Most American students learn in high school about the 1856 “caning” of Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks. Teachers love the incident because it serves as a tidy encapsulation of so many themes from that period of American history.
The attack stemmed, like so many problems in the 1850s, from the dispute over slavery. Sumner was a fierce abolitionist who had recently given an aggressive speech opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In that speech, he attacked Senator Andrew Butler from South Carolina in personal and sexually charged language designed to remind listeners of the sexual violence that many slaveowners perpetrated on their slaves:
The wickedness which I now begin to expose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which prompted it. Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the National Government… The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight – I mean the harlot, Slavery.
It also reflects the Southern obsession with honor (which I wrote about a while back). Butler’s cousin, Representative Preston Brooks, saw these attacks as an unconscionable assault on his family honor and thought about challenging Sumner to a duel. But, deciding that Sumner was not of elevated enough social standing for a duel, he chose to just beat him up in public.
The main reason that teachers love this event is that it exemplifies just how frayed American political culture had become. That and the fact that it’s a dramatic, violent event guaranteed to catch the attention of even the most distracted high schooler. Brooks and two other pro-slavery congressmen (Laurence Keitt of South Carolina and Henry Edmundson of Virginia) went into the Senate chamber two days after Sumner’s speech and waited for any women who were present to leave (you wouldn’t want your savage beating of a U.S. Senator to scandalize a member of the fairer sex). They went up to Sumner and Brooks announced: "Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine."
And then he began a savage attack on Sumner. He hit him on the head before he could even get fully out of his chair. Sumner fell underneath his desk and was trapped for a time while Brooks continued to hammer away at his head. Sumner couldn’t see because there was so much blood pouring into his eyes. The senator tried to rise and defend himself, but Brooks kept hitting him. When the cane snapped, Brooks kept swinging, knocking Sumner unconscious with a piece of the cane while his buddies held bystanders at bay with a pistol.
1856 cartoon about the attack ( Public domain )
Sumner was unable to return to the Senate for three years because the physical and psychic toll of the attack was so great.
A few years ago, Albert Burnenko wrote a memorable take on the way we often refer to this event as the “caning” of Charles Sumner:
That is not a damn "caning"! That's just a frickin' psycho trying to kill a guy, and happening to use a cane as the murder weapon! Calling this a "caning" is like writing about a great white shark biting somebody's arm off and saying the person was subjected to "mouthing." You can say Brooks attacked Sumner with a cane or tried to kill him with a cane, that's fine, but it's not a damn "caning." I blame the persistence of "caning" as the word for this event on the fact that the American Civil War is pretty much the only conflict in world history whose story overwhelmingly has been told from the perspective of the shitbag slavers who lost it.
I agree! But the cane itself became famous. Brooks’ sympathizers collected the pieces of the shattered weapon from the bloody floor of the Capitol. Some of them made jewelry out of the smaller pieces and wore it as a symbol of sympathy for the South. One piece of the cane ended up in a Boston museum:
Though Brooks’ attack was an act in defense of a dying system and followed old codes of honor, one part of it was quite new: the cane itself. Though it might have seemed like an old-fashioned accessory, Brooks’s cane was made with a state-of-the-art material that, though it’s been almost entirely forgotten today, would make many of the greatest advances of the 19th century possible. The cane was made of gutta-percha.
Plastic rules our world. It’s in pretty much everything, from the clothes I’m wearing to the couch I’m sitting on to the keyboard I’m typing these words on. It’s found everywhere, too, from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It’s ubiquitous because it’s cheap, light, infinitely moldable, and incredibly durable (honestly, it’s a little too durable to be good for the environment).
But plastic only began to dominate the marketplace after World War II. Before then, goods had to be manufactured from more natural substances. One of the most important predecessors of plastic was a “curious vegetable gum” that came from trees in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
The flowers and leaves of gutta percha trees ( Louis Figuler, CC 2.0 )
The gutta-percha tree is a tall evergreen whose unique properties were introduced to the West by William Montgomerie, a doctor with the East India Company. He got hold of an indigenous Malaysian man’s hatchet and realized that its handle was made of something he’d never seen before. Montgomery later wrote that
I questioned the workman, in whose possession I found it, and heard that the material of which it was formed could be moulded into any form by dipping it into hot water, when it became as plastic as clay, and when cold regaining its original hardness and rigidity.
This strange stuff was the sap of huge gutta-percha trees, which could be extracted by tapping a tree or simply cutting it down. Montgomerie spread the word about gutta-percha, and enterprising capitalists soon found ways to make it resemble wood, leather, or rubber. An 1854 edition of The Illustrated Magazine of Art sang gutta-percha’s praises:
In gutta percha are formed all manner of domestic appliances and ornaments: trays of all sorts and sizes; vases, watch-stands, and plates ; bouquet-holders, statuettes, brackets, jugs, mugs, inkstands, and clothes-lines ; flower-pots and stands, paper weights, medallions, cornices, doors, mouldings, picture and glass frames, drinking cups, fishing nets, and portmanteaus ; skates, policemen's batons, and boats; oil-cans, washing basins, and whips ; stethoscopes, splints for dislocations, and curtain-rings ; stuffing for horses' feet, mill-bands, and stop cocks ; cutting boards,, cabmen's hats, and traces ; life preservers, bottling boots, and seals; powder-flasks, air-guns, and book-covers ; sponge-bags, galvanic batteries, and bandages for broken limbs. For all these, and thousands of other purposes, it has been found of eminent utility, and we think enough has been said to commend it to the reader’s attention.
An 1851 book called Gutta Percha: Its Discovery, History, and Manifold Uses cataloged the things that were being made less than a decade after Montgomerie brought back samples for the Royal Society. Some applications were eminently practical:
This and all images from this book are in the public domain
Others were the kind of household junk that is now made from plastic:
Gutta-percha was especially good for making tubes, and people made great use of it for communications:
Here, a preacher’s words are transmitted via gutta-percha to his parishoners:
And here it’s used to make a sort of intercom:
In fact, communications became the most revolutionary use of gutta-percha. The telegraph was one of the most transformative technologies of the age, and people dreamed of a transoceanic telegraph network by which people in New York could communicate with their counterparts in London.
The problem wasn’t just making a really long cable; the cable needed to be insulated and protected from the elements by a flexible but durable substance. Rubber degraded too quickly, but gutta-percha turned out to be the miracle substance that made global communication possible. Gutta-percha made laying the cable possible:
The successful laying of transatlantic cables was seen as one of the most significant moments of the century, heralding a new era of interconnection.
Gutta-percha was a miracle substance, endlessly useful and immensely profitable. What happened to it?
It — and the rainforests from which it hailed — were a victim of its usefulness. The miracles of gutta-percha that people in Europe and North America hailed were only possible because of a laborious and destructive extraction process. Historian John Tully describes how people got their gutta-percha:
After choosing a suitable "victim," the woodsmen would build a primitive wooden stage that reached just below the level where the buttress ended and the smooth bole of the tree began, perhaps fourteen to sixteen feet above the ground… When the tree crashed to the forest floor, the branches would be lopped off to prevent the latex from being drawn into the leaves by osmotic force. The latex is found in narrow reservoirs running as black lines through the heartwood, and the woodsmen would make incisions into the trunk to drain these into bamboo bowls, coconut shells, or even holes in the ground. This was a time-consuming process, because the thick latex flows very slowly and coagulates quickly into a solid mass upon exposure to air. Following collection, the latex would be roughly but painstakingly washed several times and rubbed before being rolled into sheets and folded into blocks… The felled trees were left to rot on the jungle floor, with most of the latex untapped within them.
One observer estimated that almost 70,000 gutta-percha trees had been cut down in Singapore alone between 1845 and 1847. That was just a prelude to the destruction to come. The estimates by Westerners of the destruction are staggering. One estimated that, over a 20-year period in the Sarawak region of Borneo, perhaps 3 million trees were killed to satisfy global demand. Another thought that five million trees were cut down in Borneo in 1879 alone. Another estimated that somewhere between one million and 26 million trees had been harvested in Borneo by 1900.
In short, no one knew exactly how often a scene like this, where four men cut down a gutta-percha tree in Sarawak in the late 19th century, took place. But they knew it happened a lot, and that there weren’t many trees left after a while.
Gutta-percha trees became much less common in the wild by the 1880s, and local people in the areas where they grew became less interested in going deep into the forest to harvest the stuff for some telegraph cable halfway around the world.
Shortages and environmental degradation threatened to kill the industry, but Dutch manufacturers figured out how to more sustainably harvest the substance from younger plants on farms, deriving the sap from their leaves. This sustained the industry, which supplied the cable industry and others for a few more decades. “Gutty” golf balls, for example, were made of gutta-percha well into the 20th century:
Eventually, however, plastic came to rule the world. Polymers supplanted and surpassed gutta-percha everywhere, bringing new conveniences — and new types of environmental damage — into our lives just as gutta-percha did for the people of the 19th century.
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