Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/170

 SUMNER ON THE CRIME AGAINST KANSAS - (1856) Born in 1811, died in 1874; admitted to the Bar in 1834; an Unsuccess- ful Free Soil candidate for Congress in 1848; elected United States Senator by Free Soil and Democratic votes in 1851 ; assaulted in the Senate by Preston Brooks in 1856; reelected Senator as a Repub- lican in 1857, 1863 and 1809; advocated the Civil Rights Bill for ne- groes; joined the Liberal Republican party in 1872. You are now called to redress a great trans- gression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. !As means and instruments only, they are necessarily sub- ordinate to the conservation of government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or » Delivered in the United States Senate, May 15-20, 1856. It was ^his speech that led to the famous assault on Sumner by Preston S. Brooks. Sumner had severely arraigned Senator Butler of South Carolina, an uncle of Brooks, Brooks being himself ,a member of Congress from the same State. Two days after Sumner finished his speech, while he was sitting at his desk alone in the Senate-cham- ber, after the adjournment, Brooks entered and, after speaking a Cew words, struck Sumner violently on the head with a heavy stick. While Sumner was trying to extricate himself from his seat at the desk, Brooks repeated the blows imtil Sumner sank to the floor, bloody and senseless. Morefield Storey, one of Sumner's biograph- ers, says Brooks's cane was "a heavy gutta-percha cane " and that the blows were continued " until the cane broke." So great was the excitement produced in the country by this event, that many pre- 160