Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The caning of Charles Sumner, or the Brooks–Sumner Affair, occurred on May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate chamber, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, used a walking cane to attack Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts.
Charles Sumner (January 6, 1811 – March 11, 1874) was an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1851 until his death in 1874. Before and during the American Civil War , he was a leading American advocate for the abolition of slavery .
Andrew Pickens Butler (November 18, 1796 – May 25, 1857) was an American lawyer, slaveholder, and United States senator from South Carolina who authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act with Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. [1] In 1856, abolitionist senator Charles Sumner gave a speech in which he
In the Senate, 14 Whigs, 14 Democrats, and 12 Free-Soilers were elected. In the House, 175 Whigs, 108 Democrats, and 113 Free-Soilers were elected. [1] Although the Democratic-Free Soil coalition held a clear majority in each house, some Democratic legislators voiced their opposition to the election of the radical abolitionist Sumner.
Other Republicans pointed to the violence in Kansas, the brutal assault on Senator Sumner, attacks upon the abolitionist press, and efforts to take over Cuba (Ostend Manifesto) as evidence that the Slave Power was violent, aggressive, and expansive.
Abolitionists emphasized Williams's perceived whiteness to enlist sympathy, and to suggest to Northerners that any child, regardless of appearance, might be snatched and made a slave. On May 19 and 20, 1856, Sumner spoke in the Senate comparing Southern political positions to the sexual exploitation of slaves then taking place in the South.
The Pottawatomie massacre occurred on the night of May 24–25, 1856, in the Kansas Territory, United States.In reaction to the sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces on May 21, and the telegraphed news of the severe attack on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, John Brown and a band of abolitionist settlers—some of them members of the Pottawatomie Rifles—responded violently.
Some of the most enduring invocations of Southern honor in both the original and ironic senses come from the Brooks-Sumner affair, which occurred after abolitionist Charles Sumner gave a charged speech on the admission of territories as slave states, titled "the Crime Against Kansas."