Political Career
He was a member of the South Carolina state House of Representatives in 1844. Brooks was elected to the 33rd United States Congress in 1853 as a Democrat. Like his fellow South Carolina Representatives and Senators, Brooks took an extreme pro-slavery position: asserting that the enslavement of black people by whites was right and proper, that any attack or restriction on slavery was an attack on the rights and the social structure of the South.
During Brooks' service as Representative, there was a great controversy over slavery in Kansas Territory and whether Kansas would be admitted as a free or slave state. He supported actions by pro-slavery men from Missouri to make Kansas a slave territory. (See Bleeding Kansas.) In March 1856, Brooks wrote: "The fate of the South is to be decided with the Kansas issue. If Kansas becomes a hireling State, slave property will decline to half its present value in Missouri ... abolitionism will become the prevailing sentiment. So with Arkansas; so with upper Texas."
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