Preston Brooks Beats Charles Sumner on Senate Floor, Southern Elite Celebrates Violence

Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, enters the Senate chamber and beats Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death with a metal-topped cane, striking him repeatedly on the head while Sumner attempts futilely to protect himself. The attack follows Sumner’s May 19-20 “Crime Against Kansas” speech denouncing the violence in Kansas Territory and personally criticizing Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, Brooks’s cousin, for his defense of slavery. Brooks believes Sumner has insulted his family, state, and the institution of slavery, but rather than challenge Sumner to a duel—the traditional recourse among social equals—Brooks chooses a caning as a more humiliating punishment, explicitly signaling he considers the abolitionist senator his social inferior. The assault continues until Brooks’s cane breaks, leaving Sumner with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder requiring three years of convalescence before he can return to the Senate.

The institutional response to the assault demonstrates the Slave Power’s capture of government accountability mechanisms and the complete collapse of consequences for political violence in defense of slavery. Brooks is arrested, tried, and convicted in a District of Columbia court but receives only a $300 fine (equivalent to $10,500 in 2024) with no prison sentence. A House motion for Brooks’s expulsion fails to achieve the required two-thirds majority. Brooks resigns on July 15, 1856, but only to permit his constituents to “ratify or condemn his conduct” through a special election—they overwhelmingly approve, returning him to office on August 1 in a landslide. South Carolinians send Brooks dozens of replacement canes, the University of Virginia’s Jefferson Society sends a gold-headed cane, and Southern lawmakers make rings from the original cane’s remains which they wear on neck chains to show solidarity. This celebration of violence against a sitting senator for expressing antislavery views reveals how thoroughly southern elite culture has embraced physical intimidation as a legitimate political tactic.

The caning’s political impact proves enormous: historian William Gienapp concludes Brooks’s “assault was of critical importance in transforming the struggling Republican party into a major political force.” The new Republican Party uses “Bleeding Kansas” and “Bleeding Sumner” as twin rallying cries in the 1856 elections, painting pro-slavery Democrats as violent extremists willing to beat senators unconscious for political speech. Ralph Waldo Emerson captures northern sentiment: “I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one state.” Massachusetts keeps Sumner’s empty Senate seat as a symbol during his three-year recovery. The caning exemplifies kakistocracy through the complete absence of meaningful consequences for political violence: a $300 fine for nearly killing a senator, constituent celebration of the assault, and the transformation of the weapon into honored relics demonstrate how thoroughly institutions fail when captured by interests (slavery) willing to employ violence to suppress opposition and maintain power.