good friend John Gottlied, a couple of
weeks ago, admitted that some Trump followers weren’t the most well-behaved,
but that he had never heard of a conservative trying to kill a Supreme Court
Justice. I assume he means the incident when people were protesting outside
Kavanaugh’s house and one of them was found to have a gun in a case. They
probably did have ill intent, and I condemn it. But I would point out that, A)
conservatives have no current reason to be mad at the Supreme Court and B) a
couple of thousand of them were too busy trying to kill the other two branches
of government on live television. Many of whom also were armed. It is not equal.
The jokes about Mr. Pelosi reminded me of an event
that occurred on the floor of the Senate in 1856, during the lead-up to the
Civil War. I, and many other historians, have used that incident to demonstrate
that the country was on the dangerous path to war because they had stopped
looking at each other as fellow Americans and human beings.
In brief, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner (an
abolitionist) had given a speech condemning the violence going on in “Bleeding
Kansas” at that time between pro-and-anti-slavery citizens, as well as
condemning slavery itself. I think he was totally correct. The problem was how he
did it. He singled out SC senator Andrew Butler, who had recently had a stroke
and whose speech was slurred, and essentially made fun of his stroke and made
veiled references to his alleged raping of slave children. Butler’s cousin,
Preston Brooks -who was in the House of Representatives -decided to challenge
Sumner to a duel to protect his family’s honor. He was told that duels were for
your social equals, so instead he beat Sumner almost to death with a cane while
he was sitting at his desk on the Senate floor. He beat him until the cane
broke.
Northerners claimed this as proof Southerners were
brutal savages and could not be reasoned with. Southerners claimed it was proof
Yankees deserved a good beating. From all over the South, people mailed Brooks
new canes -one of them inscribed “good job.”
Political violence in Kansas led to more in the
Capitol, with supporters of the perpetrator making it into a joke. It was all
more kindling added to the pile, lacking only the final spark, which would be
fanned by hatred.
I want to leave you with the words of Lincoln on his inauguration,
when the flame had already started, and entreat us all to hear his words:
“The
mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to
every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the
chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better
angels of our nature.”
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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