On May 22, 1856, Preston Smith Brooks, a South Carolinian congressman, assaulted a seated Charles Sumner, antislavery senator from Massachusetts, in Senate chamber. Brooks rained blows on Sumner's head and shoulders with his cane while Representative Laurence M. Keitt, a secessionist colleague from South Carolina, kept others at bay. Brooks later described caning in a letter to his brother, struck him with my cane and gave him about 30 first rate stripes with a gutta perch cane. . . . Every lick went where I intended. For about first five of six licks he offered to make fight but I plied him so rapidly that he did not touch me. Towards last he bellowed like a calf. Stunned by assault, Sumner was unable to slide out of his chair and was pinned under his desk, which was hinged to floor. He finally managed to extricate himself by tearing desk off floor, only to fall down unconscious, covered with blood. Sumner suffered from several bruises and cuts; two serious wounds on head exposed his skull and had to be stitched. In his frenzy, Brooks had received a minor cut in his head from backlash of his cane. He continued to hit Sumner until a northern representative physically restrained him. cane had shattered from attack, and Brooks pocketed its gold head, declining Senate page's offer to retrieve fragments from floor.1According to oft-repeated story, Brooks had become enraged on learning of Sumner's The Crime Against Kansas speech, which, he felt, had insulted South Carolina and his relative, Senator Andrew Pickens Butler. He decided to punish Sumner and after lying in wait for him for a day, came upon him at his Senate desk. Brooks and his defenders claimed that Sumner incited attack by using unusually offensive language.2 As some historians have argued, Sumner's famous speech and Brooks's subsequent assault and reactions to caning north and south of Mason Dixon line revealed fundamental political divide over racial in country.3 Instead of looking at sectionalism caning inspired or treating it as merely an incident of personal warfare, this article analyzes discussion on slavery, race, and ideology that event inspired and its aftermath, when Sumner emerged as one of foremost voices for emancipation and rights in national political arena.Most historians have failed to note sufficiently this public discourse on and race and efforts of abolitionists and free African Americans in shaping it. assault became a departure point for contemporaries to explore meaning and relationship among slavery, race, democracy, and republican government in nineteenth-century America. Observers drew upon analogies from to describe and explain caning and debated its ramifications for men's democracy. issues of and race defined both southern defenders' and northern critics' reading of event. Convenient racialist dichotomies of black slavery and white liberty fell apart. caning dramatically illustrated, instead, how question of racial could fracture world of republicanism. Like other conflicts over slavery, it helped clarify, to quote W. E. B. Du Bois, that the true significance of . . . lay in ultimate relation of slaves to democracy.4 cause of slave was inevitably tied to larger questions of representative government in United States.Public discussions of event reveal how concepts of freedom, democracy, and citizenship were not static but constantly contested. Commentators, North and South, evoked ideas about race and gender to challenge or police boundaries of republican citizenship and political participation. For southerners, Brooks' s actions were manly and honorable, vindicating not just his family but also his state, section, and slavery. But changing manhood ideals in North led most northerners to view caning as a barbaric assault on very fabric of American democracy. …