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In the Kansas territory, “border ruffians,” led by Missouri’s Democratic senator, David Atchison, moved in and out of Kansas with impunity—stuffing ballot boxes, visiting violence on free state settlers and attempting to tilt the scales in favor of slavery. “You know how to protect your own interests,” Atchison declared. “Your rifles will free you from such neighbors. … You will go there, if necessary, with the bayonet and with blood.” “If we win,” he promised, “we can carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean.” Although antislavery voters probably made up a healthy majority of the population, the slave forces stole a series of territorial elections, leading the Free Soilers to establish a shadow government in Lawrence, Kansas.
Tensions had already started to boil over when Atchison’s ruffians “sacked” and pillaged the free-state capital city, destroying the local Free-Soil newspaper office and laying ruin to the Free State Hotel, which housed the shadow legislature. Days later, on May 19, 1856, Charles Sumner rose on the Senate floor to denounce the “crime against Kansas.” The day after his speech, as Sumner attended to routine paperwork on the Senate floor, Congressman Preston Brooks entered the chamber and set upon him with a metal-tipped cane. The senators’ desks were bolted to the floor, making it impossible for Sumner to escape from his seat. Writhing in pain, he wrenched the desk up with his knees and collapsed on the bloodstained carpet. His injuries nearly killed him, and it would be four years before he could return to normal duties in the Capitol. As for Brooks: He enjoyed the full-throated support of Southern Democrats and the quiet approval—or at least non-disapproval—of his Northern party brethren who remained faithful to their party.
The incident soon became known as “Bleeding Sumner,” and it created a political firestorm. The symbolic importance of the crime was arresting. Southern Democrats and their fellow travelers up North were no longer content to employ violence and terrorism in Kansas. Now they had brought their war of aggression into the halls of Congress. “The South has taken the oligarchic ground that Slavery ought to exist, irrespective of color,” the New-York Tribune intoned, “that Democracy is an illusion and a lie.”
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