The Cane and the Fracture
The Assault on Charles Sumner and the Road to Ruin In the sweltering spring of 1856, the United States Capitol stood as a fragile monument to compromise, its marble halls echoing with the bitter debates that had long simmered over the peculiar institution of slavery. The nation, stretched thin across a continent, was tearing at its seams. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 had ignited the powder keg, repealing the Missouri Compromise and thrusting the question of slavery's expansion into the hands of territorial voters through "popular sovereignty." What followed was "Bleeding Kansas," a frontier bloodbath where pro-slavery "Border Ruffians" from Missouri…