Beaten Bloody on the Senate Floor, He Went Right Back to Fighting Slavery

Preston Brooks, a congressman from the South, walked up to Charles Sumner while the senator from Massachusetts was seated at his desk in the chamber. He accused Sumner of libel, then struck him over and over with a cane until the cane broke.

Sumner, caught by surprise and tangled in his desk, could not get away. He nearly died there in a puddle of his own blood.

The attack matters because of what Sumner did next. He recovered and pushed even harder against slavery, urging President Abraham Lincoln toward emancipation and writing legal arguments that were an early version of what the Supreme Court and Congress adopted a century later.

Sumner had grown up poor in Boston, living near a large Black community. During a visit to France in the 1830s, he was stunned to watch Black and white pupils learning side by side as peers at the Sorbonne in Paris.

He wrote in his diary, "It must be then that the distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things." He later became the era's bluntest white campaigner to end slavery, taking stances even his friends called extreme: freeing every enslaved person immediately, then securing Black voting rights and racially integrated schools.

The beating came within days of one of his speeches attacking slavery. In 1861, after he recovered, Sumner pushed Lincoln to end slavery in the seceded South. Newspapers in his home state of Massachusetts called him "a candidate for the insane asylum." Two years later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Sumner kept writing bills, arguments, and amendments. Many were defeated or weakened, but they were an early version of arguments the Supreme Court adopted in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and Congress adopted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His test for a leader was simple: "The first is backbone, the second is backbone and the third is backbone."