Posted on 04/01/2016 5:01:32 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
So hard to be objective about the caning of Senator Sumner. Acts of “Legislative Violence” in the United States Congress are rare, but of the four acts of violence in the Capitol between legislators, three of them were over slavery including this one. The first, but not the last “fight” over slavery.
On the one hand, a brutal attack on the floor of the Senate does not bode well for the Republic. What Sumner said wasn’t anything worse than what the southern Senators and Congressmen had said about northern abolitionist members. And the response was far from commensurate with the speech. On the other hand, you will notice the deliberate omission of the word “unprovoked” in my description of the assault. The reason I find it hard to be objective is that Sumner seemed to go out of his way to provoke the southern Senators. I wonder if he deliberately provoked them into an act of violence just to further his political agenda.
The breakdown in public discourse in a polarized nation...the deliberate provocation to violence...it all seems eerily familiar today.
Oh well, at least our Senators never assassinated a President by stabbing him to death under the statue of one of his rivals. Not yet, anyway.
This is the cane used in the attack.
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Link to Chicopee Weekly Journal
Nicole Etcheson, "Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era"
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