Democrats Throw a Temper Tantrum

Proper decorum be damned.

In 1856, Senator Sumner from Massachusetts gave a mocking speech meant to ridicule slave owning Democrats. Democrats would have none of it. They puffed up with sanctimony and called Sumner’s speech “self-righteously insolent.” They believed slavery was a general good, and a Republican had no right to challenge their narrative.

A day or so later, Congressman Preston Brooks waltzed into the Senate chamber and marched up to Senator Sumner and blindsided him with his cane. Southern senators could have stopped him, but instead watched as he beat Sumner on the head with all his might.

Sumner suffered incapacitation for nearly five years. Brooks was quoted as saying that it was fortuitous that he caught Sumner in “a helpless attitude” because “Sumner had superior strength and if mindful, he would have needed to shoot him with his revolver.”

The entire South applauded and exulted Brooks for his bravery. When Republican Congressman Burlingame chastised Brooks for his brutish behavior, Brooks challenged Burlingame to a duel. Challenges to duels then became a craze as Southerners taunted anyone brave enough to speak out against slavery.

In the 1916 biography Abraham Lincoln, Lord Charnwood wrote that Republicans saw “no harm in shifting towards some less provocative principle on which more people at the moment might agree. Confronted with Northern politicians who would reason in this fashion stood a united South whose leaders were accustomed to make the Union government go which way they chose and had no disposition to compromise in the least.”

Lincoln objected to being forced to accept morally wrong principles, so he refused to espouse the accepted cant that slavery was a general good. Charnwood cited this as the reason establishment Republicans initially opposed Lincoln’s candidacy.

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