ABSTRACT
On May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate, pro-slavery South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks brutally attacked Massachusetts abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner. Brooks’s weapon of choice was what he called “an ordinary cane.” The attack ended quickly—with Sumner rapidly receiving approximately twenty to thirty blows to his head, shoulders and arms. By the end of the encounter Sumner lay unconscious on the floor, his shirt and jacket soaked with blood. Due to his physical and psychological injuries, he would not be able to return to his legislative duties for over three years.
The caning of Charles Sumner has been a story told many times before by historians seeking to understand the coming of the Civil War. However, surprisingly little attention has been given to placing the assault in the context of the history of honor and shame in America. By the 1850s, dueling and the culture of honor associated with dueling and related assaults like caning had greatly diminished in the free-state North, while it remained vitally important for many whites in the South. To examine closely the caning of Charles Sumner allows us to better understand the larger clash of cultures associated with slave and free societies—a clash between a world where violent personal encounters involving honor and shame made sense and a world where such encounters seemed increasingly strange and out of place. It also helps us understand why the end of slavery was so closely connected to the moral revolution associated with the end of dueling culture.
