who beat someone with a cane in congress
Caning of Charles Sumner The Caning of Charles Sumner, or the Brooksâ€“Sumner Affair, occurred on May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate when Representative Preston Brooks (D-SC) attacked Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA), an abolitionist, with a walking cane in retaliation for a speech given by Sumner two days earlier in which he fiercely criticized slaveholders including a relative of Brooks. The beating nearly killed Sumner and it drew a sharply polarized response from the American public on the subject of the expansion of slavery in the United States. It has been considered symbolic of the "breakdown of reasoned discourse"[1] that eventually led to the American Civil War.