The Caning of Charles Sumner on the Senate Floor

The outspoken statesman and abolitionist Charles Sumner served as a senator from 1851-1874. Learn how Senator Sumner's 1865 protest against the Kansas-Nebraska Act prompted one of the most violent altercations in senatorial history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Doddie and Sarah and
I have decided that this is the fall of angry outbursts.
We have been spending this morning Kanye buying the house

(00:22):
Stuff Works homepage for each other. It's pretty entertaining. And
then we have Serena Williams and then of course South
Carolina Congressman Joe. I'll let you finish, Katie. I like
you and I'm gonna let you finish. That one's for you, Kanye.
But probably the biggest angry outburst of the season has
been that of Congressman Joe Wilson against President Obama during

(00:46):
his speech on healthcare when he yelled you lie. Which
we were all aboves for a few days about that one,
and all the accounts of this have called it an
unprecedented breach of protocol, but it reminded us some other
interesting events in history where protocol was severely breached, and
that would be the caning of Senator Charles Sumner by

(01:09):
Representative Preston Brooks in May eighteen fifty six, and before
we get too much into the caning. It helps to
know a little bit about the background. And this violent
beating was the result of a speech that Sumner gave
called Crimes against Kansas from the Senate floor, and back
in eighteen fifty four, a couple of years before he

(01:31):
gave this speech. We have the Kansas Territory, which isn't
a state yet, but it's the perfect candidate for statehood.
And Southerners thought the North was overwhelming them economically and
they were really wanting a new slave state. But unfortunately
for them, that's impossible because of where the Kansas Territory

(01:52):
is situated, it falls outside of the boundaries permitted for
slavery by the Missouri Compromise. So if Kansas becomes state
under the Missouri Compromise, it's going to be a free state. Right.
And this really bothers a senator from Illinois, Senator Stephen Douglas,
who you might know for his later debates with Abraham Lincoln.

(02:14):
Now it's not like Senator Stephen Douglas is really for
slavery or particularly invested in this in a political way.
It's more about his own business interests, all about the money, yeah,
and his personal political ambition. So he knows that if

(02:35):
the Kansas Territory goes up for statehood, there's no way
Southern Democrats are going to vote for it because they're
not going to allow another free state to enter the Union.
So he goes to them to make a deal. He
needs their support anyways, He's planning on running for president
in two years and needs some Southern Democrats support. But

(02:55):
he goes to them and tells them that he'll help
them repeal the Missouri Compromise and get Kansas in as
a slave state, and in return, he's going to get
new territory to run his railroad through, which is what
he's after all along, and bring in the money to
his terminus in Chicago. Gotcha, So they set up the

(03:15):
Kansas Nebraska Act in eighteen fifty four, Senator Andrew Butler
of South Carolina along with Senator Stephen Douglas, and the
Kansas Nebraska Act provided for the territorial organization of Kansas
and Nebraska under popular sovereignty. Basically, you could have a vote,
and this ends up with Kansas being flooded by pro

(03:39):
slavery and anti slavery people. These aren't folks who just oh, Wow,
I never realized how much I wanted to live in Kansas.
They're moving there for their political agendas. So the Northerners
actually um move anti slavery settlers into Kansas, and this
really outrages uh, this really outrages pro slavery people in

(04:02):
Missouri who are upset that these Yankees are moving in
to Kansas to try to sway the vote, so they
fled the state too. These are called the border Ruffians,
and UM, a lot of violence happens, and the Ruffians
actually end up winning this rigged, really kind of corrupt election.
And this period this is all known as Bleeding Kansas

(04:24):
because it is so incredibly violent. This is setting a
stage for the later training. But people are getting in
physical altercations about whether we should go with slavery or
go against it, which might remind you a little bit
of the Healthcare reformed town halls right now. But they
were getting in fights. They were pulling out their guns
and shooting people. This was not an amicable debate or

(04:47):
even you know, an angry political debate. This was a violent,
physical skirmish. You actually have a small civil war here.
The anti slavery people who don't accept the vote end
up setting up a provisional free state government, which is
denounced by the President, and you just have all this violence.
This is around the same time that John Brown, the

(05:08):
radical abolitionist, is killing people. And by October eighteen fifty
six you have about two people dead in Kansas. So
this brings us back. And it is May nineteenth, eighteen
fifty six, and Charles Sumner gets up to give a
speech to the Senate, and he talks for two days
in his Crimes against Kansas speech and specifically calls out

(05:32):
Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who we mentioned, and Andrew Butler
of South Carolina, who isn't present, so he can pretty
much say whatever he'd like about Butler, and he does
not spare any words. He charges him with and I quote,
taking a mistress who, though ugly to others, is always
lovely to him, though polluted in the sight of the world,
is chased in his sight, I mean the harlot slavery.

(05:54):
So making fun of his image as a gentleman and
someone who's chivalris Southern gentleman, right, I'm saying he's, you know,
captive to the charms of a prostitute called slavery. He
also gave a history of the struggle, what's been going
on with slavery in the country, and then a rundown
of all the types of apologies for slavery that people give,
you know, the ones that are absurd, the ones that

(06:16):
are infamous, the ones that are tyrannical. And the reaction
to his speech is more than a little heated. Lewis
Cass of Michigan calls him Unamerican and unpatriotic, which again
probably sounds familiar with the political debate in the past year.
James Murray Mason of Virginia calls him a liar in
the New Cane. Douglas himself so that Sumner wanted to
provoke them all into kicking him so he could get sympathy,

(06:38):
and that he was repudiating the Constitution. So Sumner fires
back and says the cast is disloyal to the founding
fathers and the Constitution. Sumner says Mason has plantation manners,
and he does not mean that as a compliment. And
to Douglas, Sumner says, the noisome, squat and nameless animal
to which I now refer is not a proper model

(06:59):
for the American cent itor. Will the Senator from Illinois
take notice? So things get nasty, but I like how
they still have to follow rules and saying will the
Senator from Illinois instead of you know that noisome animal?
Mr Douglas. This speech really upset Representative Preston Brooks, who
took it as an assault not only to his home

(07:20):
state of South Carolina, but to his kinsman. And he's
so angry that he wants to fight Sumner, but he
says that Sumner isn't a gentleman, so they're not in
the same footing, and he's not going to challenge him
to a duel, which is what you would normally do
in those circumstances. Instead, he's going to treat him like
the dog he is, So Bricks decides instead he will

(07:43):
Caine Sumner. So the Senate has adjourned early on this day,
and Sumner is still at his desk, which is bolted
to the ground, which is important to note because this
will turn out to be really bad. Actually, he's applying
his frank to copies of the speech, which must have
just even further outraged Brooks when he approached him. And

(08:03):
Brooks shows up with his friends at the Senate chambers
and comes up behind Sumner, doesn't warn him or anything,
and just wax him in the head with a gut
a purchase cane and proceeds to beat him violently until
Sumner is unconscious and covered in blood. Sumner makes weak
attempts to defend himself, but if you're hit on the

(08:25):
head with a cane unaware, what can you really do?
And he's sort of stuck at his desk and eventually
he crawls out of it and makes his way out,
but Brooks is still hitting him till the man is
unconscious and has to be carried out, and there were bystanders,
no one does anything. Brooks walks out of the Senate
at the end of it all, and what happens. You
might think he was horribly censured, but actually the South

(08:47):
is thrilled with Brooks. People send him inscribed canes because
he actually broke his other one beating Charles Sumner. People
throw dinner parties for him and gives speeches in his honor.
Favorite quote is from the Richmond Inquirer, and I got
this quote from a book by Anna Lawrence DAWs that says,
we trust other gentlemen will follow the example of Mr Brooks,

(09:09):
that so a curb may be imposed upon the truculence
and audacity of abolition speakers, if need be, let us
have a caning or cow hiding every day. If the
worst come to the worst, so much the sooner, so
much the better. And then they basically went on to
say that because these men, these antislavery people, weren't gentlemen,
you shouldn't treat them as such, and you should treat

(09:29):
them as the dogs they were. But some people were
sticking up for Sumner too. He became a hero in
his own state, and one of his colleagues, Anson Burlingham,
challenges Brooks to a duel, calls him a coward for
caning a man on the head, and um Brooks ends
up declining because the duels at Niagara Falls, and people

(09:50):
say Brooks he's basically just a bully. He's afraid of
anybody who might be a better shooter than him, or
who's bigger than him. And other people speak from the
Senate floor about Brooks's attack, calling it brutal, murderous, and cowardly.
And the man who said that, Wilson Sutherners, proposed that
he'd be beaten as well, and the speaker or had

(10:12):
to talk them out of it, and they then challenged
him to a duel and he said no. So things
just keep escalating. Was keen on caning, who was keen
on getting really physical about this, But it did change
public sentiment. It gave the North something of a personal
cause to rally around someone symbolic who could stand for

(10:33):
all the things that they wanted to fight. So the
Senate appoints a committee to look into the Brooks incident
and they handed off to the House and they can't
get the two thirds the needed to expel Brooks, which
is a bit surprising. It is surprising that they would
accept caning of one of their own on the floor.
That seems like it opens up a world of things

(10:55):
you really don't want to happen in your workplace. But
Brooks was censured. He ends up giving a speech where
he's just trumping himself up and he resigns in It's
fine three but he's reelected immediately. People of South Carolina
just love this guy, and uh it doesn't do much

(11:17):
good though, because he dies of the group in eighteen
fifty seven, which is a bad respiratory ailment. For those
who haven't heard of it. So there's a lesson here.
If you came someone until they're unconscious because you don't
like their political views, you will die of the croup
he heard here first. Meanwhile, Sumner is kept away from

(11:37):
the Senate for three years due to his canning stained injury. Serious.
It wasn't like he got hit, he got beaten broken.
But he's re elected to Massachusetts and serves for eighteen years.
So I think we know who won that one, and
it wasn't the man who died at the age of
thirty seven. And what of Kansas, which was the center

(12:01):
of this debate anyways, It's eventually admitted as a free
state in January of eight six one. And this is
just a sign of the rising tensions that end up
leading to the Civil War. And you can learn more
about the Civil War and other topics on the homepage,
where you'll also find Katie's blog at www dot how

(12:22):
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