This outrage did much to precipitate events and to intensify hostility to slavery. Southern Senators and Representatives assumed to justify the assault.(85)
The House did not expel Brooks, as the requisite two thirds vote was not obtained. He resigned, and was re-elected by his district, six votes only being cast against him, but he died in January, 1857. Butler, of South Carolina, the alleged immediate cause of Brooks' assault on Sumner, died in the same year.
The whole North looked upon the personal assault upon Sumner as not only brutal, but as intended to be notice to other Senators and members of Congress of a common design and plan to intimidate the friends of freedom. The assault was largely justified throughout the South, also by leading Southern statesmen in both branches of Congress.(86)
Remarks on the manner of Brooks' assault in the House made by Burlingame of Massachusetts led to a challenge from Brooks, which was accepted, the duel to be fought near the Clifton House, Canada; but Brooks declined to fight at the place named, alleging a fear to go there through the enraged North.
Brooks also, for remarks in the Senate characterizing the assault, challenged Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, but the latter declined the challenge because he "regarded duelling as the lingering relic of a barbarous civilization, which the law of the country has branded as a crime."(86)
So threatening, then, was the attitude of the Southern members of both Senate and House that Senators Wade of Ohio, Chandler of Michigan, and Cameron of Pennsylvania made a compact to resent any insult from a Southerner by a challenge to fight.(87)
A last attempt was made in Buchanan's administration, pending the Kansas agitation, to buy and annex Cuba in the interest of the slave power. It was then a province of Spain. Buchanan was both dull and perverse in obeying the demands of his party, especially on the slavery issue. In his Annual Message of 1858 he expressed satisfaction that the Kansas question no longer gave the country trouble. He also expressed gratitude to "Almighty Providence" that it no longer threatened the peace of the country, and congratulated himself over his course in relation to the Lecompton policy, saying, "it afforded him heartfelt satisfaction." He, in the same message, set forth his anxiety to acquire Cuba, assigning as a reason that it was "the only spot in the civilized world where the African slave trade is tolerated."
Cuba was wanted simply to make more slave States to extend the waning slave power, and thus to offset the incoming new free States, which then seemed to the observing as inevitable.
Buchanan suggested that circumstances might arise where the law of self-preservation might call on us to acquire Cuba by force, thus affirming the policy set forth in the Ostend Manifesto, prepared and signed by Mason, Soulé, and himself four years earlier.
Slidell of Louisiana, from the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the
Senate, promptly reported a bill appropriating $30,000,000 to be
used by the President to obtain Cuba; and it soon transpired that
Southern Senators were willing to make the sum $120,000,000.