Caning of Charles Sumner

On May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate, Representative Preston Brooks (D-SC) attacked Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA), an abolitionist, with a walking cane in retaliation for a speech given by Sumner two days earlier in which he fiercely attacked slaveholders including a relative of Brooks. The beating nearly killed Sumner and it drew a sharply polarized response from the American public on the subject of the expansion of slavery in the United States. It has been considered symbolic of the "breakdown of reasoned discourse" that eventually led to the American Civil War.

In 1856, during the "Bleeding Kansas" crisis, Sumner denounced the Kansas–Nebraska Act in his "Crime against Kansas" speech, delivered on May 19 and May 20. The long speech argued for the immediate admission of Kansas as a free state and went on to denounce the "Slave Power"—the political arm of the slave owners:

Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved desire for a new Slave State, hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the National Government.

Sumner then attacked the authors of the Act, Senators Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina, saying,

The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. 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. For her his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.

...
Wikipedia