William Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-61, pp. 82-84
Immediately after Brooks heard that Sumner had mocked Butler, the mercurial South Carolinian determined to [avenge the insult.]37 Then the avenger stalled, as had South Carolina so often. Brooks decided to wait for the printed version of Sumner's speech. Upon reading the published oration two days later, Brooks searched for Sumner. Then he aborted the search. That night, he barely slept. Upon rising on May 22, he charged out to intercept Sumner as the insulter walked to the Senate. After hours of storming through Washington streets, Brooks decided his effort would exhaust him. Then the stronger Sumner would prevail. So he again withdrew. Sumner stepped into the Senate, unaware that he was hunted prey.
The harried hunter now waited at the Senate door for his prey to leave the chamber. Sumner stayed at his desk. Brooks entered the chamber. He sat three seats from the senator. A lady watched from the Senate gallery. Brooks asked that she be removed. She stayed. The South Carolinian retreated to the lobby.
Finally, the lady left. Only then did the assailant bellow that he could [stand this thing no longer.] Brooks strode into the senatorial chamber. He rushed up to the seated Sumner. Screaming of [a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine,] Brooks struck, as he had intended, a light blow with the smaller end of his gold-headed walking stick. Then, liberated at last, the exhilarated revenger could not restrain himself. Again and again, he clubbed Sumner, this time with the thick end of the cane. The wounded Sumner instinctively thrust himself backward and erect, ripping his desk from its moorings, then reeling as consciousness faded. When Sumner started to fall, Brooks caught him, propped him up, then struck again and again with the splintering cane.
John J. Crittenden, the Kentucky successor to Henry Clay's seat, lurched up to the assailant. [Don't kill him,] he cried. Laurence Keitt, Brooks's young South Carolina colleague in the House, intercepted Crittenden, raised yet another cane, and screamed, [Let them alone, God damn you.] Thus did South Carolina almost brutalize not only Massachusetts, center of free soil extremism, but also Kentucky, center of border compromising.
That preview of the secessionists' double enemy among white men, inside and outside the South during the Civil War, flickered but briefly. Georgia's Senator Robert M. Toombs restrained Keitt from assaulting Crittenden while Brooks smashed the unconscious Sumner to the floor. Then the assailant strode away from the desecrated Senate chamber. He left behind the most vivid imaginable symbol of the North's reaction to the Slave Power. Not even congressional gag rules against discussing slavery, not even unrepublican procedures to return fugitive slaves, not even unrepublican laws in Kansas compared symbolically with the senator soaking freedom's chamber with his blood, unable to speak, unable to rise, a free white debater lashed more insufferably than a supposedly trashy slave.
For all this, Preston Brooks received applause, first from Southerners in Washington, D.C., then in South Carolina. While many Southerners privately thought that, as usual, South Carolina had gone a little too far, most of them publicly castigated Charles Sumner for pushing oratorical insults way too far. Border politicians such as John Crittenden condemned Brooks. But this important exception aside, most Southerners cheered Preston Brooks's silencing of an unbearable Yankee with all the passion of William L. Yancey's loathing for his stepfather. Isolated South Carolinians usually postured, then retreated. But Preston Brooks, tremulously, had finally done it—and had usually won southern huzzahs. It was all another ominous rehearsal for 1860–61.
As echoes of southern applause for Preston Brooks cascaded around an appalled North, so did Charles Sumner's whispered lament, before he lapsed again into unconsciousness: [I could not believe that a thing like this was possible.] But the famed Massachusetts poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson better summed up the more extreme Northerners' thought. [I think we must get rid of [black men's] slavery,] wrote Emerson, [or we must get rid of [white men's] freedom.]38