Over two days — May 19 and May 20 in 1856 — Sumner delivered a stinging antislavery speech on the Senate floor that accused Southern leaders of undermining democracy. An outraged congressman, Preston Brooks of South Carolina, lashed out on May 22 to avenge the South’s honor. With a gold-tipped gutta-percha cane, Brooks beat Sumner so badly that the cane shattered into pieces. Rendered unconscious, Sumner soaked in a pool of his own blood in what is now the Old Senate Chamber.
Though Sumner barely survived, his assault breathed new life into the antislavery movement. Voters recognized a parallel between Sumner’s beating and the beatings that those enslaved in the South experienced daily. In the fall of 1856, outraged Northerners elected scores of politicians who went to Washington demanding that slavery be abolished or restricted.
“No one act,” Frederick Douglass observed, “did more to rouse the North.”
High school students learn about Sumner’s caning in U.S. history class, but few grasp the full story. As threats of political violence rise, it’s appropriate to revisit the caning to learn three lessons that most history textbooks overlook.
The first is that many politicians rejected America’s founding texts, sacrosanct as they are, in the lead-up to the Civil War. One of the senators who hated Sumner the most, John Pettit of Indiana, belittled the immortal words that Thomas Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence: the phrase “all men are created equal.” A proslavery statesman who embraced white supremacy, Pettit scorned this Jeffersonian ideal of human equality as “a self-evident lie.”
After nearly killing Sumner, Brooks barely faced any consequences and became a celebrity at proslavery rallies across the South. At one such rally with an estimated 10,000 attendees, Brooks declared that “the Constitution of the United States should be torn to fragments.” Openly calling for a treasonous insurrection, Brooks — an enslaver — said he wanted “a Southern Constitution formed in which every state should be a slave state.”
The second lesson is that anti-constitutional rhetoric from politicians, as the caning shows, can overlap with direct political violence. Only weeks before the caning, David Rice Atchison of Missouri — the former president pro tempore of the Senate — led an armed gang into the territory of Kansas. With bowie knives and guns, Atchison’s men seized polling locations, intimidated voters and stuffed thousands of fraudulent ballots into the voting boxes. Their goal was to ensure that Kansas voted to become a slavery state, even if it required violence and election fraud to make it happen. “If we win,” Atchison told his thugs, “we can carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean.”