He opposed slavery. So he was beaten nearly to death on the Senate floor by a Southern congressman
In 1856, the Massachusetts senator was bludgeoned nearly to death by a South Carolina congressman. The assailant went unpunished.
Not long ago, something truly strange or, depending on your perspective, amusing or shocking occurred on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Two Republican representatives — Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of South Carolina, engaged in a nasty exchange, culminating in Greene calling Boebert a “little bitch.”
The ostensible source of their discord was Greene accusing Boebert of hijacking her proposal to impeach President Biden (prompting a friend to remark, “Not something to hear everyday - you bitch! You stole my articles of impeachment!") Apparently, the feud between the two right-wingers runs deeper than this latest proximate cause. They just don’t like each other.
Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert (left), Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (right)
photo credit: Gary Skidmore
But when it comes to conflict between members on the hallowed floors of Congress, their verbal clash doesn’t come close to what happened more than 150 years ago on the floor of the Senate.
Some background. In 1850, Kentucky Sen. Henry Clay, known as The Great Compromiser (this was considered high praise in that era), engineered passage of a series of bills intended to prevent a civil war between the Southern slave states and Northern free states.
The Compromise of 1850 was actually several pieces of related legislation. One measure approved California's entry into the Union as a free state. Another was the Fugitive Slave Act, an audacious affront to the principles this young nation said it stood for. Among its provisions, it authorized federal law enforcement to track down and apprehend fugitive slaves, to be returned to their "owners." It denied the former slaves - or even just suspected former slaves - the right to testify in their own defense. In fact, they weren't even entitled to a jury trial. Federal commissioners who issued warrants, deposed witnesses and dispatched agents to track down runaway slaves were to be paid $10 by the slave owners for each person returned to them, as a kind of an added incentive.
Meanwhile, trouble was brewing west of Missouri, a slave state. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act created two territories that were candidates for statehood. The act gave the residents of each of the proposed states the right to decide whether they would enter as slave or free states, in violation of a law passed 30 years earlier banning slavery in those parts of the West. In the Kansas Territory, that provoked what amounted to a mini-civil war between anti- and pro-slavery Kansans. The conflict was so violent, it became known as Bleeding Kansas.
Sen. Charles Sumner, photo credit: Boston Public Library
This chain of events stunned and outraged abolitionists. One of them was a Boston lawyer named Charles Sumner. But Sumner wasn't just an abolitionist impelled by moral repugnance, he was a white man who held the unusual belief that Black human beings were the equals to whites, a concept not shared even by many Northerners.
In 1845, Sumner had represented a Black plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging public school segregation. They lost the case, but the state legislature banned school segregation 10 years later. In 1851, Sumner was elected to the Senate as a member of the anti-slavery Free Soil Party (he would later become a Republican).
A forceful, brilliant, at times emotional speaker, he inveighed against the evils of human bondage. While other politicians strove to avoid a civil war between North and South, he argued that it was not just inevitable but necessary to eradicate the institution of slavery.
Sen. Charles Sumner, photo credit: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Frederick Hill Meserve Collection
On May 19, 1856, Sumner rose to speak on the Senate floor.
"My soul is wrung by the outrage and I shall pour it forth," he intoned.
He poured forth all right, denouncing the intrusion of pro-slavery Missourians into the Kansas Territory, branding them "hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization."
He was just getting started.
In a burst of grandiloquent oratory, Sumner excoriated senators who had supported the Fugitive Slave Act, including one Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, who he called "a Don Quixote who had chosen 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. I mean, the harlot, Slavery."
Today, a certain presidential candidate can casually deride his opponents as liars and crooks without causing much uproar. But in those days, personal attacks were considered unseemly, even dishonorable.
"(Sumner's) accusation against a fellow senator and condemnation of the entire state of South Carolina, Butler's home, shocked even those who agreed with Sumner's assessment of the situation in Kansas," wrote historian Edward Alexander. "Southerners meanwhile deemed the Massachusetts abolitionist's rhetoric as incendiary. Some personally viewed it as an affront to their honor."
Preston S. Brooks was a House member from South Carolina and a distant relative of Senator Butler's (Butler himself had not been in the Senate when Sumner spoke).
"Brooks believed Sumner had insulted Brooks's prided institution of slavery, his family, his state and himself," Alexander wrote.
To Brooks, Sumner wasn't worthy of challenging to a duel. Duels were for gentlemen.
On the 22nd of May, Congressman Butler entered the Senate floor just after it had adjourned. Sumner was at his desk, gathering papers. Butler, ever gallant, waited until the women in the gallery had departed before approaching Sumner.
"Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech with great care," he said to Sumner. "I feel it my duty to say to you that you have published a libel on my state, and uttered slander upon a relative, who is aged and absent, and I am come to punish you."
Brooks walked with a limp from a previous dueling wound and carried a cane. He raised the wooden stick and began to viciously beat Sumner in the head. Trying to rise, Sumner's legs got caught under the desk which was bolted to the floor and he was unable to extricate himself as the the gentleman from South Carolina continued to bash him in the skull, again and again.
Brooks would proudly recount later that he had given Sumner "about 30 first rate stripes. Every lick went where I intended it. I plied him so rapidly that he did not touch me. Towards the last he bellowed like a calf."
At first, a fellow South Carolina congressman who had accompanied Brooks brandished a pistol to prevent anyone from coming to Sumner's aid. Finally, bystanders were able to rescue Sumner and lead him away, dazed and bleeding profusely.
A Senate select committee that was convened to investigate the assault on Sumner concluded there was nothing in the Senate rules that allowed it to discipline Brooks. It referred the matter to the House, which voted to remove Brooks from office. But the motion failed to get the needed two-thirds majority for passage as the Southern bloc rallied around Brooks.
Brooks subsequently resigned and then ran for his old House seat. Hailed as a hero throughout the South and showered with accolades in the Southern press, he was easily reelected, but died shortly afterward at the age of 37.
Sumner was badly wounded. It would be three years before he could return full-time to the Senate. The first speech he gave in 1860 was entitled The Barbarism of Slavery.
Sumner would spend the rest of his life as a Senator and a fierce proponent of equal rights for African-Americans. He died in 1874 at the age of 63.
In the decades after his death, Sumner was widely honored. The first school for Black children west of the Mississippi was named for him in 1975. There's a statue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Towns were named after him in Iowa, Oregon, Washington and Nebraska and a county in Kansas. Many streets in many cities bear his name, including one in the Dominican Republic and another in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Charles Sumner Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas was built in 1935-36 to be a school for Black students, but white parents liked it so much, they demanded it for their children, so it became an all-white school Years later, it would play a key role in the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. (Topeka) Board of Education decision. One of the plaintiffs was a Black child who had been refused admission to the all-white school named for one of the great American abolitionists.
Sumner statue, Cambridge, Massachusetts, photo credit: Boston City Archives
Despite all the street and town names, today Sumner is an obscure figure in American history. Once he was a titan. He was a man who dared to demand, when few others did that as Martin Luther King would say a century later, "one day this nation will live up to its creed ... that all men are created equal."
For this, he was beaten senseless on the floor of the United States Congress. For this, he deserves to be remembered on this American holiday.
Ron, I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of Sumner. What a man. What a story.
Fantastic. Grateful to learn about Sumner. Heartening ti know of people fighting the good fight going that far back. Proof of resistance against equity for Black Americans that continues to this day, sanctioned and enabled, at the highest levels. Thanks for this Ron.