No one incident of the period showed more clearly the tension under which the country was laboring than the assault on Charles Sumner by Preston S. Brooks, a congressional representative from South Carolina.  As a result of this regrettable occurrence splendid canes with such inscriptions as “Hit him again” and “Use knock-down arguments” were sent to Brooks from different parts of the South and he was triumphantly reelected by his constituency, while on the other hand resolutions denouncing him were passed all over the North, in Canada, and even in Europe.  More than ever the South was thrown on the defensive, and in impassioned speeches Robert Toombs now glorified his state and his section.  Speaking at Emory College in 1853 he had already made an extended apology for slavery;[1] speaking in the Georgia legislature on the eve of secession he contended that the South had been driven to bay by the Abolitionists and must now “expand or perish.”  A writer in the Southern Literary Messenger,[2] in an article “The Black Race in North America,” made the astonishing statement that “the slavery of the black race on this continent is the price America has paid for her liberty, civil and religious, and, humanly speaking, these blessings would have been unattainable without their aid.”  Benjamin M. Palmer, a distinguished minister of New Orleans, in a widely quoted sermon in 1860 spoke of the peculiar trust that had been given to the South—­to be the guardians of the slaves, the conservers of the world’s industry, and the defenders of the cause of religion.[3] “The blooms upon Southern fields gathered by black hands have fed the spindles and looms of Manchester and Birmingham not less than of Lawrence and Lowell.  Strike now a blow at this system of labor and the world itself totters at the stroke.  Shall we permit that blow to fall?  Do we not owe it to civilized man to stand in the breach and stay the uplifted arm?...  This trust we will discharge in the face of the worst possible peril.  Though war be the aggregation of all evils, yet, should the madness of the hour appeal to the arbitration of the sword, we will not shrink even from the baptism of fire....  The position of the South is at this moment sublime.  If she has grace given her to know her hour, she will save herself, the country, and the world.”

[Footnote 1:  See “An Oration delivered before the Few and Phi Gamma Societies of Emory College:  Slavery in the United States; its consistency with republican institutions, and its effects upon the slave and society.  Augusta, Ga., 1853.”]

[Footnote 2:  November, 1855.]

[Footnote 3:  “The Rights of the South defended in the Pulpits, by B.M.  Palmer, D.D., and W.T.  Leacock, D.D., Mobile, 1860.”]