While "the war in Kansas" was going on, Charles Sumner, an Abolitionist from Massachusetts, delivered in the Senate a speech of which he wrote his friends beforehand: "I shall pronounce the most thorough Philippic ever delivered in a legislative body." He was a classical scholar. His purpose was to stir up in the North a greater fury against the South than Demosthenes had aroused in Athens against its enemies, the Macedonians. His speech occupied two days, May 28 and 29, 1855. At its conclusion, Senator Cass, of Michigan, arose at once and pronounced it "the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of this high body." The speech attacked, without any sufficient excuse, the personal character of an absent senator, Butler of South Carolina, a gentleman of high character and older than Sumner. Among other unfounded charges, it accused him of falsehood. Preston Brooks, a representative from South Carolina, attacked Sumner in the Senate chamber during a recess of that body and beat him unmercifully with a cane. The provocation was bitter, indeed, but Brooks's assault was unjustifiable. Nevertheless, the exasperated South applauded it, while the North glorified Sumner as a martyr for free speech.
In less than two years the new Republican party had absorbed all the Abolition voters, and in the election of 1856 was in the field with its candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency—Fremont and Dayton—upon a platform declaring it the duty of Congress to abolish in the territories "those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery."
Excitement during that election was intense. Rufus Choate, the great Massachusetts lawyer, theretofore a Whig, voiced the sentiment of conservatives when he said it was the "duty of every one to prevent the madness of the times from working its maddest act—the permanent formation and the actual present triumph of a party which knows one-half of America only to hate it," etc.
Senator Toombs, of Georgia, said: "The object of Fremont's friends is the conquest of the South. I am content that they shall own us when they conquer us."
The Democrats elected Buchanan; Democrats 174 electoral votes; Republicans 74, all Northern; and the Know-Nothings, combined with a remnant of Whigs, 8.
The work of sectionalism was nearly completed.
The extremes to which some of the Southern people now resorted show the madness of the times. They encouraged filibustering expeditions to capture Cuba and Nicaragua. These wild ventures were absolutely indefensible. They had no official sanction and were only spontaneous movements, but they met with favor from the Southern public, the outgrowth of a feeling that, if these countries should be captured and annexed as slave States, the South could the better, by their aid, defend its rights in the Union. The Wanderer and one or two other vessels, contrary to the laws of the United States, imported slaves from Africa, and when the participants were, some of them, indicted, Southern juries absolutely refused to convict.
"Judgment had fled to brutish beasts,
And men had lost their reason."
When later the Southern States had seceded and formed a government of their own their constitution absolutely prohibited the slave traffic.