The most closeted too.
🐞
Oh there are SO many more, but this article listed only the Class Two Senate seats for South Carolina. If they’d included both classes you’d just have almost the full list of South Carolina senators.
I noticed because I missed the presence of Andrew Butler, another South Carolina senator of the same Butler family named in the article, who was responsible for the caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate.
For any history buffs like me, I am including the story, because it actually mirrors a lot of what is happening right now. For anyone else, now you know that the vast majority of South Carolina senators were and are racist sacks of shit (there are a few exceptions, fortunately).
In 1856, roughly four years before the start of the Civil War, westward expansion was hotly debated, and not just with words, because abolitionists wanted banning of slavery in any territory to be a requirement of entry into the Union and statehood, while slave-owning states of course did not.
This wasn’t just about slavery; like MAGA today it was about power and who got to control the country, as the pro-slavery states sought to ensure that territories admitted to statehood did not dilute their own federal influence, power and control. So how newly-admitted states were represented and got to vote was a huge deal, especially if that admission might upset various cheats like the Three-Fifths Compromise and others like it that gave slave-owning states an unnatural advantage not directly conferred by actual population.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act was one of these cheats, a short-lived compromise co-authored by Andrew Butler of South Carolina, which allowed newly admitted states in the west to enter the union while permitting slave ownership by leaving it up to the new state to decide for themselves, where slavery was already just as hotly argued over as it was anywhere else.
States rights, in other words. This should be sounding familiar by now.
So when the Kansas-Nebraska Act went through the Senate, an abolitionist named Charles Sumner from Massachusetts gave an impassioned speech against it, while also being sure to personally insult Butler as many ways as he could throughout, with liberal use of sexual innuendo (probably not misplaced, according to Wikipedia).
By way of response, Butler’s first cousin once-removed, Preston Brooks, who was a representative for South Carolina at the time, came onto the Senate floor with a couple of other southern congressmen two days later and caned Sumner nearly to death. Brave men as they were, they waited for the chamber to be almost empty before they did so, claiming that this was so that no ladies present in the galleries could see, and Brooks attacked Sumner as he was sitting at his desk writing a letter while his associates held off those attracted by the commotion so no one could help Sumner, one using a pistol. Sumner had already passed out and was being held up by the lapels by Brooks as he continued to whip him with the cane before others were able to get to him, and suffered severe injuries.
Afterward, the South closed ranks around its own and re-elected those involved, making heroes out of them, but Preston Brooks died of a respiratory infection shortly after re-election anyway. Sumner survived and lived another twenty years, but he
suffered head trauma that would cause him chronic pain and symptoms consistent with what would now be called traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, and spent three years convalescing before returning to his Senate seat. He suffered chronic pain and debilitation for the rest of his life.
Funny thing, the caning of Charles Sumner ended up being one of the biggest own-goals of the pro-slavery South: when these racist slave owners brought their violence into the Senate itself it angered a number of abolitionist Kansas settlers, one of whom was John Brown, and the Pottawatomie Massacre in response, and in the long run only strengthened the newly-formed anti-slavery Republican party and helped put Abraham Lincoln into office four years later.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Thanks for this bit of history. I wish more history books in school covered this part of our past.
I do too. My history teachers tried, but most of what I learned about history I learned as an adult, mainly because I really like historical biographies. There was a time when I’d have multiple books going at once, but that was decades ago now.
What has really fired me up in the last few years has been listening to Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman, who are both essentially historians/history teachers/historical authors turned contemporary political commentators.
Until them I avoided almost all modern political commentary because it all sounds like fantasy football to me, with participants hotly arguing conjecture. But when I first heard Richardson, she was talking about how some particular thing with Trump had a clear parallel in something that had happened in Reconstruction, I could see it for myself, and suddenly history had relevance again.
I was hooked. She does a Saturday morning thing with Dr. Freeman, whose specialty seems to be Alexander Hamilton, and they both just talk history in the modern context and laugh. I haven’t read their books, but I might, and Richardson also has a Substack I catch occasionally.
Somehow those two have got me interested again, and it’s no longer strategists arguing fantasy politics. (I still don’t listen to anyone else, lol.)
Never too late to learn.
Which would make a progressive victory all the sweeter.
As soon as a progressive wins the seat all the leftists will hate them anyways.
