The Caning of an Abolitionist Senator
How a sensational beating in the Senate Chamber inadvertently led to the Civil War
Congressional Representative Preston S. Brooks, a slave-holding racist from South Carolina, was a relatively minor character in politics until May 22, 1856. On that date, he lands in the pages of history when he turned the Senate Chamber into a combat zone. After the Senators had adjourned, Brooks approached the diminutive Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts (for whom the Sumner Tunnel, which connects Boston Harbor to Logan Airport, is named). At the same time, he was preoccupied with writing a speech at his desk.
Sumner was an ardent opponent of slavery; Brooks was its staunchest proponent. For remarks the New Englander had made the day before opposing slavery (with a few asides about mistresses), Brooks began beating Sumner about the head with a metal-topped cane. He repeatedly slammed the unsuspecting Sumner with such swift vengeance that blood pouring from his open wounds blinded him, and he lurched about the chamber in stark agony.
After delivering near-fatal blows, Brooks wiped his cane with a handkerchief before pulling his collar into place and walking calmly out of the chamber without being detained. It was a day's work for a Southern Democrat. For the Republican Sumner, his recovery would take years. Despite his injuries, Sumner was reelected, and his empty desk in the Senate served as a reminder of the assault.
Lincoln's Election
Overnight, both men became heroes, respectively, in their regions. Sumner was a martyr in the North, and Brooks was a hero in the South. A sensational and relatively minor incident drew outsized attention that contributed to the rise of the Republican Party, setting the stage for Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 presidential election. The country needed a spectacle to focus the anxiety people were feeling, and now they had a bloody good one. Surviving a House censure resolution, Brooks resigned his Congressional seat but was immediately reelected and, soon after that, died at age 37. Sumner recovered slowly and returned to the Senate, where he remained for another 18 years.
The beating inadvertently brought much greater attention to the cause of racism in the United States, revealing the grand divide between North and South, and played a role in the transformation of the Republican Party into a significant political force. The nation, suffering from the breakdown of reasoned discourse that the event symbolized, tumbled onward toward the catastrophe of civil war.
It could be said that Brooks's sensational hostility led to an unbridgeable divide between North and South, which eventually turned into the war itself and ironically resulted in a final epitaph of the era of slavery.
