The 1856 Brooks-Sumner incident was not between two Senators. Sumner was a Senator, Preston Brooks was a House member, as was Laurence Keitt, both from South Carolina.
Sumner precipitated the event by insulting Brooks’s cousin, the Senator from South Carolina, Andrew Butler. He did so when Butler was absent from the body, which was considered bad form, as Butler could not answer the epithets thrown at him. Sen. Stephen Douglas watched Sumner’s tirade and remarked his mouth was going to get him killed.
Contrary to what some recall, Brooks didn’t just burst in when it was going on. Someone first informed him of the insult to his cousin and Brooks, in his cousin’s absence, debated upon how to respond with friends. As Sumner was considered the lowest life-form imaginable to most Southerners, challenging him to a duel was out. Dueling was for gentlemen. Brooks settled upon beating Sumner like a rabid dog.
Two days later, Brooks, with 2 other House colleagues, marched over to the Senate, when Sumner was spotted there. Brooks told him the score and using his gutta-percha walking stick, he walloped the warmongering Yankee until the stick broke. His intention was not to kill him, just to beat him within an inch. Brooks’s colleague, Keitt, held off anyone trying to come to Sumner’s aid during the corporal punishment with a pistol. Brooks actually injured himself as the stick struck him when it bounced off Sumner.
It, of course, became an instant flash point for the country (frankly, I think Sumner instigated on purpose because he expected it would incite violence upon his person - he did more to get the war started and to divide the nation than almost any other political figure to that point). Sumner took 3 years to recuperate, by which time the war was about to start. Sen. Butler, the subject of the insult, died the following year.
Faced with expulsion, both Reps. Brooks and Keitt resigned from the House. Brooks became an instant hero in the South and received countless gutta-percha sticks to replace his broken one. Both he and Keitt ran in the special elections caused by their own resignations and handily won. However, Brooks became ill with the croup (usually a baby’s illness) and died just 8 months after his beating of Sumner. Keitt would die in battle in the Civil War. Sumner remained in the Senate until his death 18 years later, and still suffered the effects of the beating.
BTW, it was Keitt that precipitated the 1858 brawl that involved some 50 House members, after he got in a verbal altercation with PA Congressman Galusha Grow (later Speaker). Apparently, it only came to an abrupt halt when the toupe of MS Congressman William Barksdale got knocked off in the fracas, and when he grabbed for it to put it back on, he set it backwards, which caused the entire body to break out in laughter.
Wow, I never heard of this 1858 brawl.