Sumner, Charles. Crime Against Kansas Speech.

Sen. Charles Sumner (Free Soil-Mass.) delivers the 112-page, five-hour speech, over two days in the U.S. Senate chambers in Washington. In it, he denounces the “slavocracy” of the South, and singles out for criticism Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina. According to Thomas O’Connor, Sumner “ridicules the disabilities” of the latter, who had recently suffered a stroke. Longfellow later calls the speech “the greatest voice on the greatest subject that has ever been uttered since we became a nation.” Whittier calls it “a grand and terrible philippic.” But Sumner is attacked as a result of the speech three days later.*