Embodied Eloquence, the Sumner Assault, and the Transatlantic Cable

• Published in: American literature 2010-09, Vol.82 (3), p.489-518
• Main Author: Hanlon, Christopher
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: American Studies; Assaults; Attorneys; Brooks, Preston S; Cultural Studies; Dana, Richard Jr; Literary Criticism; Literary Theory; Literature and Literary Studies; Metaphor; Politicians; Politics; Rhetoric; Sumner, Charles (1811-74)
• ISSN: 0002-9831; 1527-2117
• DOI: 10.1215/00029831-2010-022

Hanlon's essay depicts South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks's 1856 assault on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner as a flashpoint for 1850s controversies over the laying of transatlantic telegraphic cable between the United States and England. Widely treated by both Northern and Southern commentators as a form of political discourse, Brooks's caning of Sumner also reverberated with a broad set of concerns over telegraphic communication. Many noted that the cane with which Brooks assaulted Sumner was constructed of gutta-percha, the substance that was used to insulate the transatlantic cable and that served, over the course of the decade, as a metonym for advanced telecommunications technology. In Congress, Brooks's assault was depicted by Senator Andrew Butler as a rejoinder to Sumner's speech as an improper-because prepublished and internationally distributed-abolitionist diatribe. The Brooks-Sumner affair, in which a Southern legislator smote his abolitionist colleague using a fragment of the era's most salient symbol for global peace and goodwill, called forth a set of anxieties concerning the telegraphic disembodiment of the voice, the unchecked proliferation of speculation and rumor, and the globalization of the American cotton trade.