Violence in the Senate -1856

Violence in Kansas spilled over into the Congress itself. On May 22 1856, the day after the sack of Lawrence and two days before Brown's Pottawatomie Massacre, a sudden flash of savagery on the Senate floor electrified the whole country. Just two days earlier Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had finished an inflammatory speech in which he described the treatment of Kansas as 'the rape of a virgin territory,' and blamed it on the South's 'depraved longing for a new slave State.' Sumner made Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina a special target of his censure. …