Whitewashed version?
His speech seemed on point to me, it was harsh but the truth was harsh, slavery was evil and we still live with it’s consequences, having an unruly population of Afro-Americans. Seems he wrote it before hand so it’s not his fault Butler wasn’t there, was it? The war was gonna happen, absent massive statesmanship that certainly wasn’t being offered by the losers who preceded Lincoln as President or by congressional democrats.
In any case, different time or not you cannot beat a man half to death on the floor of the Senate for talking smack about your cuz.
Whitewashed, as in “Sumner the martyr” being beaten down for speaking about slavery, when it was a deliberate, incendiary speech attacking a well-respected Southern Senator in what was (then) some of the most guttural and vile terms imaginable. Sumner would not have been permitted to make the speech today as it violates Senate decorum and rules (as we saw last week with Fauxcahontas similarly attempting to impugn the character of Jeff Sessions. Lizzie Warren curiously sits in Sumner’s seat today).
Sumner could have made his point about slavery without resorting to personal attacks on the floor, or the cowardly stance of delivering the speech when the subject of his attack was not present. It was not a high point of that body’s history. A real statesman would’ve tried every imaginable way to prevent a civil war. Sumner just wanted blood and to douse the burning divisions with gasoline. Ghoulish more in the style of leftist Democrats today and their deliberate methods to incite rather than unite.
Add to that, the hypocrisy of many Northern Republicans on the issue of slavery in being so concerned about “Black issues” from so far away where they scarcely had to deal with it close-up. If Sumner had been as “high minded” after the Civil War (he served until his death in 1874, having switched to the Liberal Republican Party for the 1872 elections, essentially a Democrat Party opposing President Grant), he would’ve prescribed removing emancipated slaves en masse from the South to take up residence safe in the bosom of the tolerant peoples of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Of course, had he done that, he’d have likely been lynched by his White constituents (and somewhere Preston Brooks would’ve been smiling at the irony).