Description:
Senator Charles Sumner's 1856 speech, "The Crime Against Kansas," is best known for provoking Congressman Preston Brooks to beat Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor. The caning helped propel the country toward civil war and is now a standard topic in U.S. history textbooks. In Charles Sumner, Slavery, Sexual Assault, and the 1856 Election, Michael D. Pierson offers a new interpretation of this notorious incident and its aftermath. His close reading of Sumner's speech highlights Sumner's subtle emphasis on the sexual violence inherent in American slavery--a reading that explains why so many men endorsed the caning as a way to suppress Sumner's provocative antislavery rhetoric in Congress.
Pierson's study provides a new understanding of antebellum politics. It begins in the realm of "high" politics, including Senate speeches and election campaigns at the state and federal levels, but it also shows how women, African Americans, and other citizens brought discussions of sexual assault into civil society, driving vital changes in northern public opinion that influenced Charles Sumner and other Republicans. Pierson uses the historiography of gender studies and rape culture to inform what was at stake in Sumner's speech and the reaction to it. By tracing the interactions between Sumner and activists who changed the ways we think about sexual violence, the book advances a bold reassessment of an event we thought we knew well.Brief description: Michael D. Pierson is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and the author of The Wild Woman of Cincinnati: Gender and Politics on the Eve of the Civil War.
Review Quotes:
"In 1856, Charles Sumner became the first-ever senator to accuse a colleague of sexual assault. He did so in 'The Crime Against Kansas, ' a five-hour-long speech that prompted a proslavery congressman to beat Sumner nearly to death. In this masterful book, Michael D. Pierson uncovers the subtleties of the speech--its complex allusions, rhetorical innuendos, and signals to current events. He presents the speech as a groundbreaking defense of the dignity of enslaved women, situating it within the women's rights movement. This fascinating book resuscitates one of our country's greatest works of oratory and is vital reading for literary scholars and historians of feminism and abolitionism."--Zaakir Tameez, author of the Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize-winning Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation
"Michael Pierson's account of Charles Sumner's famous 'Crime Against Kansas' speech and its impact breaks fresh ground. Pierson convincingly contends that southern fury directed at Sumner--not least through the brutal caning administered by Congressman Preston Brooks--was triggered by Sumner's conspicuous connection of slavery to sexual violence against enslaved women and white wives. Northern women's influence on Sumner's thinking about the South's 'peculiar institution'--a noteworthy feature of Pierson's argument--enhances the value of this impressively researched and elegantly constructed book."--Michael J. Birkner, coeditor of The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens: Place, Personality, and Politics in the Civil War Era