Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

by Tony Horwitz

Earlier that week, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had delivered a five-hour diatribe about Kansas, accusing the “Slave Power” of perpetrating “the rape of a Virgin Territory” by “hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization.” Sumner also heaped invective on Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, whom he mocked for making great claims to chivalry while taking as his mistress “the harlot, Slavery.” Butler was ill and absent from the chamber. But a kinsman from South Carolina, Congressman Preston Brooks, accosted Sumner on the floor of the Senate on May 22, as Lawrence smoldered. Brooks told Sumner his speech was “a libel on South Carolina and against my relative Senator Butler.” Then he beat the Massachusetts senator hard enough to splinter the gold-headed cane he used to do it. Sumner fell to the floor, bloodied and unconscious, so badly hurt that he did not return to the Senate for three years. Brooks, meanwhile, became an instant southern celebrity, hailed for having “lashed into submission” the Senate’s most vocal abolitionist.