Sen. Charles Sumner is beaten on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Sumner (Free Soil-Mass.) is severely beaten by U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina, whose second cousin, Sen. Andrew Butler of South Carolina, Sumner had denounced in a speech two days earlier. Sumner is seated at a desk, signing copies of his speech, when Preston approaches and begins to strike him repeatedly with a gold-handled cane. “I felt it to be my duty to relieve Butler and avenge the insult to my State,” Preston says later. Seriously injured, Sumner recuperates first in Maryland, then in Pennsylvania before returning to Boston in November 1856.*