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.]
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