While he was the recipient of the caning, I do not believe he deserves true victim status. He had insulted a fellow senator, insinuating that he had a slave mistress, and ridiculing him for his inability to speak clearly(the senator in question had suffered a stroke). As the offended senator in question was in no shape to defend his own honour, his cousin took matters into his own hands.
The speech provoking the caning, not the caning itself, marks an end to civil discourse.
Ah. An offense to “honor”
Basically the same reason Trayvon Martin attacked George Zimmerman.
“He had insulted a fellow senator, insinuating that he had a slave mistress, and ridiculing him for his inability to speak clearly(the senator in question had suffered a stroke). “
He did nothing of the sort. It was an easily understood metaphor, except to a moron;
“Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and 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”
And he also did not ridicule his speech impediment. The actual words;
“[He] “touches nothing which he does not disfigure with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact. He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder”
A blunder of principle or fact. Again, very clear.
As for slave mistress allegations, they did happen. Butler the southerner accused Sumner of supporting abolition so he could have interracial marriage.
SO yeah, he was an innocent victim. The fact is, he entered things into argument that could not be refuted with rhetoric, so the duller one had to attack.
He had no other tools.