Senator Charles Sumner caned on Senate floor in 1856, escalating pre-Civil War tensions

The Speech

On May 19 and 20, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered his "Crime Against Kansas" speech in the U.S. Senate. The printed version ran 95 pages, but the brilliant scholar, writer, and Harvard-trained lawyer delivered the speech entirely from memory.

A rhetorical and provocative tour de force, Sumner attacked Southerners and their Northern "doughface" allies for:

• The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Compromise of 1820's ban on slavery in territories north and west of Missouri
• The ongoing violence designed to force slavery on the Kansas Territory

The act was sponsored by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who claimed he did not care if slavery was voted "up or down" (and whose wife owned approximately 100 slaves on a Mississippi plantation).

Sumner's speech was a biting, sarcastic, and penetrating attack on proslavery Senators intent on spreading slavery into the West. It included personal attacks on proslavery Senators.

Comparing South Carolina's Senator Andrew Butler to Don Quixote, Sumner said the slavery stalwart:

"believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage" who had "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. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator."

The context makes this even sharper: Rumors abounded that Butler had fathered children with his own slave. Sumner asserted Butler "touches nothing which he does not disfigure with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact. He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder."

Butler had recently suffered a stroke, and his speech was impaired. So along with the innuendos about his slave mistress, the invective of the speech was deeply personal. Sumner compared Senator Douglas to Don Quixote's faithful servant, "the senator from Illinois is the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices."

The Attack

On May 22, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina (a cousin of Senator Butler) quietly slipped into the Senate after adjournment, carrying a heavy metal-tipped cane. Sumner was writing letters at a desk that folded over the head of the occupant, so the New Englander could not get out of his chair without first lifting the desk over his head.

Brooks snuck up behind Sumner and, after briefly shouting at him, began to beat Sumner with the cane. He only stopped when the cane broke. Sumner managed to stand up during the attack but then fell to the floor bleeding profusely. While Brooks beat Sumner from behind, another southern representative waved a cane, threatening to hit anyone who interfered with the attack.

Sumner eventually returned to the Senate but only after three years recovering from what today would be diagnosed as traumatic brain injury. During this period, the Massachusetts legislature re-elected him to the Senate. (This of course predates the direct election of senators, which began in 1913.) For the rest of his life, Sumner was plagued by the injuries he sustained.

The Man Behind the Cane

The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War by Paul Quigley (Oxford University Press, 244 pp.)

The caning of Sumner was a dramatic moment on the road to the Civil War. For Northerners, it illustrated the violence and intolerance of the slave South. Brooks ambushed Sumner from behind to defend the honor of his cousin, his state, and slaveholders.

As Paul Quigley details in The Man Behind the Cane, an important, elegantly written, and carefully researched book, Brooks was afraid to challenge Sumner "face-to-face" because he feared that Sumner might win a fair fight. At the time, Sumner was 45, and Brooks was 36. Both were tall and in good health. But the "bully" Brooks (as he became known) was taking no chances with the trim and athletic Sumner. Brooks, who became the face of southern "chivalry" because of this near homicide, believed the sneak attack was appropriate because Sumner's insults had to be avenged.

The sneak attack "proved" to Northerners (and many in Europe) that slaveowners like Brooks were inherently violent, dangerous, and uncivilized. The attack also illustrated the chasm between southern white slave owning culture and the rest of the nation. Slaveowners like Butler lobbed personal and nasty insults at Northerners, including innuendos about the bachelor Sumner's sexuality, but when Northerners responded in kind, as Sumner had, they were challenged to duels, threatened with violence, and, in the case of Sumner, nearly killed. Neither Brooks nor his cousin Butler had the rhetorical skills.