Object Details
- depicted
- Sumner, Charles
- Brooks, Preston Smith
- Magee, John L.
- Description
- On May 22, 1856, during the Bleeding Kansas crisis, Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner delivered a speech to Congress in which he denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and demanded that Kansas be admitted to the Union as a free state. In his oration, he verbally attacked the pro-slavery South Carolina Senator, Andrew Butler, and called into question the man’s code of Southern chivalry, accusing him of taking slavery as his mistress. Two days later, Preston Brooks, a South Carolina Congressman and also Butler’s cousin, nearly beat Sumner to death on the Senate floor with a cane. Responses to the attack in the North and the South further polarized the people of the nation, leading it further down the path to war.
- In the print, Brooks uses a bloody cane to strike the Massachusetts Senator, who has fallen out of his chair and lies on the ground below the Southerner, bleeding from gashes on his forehead. He holds in his right hand a quill he had been using to write on a document containing the word, “Kansas.” Behind the struggle, other Congressmen look on, appearing either disgusted or delighted. In the back left, Brooks’ fellow South Carolinian Representative, Laurence M. Keitt, prevents a bystander from interrupting.
- The illustration is signed in the lower left hand corner by John L. Magee. Born in New York around 1820, Magee was initially employed by the lithographic firms of James Baillie and Nathaniel Currier. He started his own business in New York in 1850, but moved to Philadelphia sometime shortly after 1852. He was known for his political cartoons, which he produced until the 1860s.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Credit Line
- Harry T. Peters "America on Stone" Lithography Collection
- n.d.
- ca 1856
- ID Number
- DL.60.3451
- catalog number
- 60.3451
- Object Name
- Lithograph
- Object Type
- Lithograph
- Physical Description
- paper (overall material)
- ink (overall material)
- Measurements
- image: 9 1/4 in x 16 in; 23.495 cm x 40.64 cm
- place made
- United States: Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
- See more items in
- Home and Community Life: Domestic Life
- Clothing & Accessories
- American Civil War Prints
- Art
- Domestic Furnishings
- National Museum of American History
- Subject
- Communication, letter writing
- U.S. National Government, legislative branch
- Furnishings
- Political Caricatures
- Record ID
- nmah_325684
- GUID (Link to Original Record)
- https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746b4-af03-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa
