The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War

by Stephen Puleo

A Turning Point in American History, the Beating of U.S. Senator Charles Sumner and the Beginning of the War Over Slavery
Early in the afternoon of May 22, 1856, ardent pro-slavery Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina strode into the United States Senate Chamber in Washington, D.C., and began beating renowned anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner with a gold-topped walking cane. Brooks struck again and again—more than thirty times across Sumner’s head, face, and shoulders—until his cane splintered into pieces and the helpless Massachusetts senator, having nearly wrenched his desk from its fixed base, lay unconscious and covered in blood. It was a retaliatory attack. Forty-eight hours earlier, Sumner had concluded a speech on the Senate floor that had spanned two days, during which he vilified Southern slaveowners for violence occurring in Kansas, called Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois a “noise-some, squat, and nameless animal,” and famously charged Brooks’s second cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, as having “a mistress. . . who ugly to others, is always lovely to him. . . . I mean, the harlot, Slavery.” Brooks not only shattered his cane during the beating, but also destroyed any pretense of civility between North and South.
One of the most shocking and provocative events in American history, the caning convinced each side that the gulf between them was unbridgeable and that they could no longer discuss their vast differences of opinion regarding slavery on any reasonable level. The The Assault That Drove America to Civil War tells the incredible story of this transformative event. While Sumner eventually recovered after a lengthy convalescence, compromise had suffered a mortal blow. Moderate voices were drowned out completely; extremist views accelerated, became intractable, and locked both sides on a tragic collision course.
The caning had an enormous impact on the events that followed over the next four the meteoric rise of the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln; the Dred Scott decision; the increasing militancy of abolitionists, notably John Brown’s actions; and the secession of the Southern states and the founding of the Confederacy. As a result of the caning, the country was pushed, inexorably and unstoppably, to war. Many factors conspired to cause the Civil War, but it was the caning that made conflict and disunion unavoidable five years later.

Genres: History, Civil War, American History, Nonfiction, Politics, American Civil War, Biography

392 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2012

About the author

Stephen Puleo is an author, historian, teacher, public speaker, and communications professional. His eighth book, The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union, was published by St. Martin’s Press in April, 2024.

Follow Steve on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/stephenpuleo...) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/puleosteve/) or visit his website (https://www.stephenpuleo.com/) for current news and events.

Steve's previously published books are:
• Voyage of Mercy: The USS Jamestown, the Irish Famine, and the Remarkable Story of America’s First Humanitarian Mission (2020)
• American Treasures: The Secret Efforts to Save the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address (2016)
• The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War (2012)
• A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900 (2010)
• The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day (2007)
• Due to Enemy Action: The True World War II Story of the USS Eagle 56 (2005)
• Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (2003)

All of Steve’s books have been Boston regional bestsellers and have received national recognition. His work has been reviewed favorably by the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Boston Globe, the New York Post, Parade magazine, The National Review, Forbes.com, C-SPAN, the Associated Press, the Portland Press Herald, the Providence Journal, the Hartford Courant, Kirkus Reviews, Barnes and Noble Review.com, Library Journal, Booklist, History.com, and Publishers Weekly. Numerous national media outlets have interviewed Steve, including NBC, the New York Times, Parade magazine, History.com, C-SPAN, the History Channel, the Associated Press, and regional and national radio and television outlets.

An experienced, dynamic, and in-demand speaker and presenter, Steve has made nearly 700 appearances before thousands of readers – including bookstore signings, keynote addresses, library presentations, historical societies, industry events, book clubs, and appearances at universities and public and private schools. His showcase appearances include: speaking events at both the National Archives and the National Constitution Center; as a keynote for the 150th Anniversary Celebration of the Massachusetts Superior Court; and as a participant with Italian-American and Jewish-American scholars on a panel entitled, Italy and the Holocaust, presented at UMass-Boston. If you would like more information about having Steve appear at your event, please contact him at spuleo@aol.com.

A former award-winning newspaper reporter and contributor of articles and book reviews to publications and organizations that include American History magazine, Politico, the Boston Globe, and the Bill of Rights Institute, Steve has also taught history at Suffolk University in Boston and at UMass-Boston. He has developed and taught numerous writing workshops for high school and college students, as well as for adults who aspire to be writers. His books have been woven into the curricula of numerous high schools and colleges, and more than 30 communities have selected his books as “community-wide reads.” Steve also conducts book-club tours of Boston’s North End, one of the nation’s most historic neighborhoods.

Steve holds a master’s degree in history from UMass-Boston, where he received the Dean’s Award for Academic Achievement and was the Graduate Convocation keynote speaker. His master’s thesis, From Italy to Boston’s North End: Italian Immigration and Settlement, 1890-1910, has been downloaded nearly 30,000 times by scholars and readers around the world.

Steve and his wife Kate live south of Boston and donate a portion of his book proceeds to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).

Reviews

[Michael Austin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an odd book to read and a difficult one to review. On the one hand, it's journalistic approach to the topic makes it much more accessible and, in many places, more interesting, than the half-dozen or so more scholarly books on the topic. But the accessibility comes with a certain amount of sensationalism (not that the caning incident itself lacked for sensationalism), a confused chronology, and a tendency to view the entire buildup to the civil war through the lens of the incident that it is attempting to explain.

The author acknowledges in the introduction that he is dealing with events that have been much discussed and written about in American history. His one contribution, he suggests, is a fuller picture of Preston Brooks, the cane-er in the famous 1856 incident in which Brooks savagely beat, and nearly killed, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner after Sumner delivered a fiery anti-slavery (and anti-South Carolina) speech on the Senate floor. Brooks was a South Carolina congressman and a distant relative of Senator Andrew Butler, also of South Carolina, who was one of the primary targets of Sumner's famous speech, "The Crime against Kansas."

In Puleo's narrative, Brooks is a moderate, responsible family man who acts as he feels he must under the code that defines his life, while Sumner is a brash, arrogant bomb-thrower from a dysfunctional family who could have made all of the points he wanted to make without personally antagonizing Butler and others. Puleo does not go so far as to exonerate Brooks, but he comes too close for my comfort--largely, I believe, because this sympathetic picture of Brooks is a way for him to distinguish himself from the many others who have written books on this very subject. But, even with the narrative on his side, Brooks comes off as a needlessly violent hothead whose life is governed by a deeply flawed conception of shame and honor. That he became a hero to the South after his attack shows, at a very minimum, that the cultural values of the North and the South were, at the middle of the 19th century, too far apart to coexist in the same nation--something that Puleo points out frequently and analyzes well.

My primary objection to _The Caning_, however, is that it can't seem to decide whether it is a dual biography of Sumner and Brooks or a history of America from 1856-1860. It frequently moves from one mode to the other, giving biographical details of its primary characters in some chapters and rehearsing the standard "steps to the Civil War" details (the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, the Lecompton Constitution, etc.) in others. As a result of this scattered approach, it does neither job as well as it would have if it had chosen one approach to its topic and stuck with it.

For all this, however, the book held my interest throughout. Though I knew most of the information it presented, I found it a succinct, well-written explanation of a critical event in Antebellum American history and a decent situation of that event in the larger historical context.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I understand there is too much information to have every event taught in history class in school but this should be in every class teaching about The Civil War. I had no idea this had happened.

A northern senator named Sumner spoke in Congress about how slavery should be abolished. A southern politician named Brooks was all for slavery, just like most of the southern land owners of that time. Brooks became so mad that he took his cane and beat Sumner until he was almost dead. What really makes me mad is that while this man was beating another man in the head, other southern men surrounded the two and kept other men from stopping the beating. Another injustice is that Brooks was not arrested for what he did. Congress investigated and put to vote if Brooks should be banned from his political career but there were not enough votes to make that happen. Now try and imagine 60-90 seconds of being so enraged and hitting someone in the head over and over again with a wooden cane. Sumner was visibly disabled after the beating that he was never the same.

The events even inspired Abraham Lincoln to write a speech about how slavery needed to end. This is called his "lost speech" that was so engaging that no one took notes. This and other key events were the catalyst for the war.

Unfortunately, not much has changed with regards to race relations or the violence between people who believe differently. Such a shame. A very informative book that should be on every American school reading list.

Post note: I did some more reading and found out that Brooks was indeed arrested for his attack. He had to pay a fine of $300 (which in today's dollars in would be around $8,500) Brooks did resign but was reinstated by the next month.

[David Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written look at the caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in 1856 by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks. Puleo digs into the histories of both men as well as the northern and southern views on slavery, then follows the caning event itself through the events leading to Civil War. The author puts a lot of weight on this one event as the catalyst for the war, which is debatable. He also treats Brooks with more compassion than he deserves (and Sumner with perhaps a bit more scorn than he deserves, although Puleo does give credit for achievements and faults as well). Overall, this is a good review of how slavery, and extreme violence, seemed to lead us inevitably to war.

David J. Kent
Author, Lincoln: The Fire of Genius
President, Lincoln Group of DC

[Roger T. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book Review
Stephen Puleo’s The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War
by Roger T. Conant

The tantalizing thesis of Stephen Puleo’s 2012 publication, The Caning, is that Preston Brooks’s one minute assault on Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate chamber on May 22, 1856, altered the course of American history by opening an unbridgeable chasm in our nation’s deepening sectional divide. He concludes that without the caning, the Civil War might not have broken out “as soon as it did, and with delay could have come the possibility of compromise, however remote it may seem in hindsight.” Given all the historical events of the 1850’s detailed in his book (The Fugitive Slave Act, Bleeding Kansas, the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre, the spectacular gains of the newly formed Republican Party in the 1856 Election, the Dred Scott Decision, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, the Harpers Ferry Raid and the Election of 1860), it is difficult to posit the caning as the single factor in irreparably severing North-South dialogue. Despite pointing out how the Compromise of 1850 with its Fugitive Slave Act together with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise 36˚ 30ˊ line by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 radicalized many in the North, precipitating a new round of vehement verbal warfare in Congress over the prospect of slavery’s expansion into Kansas and other new territories, Puleo singles out the attack on Sumner as the pivotal moment of irreconcilable disunion. In the judgment of Yale Civil War historian, David Blight, it was the Dred Scott Decision, not the caning, that destroyed the possibility of compromise.

Unquestionably, events followed swiftly after Sumner’s provocative five hour “Crime Against Kansas” speech delivered to a packed Senate chamber on May 19-20, 1856. Although his unprecedented five-hour philippic against the immorality and barbarism of slavery took up 112 printed pages, Sumner committed his entire speech to memory. Was Sumner’s charged rhetoric so inflammatory and vituperative that it crossed the line of accepted Senatorial discourse sufficiently to provoke retaliation? Puleo certainly believes so. Taking the side of Sumner’s assailant, the author castigates the speech’s biting personal denunciation of South Carolina’s Senator Andrew Butler as “outrageous,” “slanderous,” and “libelous.” Sumner’s unsparing remark about the “blunders” and “loose expectorations” that poured from Butler’s mouth might appear gratuitously insulting. However, given the heated political oratory of the 1850’s, Sumner’s bombastic rhetoric and mocking ad hominem attacks were not ruled out-of-order. Stephen Douglas, co-author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (with Butler), was also contemptuously derided at the conclusion of Sumner’s speech. Despite his anger, Douglas could hardly claim to be the object of slander. When it came to name-calling, the “Little Giant” boasted to newspapers:

I went after the abolitionist senators with a perfect torrent of invective, satire,
and ridicule. If my manner was sneering and vulgar, the abolitionists deserved it.

Although eulogized as a “generous, kind, forgiving” man, “painfully sensitive to the suffering of others,” Butler--one of slavery’s most outspoken defenders—did not eschew coarseness in rancorous debates, heaping unprintable racial slurs on Massachusetts while joining senatorial colleagues who loudly denounced Sumner as a “filthy reptile,” “a sneaking sinuous, snake-like poltroon,” “miscreant,” “fanatic,” and “leper.”

Unfortunately, by focusing exclusively on the caning of Sumner, Puleo provides his readers with no context to the pervasiveness of violence in Congress. In her masterful The Field of Blood, Joanne Freeman reminds us that in the 3 decades leading up to the Civil War, congressmen regularly strapped on knives and guns before entering the Capitol. In all, Freeman enumerates 70 duels, fistfights, and stabbings in the halls of Congress and surrounding streets. The rowdy clashes chronicled by Freeman, however, did not register in the public’s consciousness the same dramatic way as Brooks’s near-fatal attack without warning on a defenseless man whose legs were pinned under his desk in the Senate chamber. In rapid succession, Brooks struck Sumner with his metal-topped gutta-percha cane on the head, face, and shoulders with 30 full force blows (by his count). Even after his victim, whose eyes were blinded by blood, lost conscious-ness and fell prostrate in the aisle, Brooks continued to beat him--desisting only after New York Rep. Edwin Murray grabbed his arm and pulled him away. Although Brooks insisted that he did not mean to kill Sumner, a neutral observer attested that: “No ordinary man could possibly have withstood so many blows upon his bare head,” had Sumner “not been a very large and powerfully built man.” The Massachusetts senator’s chair remained vacant for 3 years while he travelled across Europe seeking treatment for chronic, debilitating pain from the severe brain trauma he would never completely recover from. Registering civic outrage at an attack on Freedom of Speech unprecedented in American history, the New York Times declared that the Sumner caning had aroused “a deeper feeling in the public heart of the North than any other event of the past ten years.”

Attempting to explain how the Southern code of honor, his strong sense of family and state pride motivated Brooks, Puleo argues against Northern characterizations of the caning as the act of a “cowardly scoundrel,” “a lawless bully,” and the “barbarous and brutal assault” by a “sneaking, slave-driving” cutthroat. Northern newspapers (as well as some Whig editors in the border states and South) questioned the chivalry of attacking an unarmed man unawares and unable to defend himself. Across the North, editorials stressed the chilling effect Brooks’s attack could have on future debates. Fearing physical reprisals, Senators might be less likely to express themselves on the floor. “The blow struck against Sumner [took} effect upon Freedom of Speech in that spot where, without freedom of speech, there can be no freedom of any kind,” the New York Times noted.

Granted permission to address the House, Brooks insisted that the caning was a “personal affair,” a “chastisement” carried out in retribution for Sumner’s attack on Sen. Butler and South Carolina. Offering no apology for his attack, Brooks believed he would have forfeited his own self-respect as a Sothern gentleman, “and perhaps the good opinion of my countrymen.” When Butler (who was absent for Sumner’s speech) returned to Washington, he defended his nephew’s actions as manly and honorable, arguing that if Brooks had not chastised Sumner,
he would have been reproached for an “unmanly submission to an insult to his state and his countrymen.”

Was Brooks’s violent response to Sumner’s speech simply a defense of Southern and personal honor, as he claimed (and Puleo contends), or were there other motivations? Three of Brooks’s statements immediately before and after his attack provide some clues to this question.
A day before the caning, on May 21, Brooks confided his plans to punish Sumner to Rep. Henry A. Edmunson (D-VA), asking the Virginian congressman to accompany him as a witness. Edmunson heard Brooks say: “it was time for Southern men to stop this coarse abuse used by the Abolitionists against the southern people and States.” As he was led away from the Senate floor following the caning, Brooks was heard boasting: “next time I will have to kill him.” After the attack Brooks wrote: “Every Southern man is delighted, and the Abolitionists are like a hive of bees … It would not take much to have the throats of Abolitionist cut.”

Given the brutal, uncontrolled violence displayed by Brooks in nearly beating Sumner to death on the Senate floor, did the South Carolina congressman’s actions constitute only “chastisement” compelled by his fear of “unmanly submission” or were his intentions just as much an attempt to both humiliate and intimidate Sumner and other “Black Republicans”? Nearly two years before the caning, at the height of the Kansas-Nebraska debate, the New York Tribune branded Southern threats, challenges to duels and bullying as “a considered plan to pursue by intimidation and violence every independent northern Democratic who dares to defy the mandates of the Slavocracy.” Even earlier, in 1849, during arguments about the admission of California as a free or slave state, Rep. Richard K. Meade (D-VA) bragged that “the best way to manage antislavery congressmen was to keep them afraid for their lives.” By the time of the Missouri Compromise of 1850, more and more northern congressmen were determined to stand up against the use of violence by their southern counterparts “as a device of terrorism to force compliance with their demands.”

While “Bleeding Kansas—Bleeding Sumner” became a rallying cry which helped fuel the meteoric rise of the newly founded Republican Party, Freeman contextualizes the attack on Sumner in a broader spectrum of emotions influencing political behavior: “fear of Southern dominance, anger at Northern degradation, horror at the brutal realities of slavery.” At best, Puleo’s narrative presents a glimpse into the broad-based ideological discussions of slavery and antislavery unleased by the caning in the North and South. Nevertheless, his preoccupation with the psychological motivations which drove Sumner to deliver his scathing address and Brooks to beat him as he would one of his slaves fails to capture the full significance of their clash. Sumner’s intemperate, abrasive disposition and antagonistic language cannot be reduced to mere personal vengefulness or a blood feud on Brooks’s part, without viewing their actions in the larger framework of the mounting political tensions over slavery’s compatibility with the values of democratic republicanism. To his credit, Puleo consummately documents the mass indignation meetings throughout the North honoring Sumner’s martyrdom and Southern jubilation over Brooks’s just chastisement of the insolent Yankee. But the uproar over the caning, which greatly heightened sectional tensions, cannot be separated from intensifying public discourse on the meanings of freedom, democracy, and racial equality.

No man did more to influence the slavery debate in the national political arena than Sumner. “His—not Lincoln’s or Garrison’s or anyone else,” Puleo concludes, “was the strongest, the clearest, the most unyielding antislavery voice that rang across the country.” As early as 1849, when he represented a young black girl in a landmark case against segregation in Boston’s schools, Sumner combined dedication to racial equality with antislavery politics. More than a century before Brown v. Board of Education, his outspoken arguments against school segregation and advocacy of “equal rights before the law” for all Americans without distinction of race or color were quite unusual in abolitionist circles of the time.

Pushing with all his strength against the political boundaries of his age, Sumner’s hand hovered over the legislation of every major racial question in the post-war period--whether urging that the 13th Amendment include the right to vote or pressing for emancipated slaves to receive a minimum of 40 acres of land. Seeking to expand the scope of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, Sumner introduced a Civil Rights bill in 1870 guaranteeing to all citizens regardless of color equal access to any facility, or privilege. As a final tribute to his unceasing fight for racial equality, the Senate passed an amended version of Sumner’s bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 banning segregation in public accommodations, transportation, and entertainment venues. Filibusters blocked the passage of the Act’s school segregation prohibition. After the Supreme Court struck it down in an 1883 decision, legal de facto racial segregation lasted another 80 years until passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.


Curiously, until the very final pages of his book, Puleo portrays Sumner as “an uncompromising, imperious egotist who sneered at lesser intellects and ridiculed opponents” while depicting Brooks as the epitome of a Southern gentlemen, upholding a code of honor which compelled him to avenge Sumner’s unforgivable insult to his kinsman Senator Butler, South Carolina, and his way of life. Puleo not only goes out of his way to seemingly exonerate Brooks’s vicious assault in response to Sumner’s “extreme provocation” but reverently likens the son of South Carolina to a “tragic hero … endowed with a status few Southerners have ever attained” when, after his triumphant reelection to Congress, this “giant figure of Shakespearean, even mythical proportions” unexpectedly died in agony at the end of January 1857 from a throat inflammation. The pathos of Brooks’s deathbed scene is followed by an outpouring of grief in Washington, where his coffin was placed in the House chamber, and the long, mournful procession of Brook’s body to Edgefield.

Puleo justifies his startlingly sympathetic treatment of Brooks by pointing to the fact that his study of the caning is the “first treatment which fully develops the characters of Sumner and Brooks in the same book.” “Historically,” he adds, “Brooks is often portrayed as a stereotypical cliché, a Southern ruffian whose attack on Sumner is seldom put in context. Sumner’s history of provocation and Brooks’s adherence to the Southern code of honor are generally not explored.” By according Brooks an outsized respect while largely downplaying Sumner’s importance, Puleo’s study is seriously marred by its sense of proportion.

It may well be that the author has taken note of these shortcomings since his latest book, The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union, scheduled for publication in 2024, promises to restore Sumner’s towering stature as a civil rights activist.

[Seaby Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Caning is written by an historian so as a book on the events that led up to the Civil War (or if you prefer, the War Between the States) it is excellent - and I would have given it five stars were it not for two egregious issues.

First, for a book that centers an event, the attack on Charles Sumner, a US Senator, ON THE SENATE FLOOR.. by a US Representive, another member of Congress, using a cane, that led to a severe injury that could have easily been fatal, one would assume that the author would have understood the nature of the deadly weapon used. But no, Puleo is confused and ignorant on this matter. Historian he may be, but he is no technology historian. He tells us, repeatedly, that the cane was made of "gutta-percha wood". No. No, gutta-percha is a natural polymer, like rubber, made from the sap of a tree. It is hard, resilient, black (or nearly so) material that like many modern polymers (typically made from petroleum, rather than from botanical sources) is a thermoplastic and is molded into products using heat and pressure. The material has much the same properties as old fashioned black bowling balls. As such, to wield it with enough force, over thirty blows, hard enough to open Sen. Sumner's scalp to the bone, shattering the resilient cane in the process, was most likely to prove fatal. It was amazing that Sumner survived, barely, but left him with such severe brain injuries that Sumner often had trouble walking and took over three years before he could return to his duties as a Senator.

This leads to the second issue. Throughout the book, Puleo disparages Sumner in an unfair and inaccurate manner. Just as Puleo has no background in historical material technology, he has no background in psychology or psychiatry, yet takes it upon himself to diagnose Sumner as being "narcissistic". Narcissism is a serious personality disorder which has very specific symptoms, none of which Sumner exhibited. Sumner may have been arrogant (many of his colleagues could have been described thus) and self-assured, but these are not symptoms of narcissism. One of the key symptoms of narcissism is lack of empathy for others. But here is a man who used his entire career into publically putting that very career at risk to fight the scurge that was chattle slavery, to fight for the rights of men, women, and children that he saw being abused, while others deemed kindly and gentlemanly, turned the face from them. Just who lacked empathy? Puleo repeatedly claimed, even though his own writing disproved it, that Sumner had few real friends and uses the fact that he was emotionally distant from his own siblings and parents as his evidence. The truth was the he had intense, deep, long lasting friendships with several men... though seemed to have no interest in women, neither romantically nor platonically. (Perhaps this disinterest explains his father's disdain for his son, who he wrote to his friends about what a disappointment his son was to him, in spite of going to Harvard and becoming a Senator?) Later in the book, Puleo even repeats the scurrilous charge that Sumner's injuries were insufficient to cause his debilitation for so long. (Really, have we not long known about boxers who having sustained to many blows to the head are "punch drunk" for years afterwards? Or the long term brain damage seen in American Football players?) He reiterates the baseless contention that Sumner suffered from a "mental problem".

The book is well worth reading - as long as you know that Puleo is flat out wrong about Sumner's personality and about that cane.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drama is difficult when the results are known, but in this historic recounting of the famous caning by southern Brooks to northern Senator Sumner there is a tension that you look for in good novels.

Bloody Kansas, a country tired of the horrible institution called slavery and a south comfortable in the inconsistent application of whip, chain, and inhumanity of the institution meant that conflict was inevitable.

Even religion could not expel or justify this blight on national history, but the results of one man - Representative Brooks - taking a cane to beat another man - Charles Sumner in the halls of congress seemed to be the keystone to the shift in the debate.

No longer was it the dance that Madison had caused around this albatross, but rather it was an open and flagrant conflict that could be embodied in the bloody and invalid Sumner.

The time for genteel discussion and compromise was past. The caning represented so much more and the bloodshed in Kansas was beyond comprehension as the bullies of Missouri poored across the border.

Ruffians they were but much more, this was a flagrant violation of the right of a state to choose for itself and the emotions brought John Brown and his boys to righteous indignation and eye for an eye retribution.

All in all the act of caning made Lincoln possible and war inevitable. Following the tableau is fascinating and absorbing.

[Colleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a long time to get through this book. Not because it is long. Not because it is a hard read. It took me a month because, hard as I tried, I could not prevent myself from drawing parallels to the state of our country today. The animosity between factions. the personalities of the primary players the distrust of the media outlets, were all too real, as if "ripped" from the headlines of today. I would become distraught knowing the ultimate outcome of the actions of Preston Brooks in May, 1856, which made me put the book down until another day.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone of my friends who teach American History. Not only does the caning lead to the Civil War, the author draws a straight line from the caning, to Dred Scott, to John Brown, to Lincoln's election. The book is well written, well researched, and in a different climate than today's political chaos, an easy read. It may be difficult to find, it is probably out of print. If anyone of my friends wants my copy, they are welcome to it. Drop me a line. But only if I can hand it to you. I won't be mailing it to anyone.

[Len Knighton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Caning was published in 2012, about a month before Barak Obama won re-election. In the eight years since, as of this writing, the United States has become a more divided nation. If you think this condition is new to the United States, you need to read this book. It gives us a very powerful narrative of the sectional divide between North and South. We also learn the motives behind Preston Brooks’ attack on Charles Sumner. I use the word “learn” because the caning seems to be a significant event that is not taught in most schools.
The last chapter addresses the current divisions that have widened since the book was written. Now we see states divided from within although the sectional chasm is still there.
Much of the writing regarding the gentlemen of the South, of defending one’s honor, family, the South’s way of life, your state, reminds me of an early scene in the motion picture GONE WITH THE WIND. Indeed, one point made in both is how that standard of living was dependent on slavery.

Five stars

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic read for so many reasons. As a civil war buff I had some cursory knowledge of Charles Sumner but before reading this book I hadn't realized how influential he really was. Puleo does a marvelous job of outlining the contrasts between the assailant Preston Brooks who was personally a gentleman and liked across the political aisle, and Sumner who could claim few friends for his brusque and unlikeable demeanor. Yet it's difficult to not ultimately sympathize with Summer who despite being cold in his personal relations burned brightly with his hatred of slavery. Puleo does a wonderful job of highlighting just how much the injustice of slavery ignited Sumner and why he is criminally overlooked as a pivotal figure in civil war America to this day. I thoroughly enjoyed every page of this story and everyone with interest in this chapter of American history would do well to read this book.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well researched, readable and fascinating look at a little known, but highly consequential, event in American history. I like Puleo's work quite a bit and this is probably my favorite of his. Charles Sumner was a fascinating character, unwavering in his opposition to slavery, respected but not loved. The book also holds up a mirror to the present day--the divisiveness and inflammatory rhetoric of 1856 is still seen today. Recommended, both for being entertaining and informative, but for its even handed treatment of the issues of the day.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book on the caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks which was sparked by Sumner's anti slavery speech in 1856. The books takes an in-depth look at the backgrounds of both men and the impact on the ongoing debate about slavery that led to the Civil War. I learned a bit more about events leading to the civil war as well as an appreciation for one of Massachusetts most outspoken anti-slavery voices. Recommended.

[Meghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Puleo does an interesting job making Preston Brooks more sympathetic than Charles Sumner. The historical background is well done, as is the aftermath of the caning (which occurs about midway through the book's timeline), but I can't help but wonder how skewed the characterizations of Sumner and Brooks turned out.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's embarrassing how little I knew about Charles Sumner or this incident prior to reading "The Caning," but Stephen Puleo brilliantly dissects how Preston Brooks' attack on Sumner in the Senate chamber was in many ways the defining precursor to the Civil War. Fascinating stuff, superbly researched and presented.

[Christina Gagliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

To read this book is to realize that, yes, history does repeat itself, and, for better and for worse, humans haven't changed. While this book could've been cut back by about 1/3 due to repeated information, it's absolutely fascinating and, from my Massachusetts perspective, well-balanced, although I'm sure others will disagree.

[Edward Hetzler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Passion versus bipartisanship

This book fleshes out a well known incident that is generally glossed over in school. I finally feel like I understand what the years leading up to the civil war were really like. When passions run high events can spin out of control.

[Eric Mayes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding read. Great flow to the book. Really brings alive Charles Summer and Preston Brooks and the events just prior to and well after the caning. Helped me to better understand the sequence of events from 1856 to 1861.

[Roger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent history of the bravery and principles of Charles Sumner and its’ direct connection to the Civil War. His recovery from terrible wounds from the caning in the primitive medicine of the day is equally remarkable.

[Matthew McDonough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting hypothesis, and well executed. However, there were times when I felt like the author was just repeating the same facts over and over. But it wasn't enough to make me give it a lesser rating.

[Dick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative regarding a period of American History of which I new little

[Kathleen Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great explanation of the caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in 1860 in the senate chamber by South Carolinia's Representative Preston Brooks. One of the precursors to the Civil War.

[Carole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting event that must have been such an intense, poignant moment in history. More detail than I needed. I ran out of time to finish the book before it needed to go back to the library.

[Mary Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. For what I would consider historical information, the author was great at making it readable and interesting. Added a different perspective on the instigators to the civil war.

[Ken Ransom · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Caning is the best recent book about the events leading up to the American Civil War.

While it is primarily about the caning of Senator Charles Sumner by the ardent pro-slavery Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, it shows the relationship of efforts by the South to expand slavery and the increasing adoption of anti-slavery feelings in the North.

The South, particularly South Carolina, argued that slavery was inherently good--for the owners and the owned; for the nation's business; for the overall community. Economic and civil order was best maintained and advance, and life was richer both materially and morally, with a robust, thriving, and unencumbered system of human slavery.

Preston Brooks agreed completely, reminding the Free Soil Party that they "know nothing of the Negro [slave] character, or of his intimate and inseparable connection with the moral, social, and political condition of the South." Whites and black working together, one as master, one as slave--was best for all involved, Brooks believed.

Most of the nation's attention was focused on Kansas at the beginning of 1856. For nearly two years, since the passage of t he Kansas-Nebraska Act--fashioned by Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and signed by President Franklin Pierce--sectional strife, assaults, barbarism, and mayhem had rocked the territory. The legislation repealed the portion of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that forbade slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ latitude--except within the boundaries of then newly admitted slave state of Missouri. Instead, the new Kansas-Nebraska Act stated that the future of slavery in those territories would be decided by the popular vote of residents.

The North was incensed, believing the Douglas-sponsored legislation recklessly and unnecessarily destroyed the delicate compromises on slavery that had existed since the nation's founding, and worse, opened vast new territories to slavery's expansion.

Those who opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories even formed a new political party, "Republicans," who vowed to repeal the Kansas-Nebraska Act. "At last there seems to be an awakening of the North," Senator Charles Sumner declared.

Early in the afternoon of May 22, 1856 Congressman Brooks strode into the US Senate Chamber and began beating renowned anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner with a gold-topped walking cane. Brooks struck over and over again until his can splintered into pieces and the unconscious Massachusetts senator lay on the floor covered in blood.

It was a retaliatory attack. Forty-eight hours earlier, Sumner had concluded a speech, during which he vilified Southern slave-owners for violence occurring in Kansas, and famously charged Brook's second cousin, South Carolina's Senator Andrew Butler, as having "a mistress ... who ugly to others, is always lovely to him .... I mean, the harlot, Slavery." Brooks not only shattered his cane during the beating, but also destroyed any pretense of civility between the North and South. The caning convinced each side that the gulf between them was unbridgeable and that they could no longer discuss their vast differences of opinion regarding slavery on any reasonable level. The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War tells the story of this event that had an enormous impact on the events that followed over the next four years: the meteoric rise of the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln; the Lecompton Constitution (bet you didn't study that in high school); the Dred Scott decision: the increasing militancy of abolitionists--most notably John Brown's actions in Kansas and his occupation of the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry; and how the caning pushed the nation inexorably and unstoppable, to war.

[Joseph Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one is to learn from history this is a timely book. It starts with this:

"Early in the afternoon of May 22, 1856, the ardently proslavery [Congressman Preston S.] Brooks [fom South Carolina] strode into the United States Senate chamber in Washington D.C., and began beating renowned antislavery Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a gutta-percha cane. Brooks struck again and again--more than thirty times across Sumner's head, face, and shoulders--until his cane splintered into pieces and the helpless Massachusetts senator lay unconscious, covered in blood."

It would take years for Senator Sumner to recover from the attack as his chair stood empty on the Senator floor, a loud reminder of the consequences of uncivilized discourse.
Such an attack inflamed the passions of the northern free states & those who had no real skin in the game on the slavery issue. Now they were incensed. They looked upon Sumner, who loved oratory but was rather harsh in his pronouncements, as a martyr for the cause. Meanwhile the proslavery South celebrate Brooks' attack on Sumner giving him the equivalents of keys to the city & parades in his honor. The Southern press praised him to overnight celebrity status. This further provoked the northern free states.

During the same year of Sumner's attack the Republican Party was born, about to elect its first presidential nominee.

"The Republican Party, of course, was founded and built on the agitation of the slavery question. It was clear that the positions of the two parties [the other being Democrats] were at the extremes of the most important issue facing the nation; it was also clear that these position were intractable."

Simply said what was perceived by the northern free states & eventually a growing Republican base as "bully tactics" used by the South to get their way, infuriated the north to vote on outlawing slavery. Those that had stood on the sidelines of this issue now became involved due to the caning incident. In the South there was a celebratory atmosphere surrounding the caning, adhering to a 'that will teach them to bad mouth the South' mentality. The lines were drawn & this would eventually lead to the death of 650,000 Americans in the Civil War and President Lincoln.

This book is well written. For a historical narrative it reads well & I found myself drawn to the book each & every day.

[Jeffrey Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Occasionally, one can find a book that is so well-written that covers a historical topic on an in-depth nature while making additional historical connections while not being a boring read. Such literary gems are extremely rare, so we much enjoy them when we find them. This is one of those gems.

Stephen Puleo introduces us to the two Central characters Charles Sumner and Preston Brooks, warts and all, and brings us on an adventure to show the brief moment when their lives intersected on May 22, 185, and how those few minutes altered the course of American history.

Keenly aware of the sectional and political attitudes that existed at the time, Puleo does a remarkable job navigating us through the key issues and personalities of the day, while allowing us to see both sides of the arguments.

If you want to better understand the tumultuous years between the Compromise of 1850 and the first shots at Fort Sumter on April 12. 1861, this book is a must read.

[William Olenick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fascinating book by Stephen Puleo discusses what he believes was the final act in a string of events that led to the Civil War.
The violent attack that occurred on the Congressional floor reverberated through the following years and overshadowed events that occurred after it. The events of Bloody Kansas, Harper's Ferry raid,the slave constitution in Kansas and the Dred Scott rulings only added fuel to the fire started in Congress.
The majority of the book is new information not put together in previous works, the last few chapters as Lincoln is elected, War starts are redundant but necessary due to Sumner living thru them.
Overall the book is an excellent read and unfortunately reminds one of political environment of today.

[Suzann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was so relatable to our status today; deplorable behavior in the highest levels of our government must not be tolerated. The tome could be a bit more accessible, with less emphasis on events decades before and after.

[Molly Hanlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

good read. also fucked up. good context for todays politics. also charles sumner is an asshole, hes in the right about most things but hes still an asshole. And preston brooks is wrong but interpersonally probably lovely. still wrong though

[RK Byers · Rating 4 out of 5]

the writer makes such a good case arguing that one brutal beating caused the Civil War that I’m ready to see him tie WWII to a single bad haircut.

[Erin Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Not really my type of book. Thoroughly researched and developed. Crazy story.