Most people in the Senate chamber noticed the sound before anything else—the sharp, sickening crack of a metal-tipped cane landing on an unprotected skull. On May 22, 1856, Preston Brooks, a young representative from South Carolina, confronted Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts during a visit to the upper chamber. Sumner, known for his fiery abolitionist orations, had recently given a speech leveling insults at Brooks’s kinsman Senator Andrew P. Butler, including that he consorted with “