When Sumner was caned

The territory was embroiled in violence as pro- and anti-slavery forces battled over whether Kansas would join the Union as a slave state or a free state.

Sumner's speech, which he delivered over two days, was a passionate denunciation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the federal law that left it up to the residents of each new state to decide whether human bondage would be allowed within their borders.

"Sumner's speech had drawn an unusually large audience," writes the historian David Herbert Donald in "Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War," his enthralling biography of the Bay State senator. The galleries were filled to capacity, the doorways were crowded with spectators, and "virtually every member of the Senate was in his seat as Sumner began."

At first Sumner focused on the disastrous fallout of the 1854 law. But then his remarks turned personal. He poured scorn on the lawmakers who were responsible for this "Crime against Kansas" — "senators who raised themselves to eminence on this floor in championship of human wrong."

In particular he excoriated Democrats Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina, the chief sponsors of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He insulted Douglas as a "noisome, squat, and nameless animal" who "fills the Senate with . . . offensive odor."

As for Butler, Sumner sneered, "he believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage," but he consorts with "a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight." That mistress, he said, is "the harlot, Slavery." Among Northern abolitionists, reaction to the speech was ardent. The New York Tribune gushed that "Mr. Sumner has added a cubit to his stature." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called Sumner's oration "the greatest voice on the greatest subject that has been uttered."

But the Massachusetts senator's words infuriated Southerners — none more than Preston Brooks, a South Carolina congressman and Butler's cousin. On May 22, after the Senate had adjourned for the day, Brooks entered the chamber carrying a gold-headed walking stick. He walked up to Sumner, who was seated alone at his desk working on correspondence.

"With cool self-possession and formal politeness," writes Donald in his biography, he addressed the senator in a low voice.

"Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully," Brooks said. "It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine." Then he began striking Sumner with the metallic head of his cane, raining down repeated blows.

Sumner, stunned by the attack and blinded by the blood running into his eyes, staggered to his feet. Brooks kept beating him, striking with such ferocity that the cane snapped. Again and again he bashed Sumner, not stopping even when the senator lost consciousness.

"Brooks reached out and with one hand held Sumner up by the lapel of his coat while he continued to strike him with the other," recounts Donald. "By this time the cane had shivered to pieces."

The beating lasted no more than a minute, but its effect on American history would be long and terrible. Sumner was taken from the Senate drenched in blood. So devastating were his injuries that it would be three years before he recovered enough to return to his seat. For the rest of his life, the brain injuries he had suffered would cause severe chronic pain and what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder.

The damage to the nation's civic health was, if anything, even more traumatic. The attack confirmed that politics in America had grown polarized beyond salvation. Sumner became even more of a hero to abolitionists. His ordeal, which galvanized antislavery opinion, was powerfully symbolic: If one of the most influential white men in the country could be beaten senseless in the US Capitol, what recourse was there for an enslaved field hand brutalized by a cruel master?

Across the North, in cities large and small, public rallies were held to protest Brooks's assault. Hundreds of thousands of copies of Sumner's speech were distributed. Support for the new Republican Party surged.

Throughout the South, by contrast, Brooks was lionized. The Richmond Enquirer hailed his attack on Sumner as "good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences." Another Virginia newspaper was chagrined only because Brooks had beaten the Massachusetts abolitionist with a cane instead of using "a horsewhip or a cowhide upon his slanderous back."

Hundreds of admirers sent new walking sticks to the congressman; one presented by the city of Charleston was inscribed: "Hit him again!" When the House of Representatives voted to censure Brooks, he promptly resigned, returned to South Carolina, and was reelected to his seat in a landslide.

What happened to Sumner convinced many Americans that the chasm separating North and South could never be resolved peacefully. The nation's two halves "no longer spoke the same language, shared the same moral code, or obeyed the same law," wrote Donald. More and more people "began to wonder how the Union could longer endure."

Nearly five years after the caning of Sumner, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president. "We must not be enemies," he pleaded in his inaugural address. "Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection." But those bonds had long since been broken. A murderous Civil War was the result.

Americans in our time, too, seem to have forgotten how to reason together, how to disagree without despising, how to prevent the fabric of society from ripping apart at the seams.

Discord and distrust are at crisis levels. For those with clashing world views and partisan loyalties, finding common ground has grown nearly impossible. Divergent opinions are treated as deadly threats, to be resisted not with courtesy and a willingness to hear each other out, but with hostility and slander. We too have witnessed shocking scenes of mayhem and violence in the Capitol Building.

The America Sumner and Brooks inhabited couldn't pull itself back from the brink.

Can we?

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."