MAY 22, 1856:
Congressman Preston
Brooks of South Carolina savagely beats Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner
with a gutta-percha cane on the floor of the Senate chamber.
Sumner sustains a
fractured skull, a swollen brain and injuries to his spinal cord, and does not return
to the Senate for three years. Massachusetts keeps his seat open as a reproach
to pro-slavery sentiment.
Sumner had made inflammatory comments about Brooks'
cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew D. Butler, in Butler's absence during a
speech attacking the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
It is a sign of
the times that Brooks is not charged, that Southern newspapers almost
universally laud the attack, and that Northern papers put it down to the
“arrogance of the Slave Power.” Many
members of the Southern public send gifts of new gutta-percha canes to the
Congressman. A town in Florida and a
county in Texas are renamed in his honor. Brooks resigns his seat, but is
re-elected in the next cycle; before he can return to Washington he contracts croup
from which "he died a horrid death, and suffered intensely."
Sumner
later charitably describes his attacker as “the unconscious agent of a malign
power.”
In response to the attack, Congressmen begin arming themselves before
coming to the Capitol Building.
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