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Chapter VIII - Kansas and Congress Bleed
Kansas and Congress Bleed 1855 - 1856
Foreboding events brewing in the Kansas territories after the Kansas-Nebraska Act further divided the North and South. In 1855, thousands of determined proslavery Americans poured into the territory and attempted to establish a proslavery government. "Border ruffians" from Missouri swept into Kansas to pack territorial legislatures and vote illegally, vowing to kill every "God damned abolitionist in the Territory." To further aggravate the already explosive situation, free state forces rejected the proslavery government and wrote a state constitution which excluded not only slavery but free black people as well. Thus, the territory had two illegal governments struggling for recognition and control making violence inevitable in what became known as "Bleeding Kansas."
In May 1856, vicious proslavery guerrillas attacked the antislavery town of Lawrence, Kansas. The "sack of Lawrence" outraged free-state supporters, including the infamous fanatic John Brown. Brown, the father of twenty, was described by a friend as a man instilled in childhood with the "idea that God had raised him up on purpose to break the jaws of the wicked." Fulfilling what he clearly perceived as his ultimate destiny, Brown quietly planned revenge. He and his reputed "family of murderers" savagely attacked the proslavery settlement of Pottawatomie on May the 4th, dragging five men from their houses and hacking them to death in front of their screaming wives and sobbing children. The Pottawatomie Massacre set off a vindictive and bloody civil war in Kansas which would kill two hundred people and destroy at least two million dollars' worth of property.
Violent emotions stirred up by this civil war spilled over into the tension-filled halls of Congress. Abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts outspokenly condemned the "rape of virgin territory" and blamed the bloodshed on the South's "depraved longing for a new slave state." Continuing his tirade, Sumner personally attacked South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler, accusing him of lusting after the "harlot slavery" and ridiculing what he called Butler's "incoherent phrases" spoken in slavery's defense.
Butler's nephew, Representative Preston Brooks, also of South Carolina, first retaliated by charging Sumner with libel. Then on May 22, Brooks furiously entered the senate chamber and used his sturdy walking stick to beat Sumner repeatedly in the face and head. Struggling in vain to protect himself, Sumner wrenched his desk from the floor as he collapsed unconscious. Later Brooks gleefully boasted to his friends, "Towards the last he bellowed like a calf. I wore my cane out completely but saved the head which is gold." Sumner was so badly injured that he could not resume his duties for three years, but sympathetic Massachusetts voters reelected him in spite of his inability to participate in Congress. (One hundred years later future president John F. Kennedy would sit at Sumner's desk as a Massachusetts congressman.) As for Brooks, after the House of Representatives condemned his action, he resigned and then gloated when his fellow South Carolinians defiantly reelected him. From all over the South, Brooks' admirers sent him new canes as a symbol of his "just deed."
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