Preston Brooks Quotes

If Preston Brooks with his attack had brought him near death, was it not his old friend Appleton who had observed, “When good Americans die they go to Paris”?

Yes, Brooke, sometimes friends can get you into trouble. But a good friend will always come and to your rescue.

It would not take much to have the throats of every Abolitionist cut. —Preston Brooks of South Carolina, 1856 Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot perform impossibilities….He cannot change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good evil. —Frederick Douglass, on the Dred Scott decision, 1857 I clearly see, as I think, a powerful plot to make slavery universal and perpetual in this nation. —Abraham Lincoln, 1858

Our methodology was to pretend not to understand Jennie’s requests unless they were signed. She didn’t know the sign for play, but she slapped the floor. It was a deliberate movement that to me looked uncannily like a sign. As an experiment, I slapped the floor. She slapped it and rattled the doorknob. I signed, Jennie want to go outside and play? But I used her sign for play, slapping the floor. She slapped the floor three or four times in succession, signing in between Yes, yes, yes. So I rewarded her with a play session down by the brook.

thing is it mobilized the people in the North. They had mass meetings against it. But Preston Brooks was made a hero in the South. They carried golden canes in his honor. That kind of division in a country was not going to be healed. The South understood that demographics were not on their side. If the North could keep slavery from moving to the western territories, the antislavery population in the West would add to that in the North, overwhelming the southern proslavery population. So they saw the writing on the wall.