Secession Era Editorials Project

Exciting Debate in the Senate -- Senator Sumner Whipped!

Raleigh, North Carolina, Standard [Democratic]

(28 May 1856)

In the Senate, on the 20th inst., Mr. Sumner, of Massachusetts -- who disgraces the seat once occupied by Daniel Webster -- delivered himself of a long and studied harangue on Kansas affairs, in which he spoke in the most offensive terms of President Pierce, Senators Douglas and Butler, and of slaveholders generally. He characterized the Kansas-Nebraska act as a great "crime," and held these gentlemen, together with the Democratic party, responsible for it. It was a speech full of abuse of his brother Senators -- full of the vilest and most dangerous appeals against the domestic institutions of the South, and calculated only to increase the strife between the two sections and lead to disunion and civil war. Mr. Cass characterized it as the most anti-American and unpatriotic speech he had ever heard; Mr. Douglas followed, denouncing Sumner in the severest terms as an enemy to the Union, and holding him up in his true colors before the country; and Mr. Mason, of Va., concurring with Judge Douglas, regretted that Senators were required by the circumstances of their position to have personal intercourse with a man like Sumner, so lost to all decency, honor, and truth. Sumner retorted in the bitterest terms; and here the debate closed.

But the meanest feature in Sumner's conduct was his attack on Judge Butler, of South Carolina, who was absent. This was the conduct of a coward.-- Judge Douglas told him what he would do when Judge Butler returned -- he would slip into his seat, whisper a private apology, and beg him to accept that in lieu of a public one." But we give the account as we find it in the papers, of the chastisement which Sumner received at the hands of Mr. Brooks, of S. C., the nephew of Judge Butler: