The Caning by Stephen Puleo

Author:Stephen Puleo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westholme Publishing

The South's reaction to the caning fueled the rancor and played right into Republican hands. Had Southerners repudiated Brooks's actions, or even remained silent, Northern Republicans would have been left with a single isolated incident that could have been attributable to one congressman who lost his temper. But the South's overwhelming approval fundamentally altered the dynamic—the congressional debate over the caning, the expulsion vote along sectional and party lines, the multitude of pro-Brooks celebrations across the South, and Brooks's over-whelming reelection all stunned Northerners. These events provided demonstrable and indisputable evidence that the South endorsed this brutality, and thus the entire South was tarred by Brooks's action.

Republicans portrayed Brooks as every Southerner, and Sumner and the North as every Southerners' victim. Each time a news account depicted Southerners rising to Brooks's defense, Republicans reinforced the image of Southerners, slave-owners in particular, as brutal and violent, and Southern society as backward and barbaric. In the opinion of the New York Times, the caning confirmed the impression that the South “will stop at no extremity of violence in order to subdue the people of the Free States and force them into a tame subserviency of its own domination.”

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