Most American students learn in high school about the 1856 “caning” of Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks. Teachers love the incident because it serves as a tidy encapsulation of so many themes from that period of American history.
The attack stemmed, like so many problems in the 1850s, from the dispute over slavery. Sumner was a fierce abolitionist who had recently given an aggressive speech opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In that speech, he attacked Senator Andrew Butler from South Carolina in personal and sexually charged language designed to remind listeners of the sexual violence that many slaveowners perpetrated on their slaves:
The wickedness which I now begin to expose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which prompted it. Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the National Government… The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has 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.
It also reflects the Southern obsession with honor (which I wrote about a while back). Butler’s cousin, Representative Preston Brooks, saw these attacks as an unconscionable assault on his family honor and thought about challenging Sumner to a duel. But, deciding that Sumner was not of elevated enough social standing for a duel, he chose to just beat him up in public.
The main reason that teachers love this event is that it exemplifies just how frayed American political culture had become. That and the fact that it’s a dramatic, violent event guaranteed to catch the attention of even the most distracted high schooler. Brooks and two other pro-slavery congressmen (Laurence Keitt of South Carolina and Henry Edmundson of Virginia) went into the Senate chamber two days after Sumner’s speech and waited for any women who were present to leave (you wouldn’t want your savage beating of a U.S. Senator to scandalize a member of the fairer sex). They went up to Sumner and Brooks announced: "Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine."
And then he began a savage attack on Sumner. He hit him on the head before he could even get fully out of his chair. Sumner fell underneath his desk and was trapped for a time while Brooks continued to hammer away at his head. Sumner couldn’t see because there was so much blood pouring into his eyes. The senator tried to rise and defend himself, but Brooks kept hitting him. When the cane snapped, Brooks kept swinging, knocking Sumner unconscious with a piece of the cane while his buddies held bystanders at bay with a pistol.
1856 cartoon about the attack ( Public domain )
Sumner was unable to return to the Senate for three years because the physical and psychic toll of the attack was so great.
A few years ago, Albert Burnenko wrote a memorable take on the way we often refer to this event as the “caning” of Charles Sumner:
That is not a damn "caning"! That's just a frickin' psycho trying to kill a guy, and happening to use a cane as the murder weapon! Calling this a "caning" is like writing about a great white shark biting somebody's arm off and saying the person was subjected to "mouthing." You can say Brooks attacked Sumner with a cane or tried to kill him with a cane, that's fine, but it's not a damn "caning." I blame the persistence of "caning" as the word for this event on the fact that the American Civil War is pretty much the only conflict in world history whose story overwhelmingly has been told from the perspective of the shitbag slavers who lost it.
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