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.

The commissioners revealed an intractable belief that Northern men were cowards. As evidence, they cited the 1856 caning of Republican senator Charles Sumner, a fervent critic of slavery, in the Senate chamber and his refusal to challenge his attacker to a manly duel. Here their argument abandoned logical constraint: As they saw it the violence of the assault was Sumner’s fault, never mind that his assailant, Rep. Preston Brooks, struck first and from behind while Sumner was seated at his Senate desk, as Russell reminded them. The commissioners brushed this aside; Brooks, they said, struck “a slight blow at first and only inflicted the heavier strokes when irritated by the Senator’s cowardly demeanor.” When the conversation turned to slavery, it seemed to Russell to slip all tethers to reality. “The gentlemen at table asserted that the white men in the slave States are physically superior to the men

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.