“Who are you going to be today?” - Anonymous

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

6 October

How to Destroy a Nation, one crisis at a time.

Here’s how: give in to the extremists on the fringe of your base. In 1856, five years befire the outbreak of the Civil War, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts [hotbed of the Abolitionist movement] gave a speech on the Senate floor denouncing Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina [hotbed of Slavery]. Senator Butler, Sumner said, "has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him. I mean the harlot, Slavery." Incendiary stuff indeed!

Although his speech exceeded the norms of parliamentary propriety the rabid Abolitionists back home ate it up.

Butler’s nephew Representative Preston Brooks, understandably, considered the speech an attack on his family’s honor.

Two days after that speech Brooks, along with an armed accomplice Lawrence Keit, entered the nearly empty Senate chamber where he found Sumner sitting at his desk. He broke his cane in beating Sumner senseless while Keit, brandishing a pistol, kept others from coming to Sumner’s aid.

The upshot?

• Sumner after recuperating in Europe returned to his Senate duties permanently impaired; in the eyes of his constituents he was nothing short of a martyr to the hypocrisy of the slaveholding elite.
• Brooks, expelled from the House, was returned in a special election; he also received any number of replacement canes to be used whenever any other Yankee hypocrite needing serious correction.
• Seen from a sufficient distance it would appear that there was gagging hypocrisy on both sides. Hypocricy and cowardice, and a complete disregard for the good of the country as a whole that both men professed to love.
• A nation addicted to shouting matches before this incident was even more addicted to shouting matches after.
• Is there a lesson here for us today, addicted as we are to remarkably similar shouting matches?
• [Arguably, patriotism – then as now - should be made of sterner stuff.]