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South, and more than a hundred Southerners sent him canes to replace the one he had broken on Sumner’s head. Although Brooks resigned from the House after surviving an attempt to expell him—every Southern Congressman voted no—his constituents in South Carolina returned him in triumph in the subsequent election. 3
    In several ways the caning of Sumner was a classically Southern More than anything else Brooks’ deed expressed what Robert Penn Warren has called that “instinctive fear—that the massiveness of experience, the concreteness of life will be violated: the fear of abstraction.” 4 Although reflection confirms the notion that Brooks’ action was symbolic, Brooks himself seemed more concerned with what was real and direct than he did with pose or gesture. He answered metaphors and innuendoes with blows. To the degree that there was a corporate Southern mind, Brooks acted out its most salient quality: the primacy of the concrete over the abstract, of action over contemplation. At the same time, Brooks gave expression to a characteristic extension of the Southern mental focus on the here and now and real—what W.J. Cash has described as “puerile individualism” and defined as “the boast, voiced or not, on the part of every Southerner that he would knock hell out of whoever dared to cross him.” 5
    In the South, physical circumstances and folk culture encouraged development of rule by men instead of law and institutions. Paradoxically, while Southerners depended on legal absolutes in Congress to preserve slavery, law on slave plantations was essentially what planters said it was. 6 And among the South’s plain folk, individualism expressed as a violent assertion of self was common. Of course, southern individualism was only partially negative; it also fostered a sturdy independence and a secure self-image. But however expressed, individualism hindered the development of a sense of corporate identity in Southern communities and produced a high degree of provincialism as a by-product. At best, individualistic Southerners lived out Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance"; at worst they answered insults with blows in the chamber of the United States Senate. 7
    Southerners are not the only Americans with a deserved reputation as proud, violent people, but in the Old South, violence tended to be more personal and more socially acceptable than elsewhere. Slavery, after all, depended upon physical force or the threat of force, and from childhood, slaveholders were accustomed to striking their chattels with impunity, because blacks struck whites at the risk of their lives. Planter-class Southerners codified personal violence in a
code duello
that persisted in law or practice long after its abandonment in other sections of the United States. That they also celebrated corporate violence is clear from the relatively high numbers of Southern military schools and militia units that took seriously the study and profession of arms.
    The planters’ penchant for violence was a model for the plain folk, if indeed they needed a model. In the rural South, often only slightly beyond the frontier stage of development, the plain folk defended and asserted themselves according to their own code of violent behavior. In addition, nonslaveholders shared responsibility with slaveholders for the internal security of slavery, and plain folk shared with planters legal sanction to “discipline” Southern blacks. Finally, the high degree of personalism which characterized Southern folk culture encouraged direct, personal confrontation. In the case of Charles Sumner’s “Crime Against Kansas” speech, for example, while many critics spoke about “intemperate” language and “malignity,” Preston Brooks took Sumner’s insults personally, nominated himself to defend his uncle’s honor, and confronted Sumner individually and violently. 8
    Brooks’ action was an enormous personal overreaction, but satisfaction for a