A History of the American People

some others rushed into Pottawatomie Creek, a pro-slavery settlement, and slaughtered five men
in cold blood. By the end of the year over 200 people had been murdered in Bleeding Kansas.' The Lawrence outrage in turn provoked a breakdown of law in the Congress. The next day, May 22, Senator Charles Sumner (1811-74) of Massachusetts, a dignified, idealistic, humorless, and golden-tongued man who also had a talent for vicious abuse-the kind which causes wars- delivered a philippic in the Senate. One of the weaknesses of Congressional procedure was that, unlike the British parliament, where a speaker must go on until he finishes, senators were allowed an overnight respite then allowed to start again next morning, provoking their antagonized hearers beyond endurance. In his two-day speech, full of excitable sexual images, Sumner said what was going on in Kansas wasthe rape of a virgin territory [sprung] from a
depraved longing for a new slave state, the hideous offspring of such a crime.' He made a
particular target of Senator A. P. Butler of South Carolina, whom he accused of having chosen a mistress who ... though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight-I mean the harlot, slavery.' One cannot help feeling that, in the run-up to the Civil War, sex played a major, if unspoken, part. All Northerners knew, or believed, that male slave-owners slept with their pretty female slaves, and often bought them with this in mind. Abraham Lincoln, aged twenty-two and on his second visit to New Orleans, saw a young and beautiful teenage black girl,guaranteed a
virgin,' being sold, the leering auctioneer declaring: The gentleman who buys her will get good value for his money.' The girl was virtually naked, and the horrific scene made a deep impression on the young man. Southerners denied they fornicated with their female slaves, but they also (contradicting themselves) accused their Northern tormenters of sexual envy, which may have been true in some cases. In any event Sumner's metaphors were provocative. Butler's nephew, Congressman Preston S. Brooks, fumed over the insults for two days, then attacked Sumner with his cane while he was writing at his desk in the Senate. Sumner was so badly injured, or traumatized, that he was ill at home for two years, his empty Senate desk symbolizing the stop-at-nothing violence of the Southern slavers. Equally significant was that Brooks, having been censured by the House, resigned and was triumphantly reelected, his admirers presenting him with hundreds of canes to mark hisbrave gesture,' though it was in fact a cowardly assault on an unarmed, older man.
Here was a case of unbridled and inflammatory Northern words provoking reckless Southern
aggression-a paradigm of the whole conflict.
Brooks' attack, and the support it received from the gentlemanly South,' reflected the aggressive politics of the slave states. The Dred Scott verdict by the Taney Court had given the South hope that the constitutional history of the country could be rewritten in a way that would make slavery safe for ever. All previous arrangements had left the South insecure-insecurity was at the very root of its violence. What the Southern militants, especially in South Carolina, wanted was ablack code,' enacted by Congress and imposed on the territories. They were not so foolish
as to hope they could reinstate slavery in New York and New England but they wanted
abolitionism to be made illegal in some way. And they wanted not merely to open new territory
in the South and West and outside the present borders of the US to slavery but also to reopen and
relegalize the slave trade.
This forward plan received an important boost with the election of 1856. The Kansas-
Nebraska Act destroyed the last remains of the crumbling Whig Party. In its place, phoenix-like,
came the new Republicans, deliberately designed to evoke the memory of Jefferson, now
presented as ,in anti-slaver, his attacks on slavery being eminently quotable, his ownership of
slaves forgotten. At its nominating convention, the Republican Party passed over its chief anti-