He then went up to Mr. Sumner, who was at his desk writing, and said: 'I have read your speech carefully and with as much disposition to do you justice as I could command, and I have deliberately come to the conclusion that you were guilty of a gross libel upon my State and a wanton insult to my absent and gray-haired relative, Judge Butler, and I feel myself under obligations to inflict on you a punishment for this libel and insult.' Mr. Sumner thereupon essayed to rise from his seat as though to resist what Mr. Brooks had said, when he (Mr. Brooks) struck Mr. Sumner with rapid and repeated blows about the head with a guttapercha cane, and continued his blows in spite of Mr. Sumner's efforts to ward them off and seize the cane, until Mr. Sumner fell. As Mr. Brooks was suspending his blows (which he did the instant Mr. Sumner fell), Mr. Crittenden came up and interposed, saying, 'Don't kill, etc.' Mr. Brooks thereupon left the spot and remained with his friends in the Senate Chamber, until Mr. Sumner's friends, several of whom were present (Mr. Morgan, of New York, and Mr. Foster, of Connecticut, among them), lifting him up, bore him into one of the ante-rooms of the Senate."

Brooks was admired and is still admired at the South, because of his known chivalrous character. This one act, which present-day methods and standards would make discreditable, make also the challenge accepted by Alexander Hamilton from Aaron Burr and the duel which followed not only discreditable, but criminal; and yet the people of the North admire Hamilton exceedingly and justly, as he is undoubtedly the greatest of all the

Northern statesmen. Viewed in a moral light, who can say that the caning by Brooks was worse than Hamilton's duel with Burr? We place the Southern Brooks alongside of the Northern Hamilton, and say that each erred in thinking it necessary to resort to violence to settle political or other disputes.

Everlasting regret must be felt because Alexander Hamilton and Preston S. Brooks resorted to violence under what we now regard as false ideas of honor. And shame must rest upon the name of Charles Sumner, the gloriously endowed scholar and intellectual athlete, for having, in a moment of high excitement, brought reproach on himself and on the Senate of the United States for personal and vile abuse of his opponents. Of the two offenses, Sumner's would seem to be the greater outrage upon Senatorial dignity and the proprieties of debate. As to John Brown, only infamy can be his reward for the murder of helpless men in their beds at night merely because of a difference of political views.

CHAPTER XXI

SLAVERY

Negro Slavery.-No history of South Carolina can fail to devote particular attention to negro slavery. It is of the highest historical interest, because the institution of slavery has in the most potent manner affected our life. Though it was not introduced into America first on Carolina soil, it was here that it took its earliest, deepest, and most vigorous rooting. We say advisedly "negro slavery," because many settlers in all the colonies brought white slaves of some sort with them.

There was not, in the minds of any of the people that came to America, any positive opposition to slavery. The time had not arrived for people, in general, to see or to understand the advantages of free labor, or to recognize the deep wrong of enslaving men and women. A general perception of the principles of freedom had not yet been attained, and slavery had come down as an inheritance to the human race. All the older peoples held slaves, and slavery existed in all quarters of the globe. The ancient Hebrews, whose historic records are revered as sacred, were slaveholders. The refined and cultured Greeks and the powerful Romans were slaveholders, and, while there was occasionally uttered some abstract philosophic sentiment about freedom, there was no opposition to it anywhere from a moral, religious, or material point of view. And among all the

slave-dealers, capturing and selling even their own kith and kin, none have excelled the Saxons.

Economic Question.-The question among the American colonies, therefore, was not whether slavery was morally wrong, but to what extent it was profitable. The hard, cold climate and barren soil of New England were not favorable to slave labor, because of the outlay in houses, clothing, and food necessary for the protection of the slaves, while the long, cold winters precluded their labors in the field. For indoor work the negro slaves were totally incompetent. So the irresistible argument against negro slavery in the North was an economic one. The intelligence of the planters of South Carolina found in the soil and climate of this region an opportunity to make large profits out of the institution, and they availed themselves of it and soon became the richest people of America, and Charleston, the metropolis of the slaveholders, became the wealthiest and most refined and cultured of the cities of the country.

The Free and the Slave States.-It was inevitable that, when the free and the slave sections of the country were united, there would arise fierce conflict. Institutions so dissimilar and hostile to each other as slavery and freedom cannot be bound together in any possible form of government. Abraham Lincoln only interpreted an inexorable law of nature when he said that this government could not exist half slave and half free. It was inevitable that it must be wholly one or the other. But Mr. Calhoun had, before Mr. Lincoln, shown that such a united government must have two

heads (as Roman affairs were once managed by two consuls of equal authority, when there were sharp divisions between the classes), and that one must be at the head of the slave system and the other of the free system, or the sections must separate.

Southern Sentiment.-It is instructive to observe the progress of thought on this question, under the influence of material advantage or loss. While the North had more advocates of the abolition of slavery, their number increasing rapidly as State by State of that section rejected it as unprofitable, yet in point of time, clearness of perception, and boldness of utterance in the denunciation of slavery and in work for its destruction, Virginia and South Carolina led the Union. It is very generally known that Virginia's Revolutionary statesmen, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Mason, Henry, and others, were opposed to slavery, though they were all slaveholders, and that no abolitionist, at any period, ever used stronger language in the denunciation of it than the author of the Declaration of Independence, though at that time he was the largest slaveholder in Virginia.

Henry and John Laurens.—It is not generally known that South Carolina furnished, in Henry and John Laurens, wealthy slaveholders, two of the most ardent advocates of abolition. The government of England was denounced by Henry Laurens in language as strong as that used by Jefferson or any other, because it had fastened this iniquity upon South Carolina over its protest, and zealously and ardently did John Laurens con