Video: '"The Caning of Charles Sumner (1856): Violence in the Senate Over Slavery" | Episode : 17'

(Tuesday, May 22, 1856, at around 2:30 p.m. local time) — Congressman Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, beat Senator Charles Sumner, a Republican abolitionist from Massachusetts, with a walking cane today in the hall of the United States Senate in retaliation for a speech Sumner had made two days earlier attacking Southerners who sympathized with the pro-slavery violence in Kansas (“Bleeding Kansas“).

Video: 'The Caning of Charles Sumner'

Sumner is unable to return to duty for 3 years while he recovers; Brooks becomes a hero across the South.