Senator Charles Sumner

The severe beating of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by Congressman Preston Brooks of North Carolina in the Senate Chamber on the afternoon of May 22, 1856 is emblematic of the increasing tension between the Northern and the Southern states over the issue of slavery.

Two days prior to the attack on Lawrence, Kansas, Sumner rose in the Senate and delivered a three-hour-speech in which he denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its authors, Senators Steven Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of North Carolina. Not content to limit his criticism to the details of the Act, Sumner launched a vicious personal diatribe on its authors. He called Douglas a "noisome, squat and nameless animal" and made derogatory remarks about the slurred speech and scuffling gait of Butler who had recently suffered a stroke.

Two days later, on the afternoon of May 22 and the day of the sack of Lawrence, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, and also Senator Butler's nephew, physically attacked Sumner as he sat at his desk in the Senate Chamber. Beating him severely with a cane, his attacker left the Senator blinded, bloodied and unconscious on the Senate floor. Senator Sumner was so severely injured that he did not return to his Senate seat for three years.