Southern Chivalry Argument Versus Clubs

Sumner, Charles · n.d.

On May 22, 1856, during the Bleeding Kansas crisis, Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner delivered a speech to Congress in which he denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and demanded that Kansas be admitted to the Union as a free state. In his oration, he verbally attacked the pro-slavery South Carolina Senator, Andrew Butler, and called into question the man’s code of Southern chivalry, accusing him of taking slavery as his mistress. Two days later, Preston Brooks, a South Carolina Congressman and also Butler’s cousin, nearly beat Sumner to death on the Senate floor with a cane. Responses to the attack in the North and the South further polarized the people of the nation, leading it further down the path to war.