From this Sumner concluded that his enemies and others who disagreed with him were willfully wicked. And, further, that it was his duty to denounce and excoriate them for their wickedness from his privileged seat in the U.S. Senate.

With his holier-than-thou attitude, Sumner seems very much like the modern Liberal. He also seems to have set the tone for generations of Massachusetts Senators.

Talk about fighting words.

Clara Barton, who sat in the Senate gallery, described Sumner’s speech––”The Crime Against Kansas”––as a declaration of war against the South. “That night war began . . . . It began not at Fort Sumter but with Sumner.”

Sumner’s speech was deliberately provocative. It is considered by historians to be the most vicious, hysterical, and unscrupulous speech ever delivered in Congress. It lasted two days, 19-20 May 1856. It was carefully prepared, using gross vituperation, insults, cruelty, and everything that would shock and horrify, then studied and rehearsed, and published in advance, with the deliberate object of generating as much offense and anger as possible.

The speech used obscenities, lewd Greek and Latin references and classical quotations, and vulgar similes. It was studded with terms such as “assassins and thugs,” “drunken spew and vomit,” “murderous robbers,” etc.

It compared the venerable Senator Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina to a whoremonger, but also insulted the President Franklin Pierce, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, and Senator James Mason of Virginia.

Sumner called out Douglas: “The noisome, squat, and nameless animal, to which I now refer, is not a proper model for an American Senator. Will the Senator from Illinois take notice?”

He insulted the southern States in general, and South Carolina and Virginia in particular. He suggested that America would be a better place if “South Carolina [were] blotted out of existence.”

Sumner’s friends had urged him in advance to moderate his speech, but Sumner — a cruel, intolerant, arrogant, and egotistical fanatic — refused. He came to the Senate armed with a gun.

Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan was the first to speak after Sumner: “I have listened with equal regret and surprise to the speech of the honorable Senator from Massachusetts. Such a speech––the most unAmerican and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body––I hope never to hear again here or elsewhere.”

Senator Douglas replied, in part: “the personalities in which he has indulged, evincing a depth of malignity that issued from every sentence…. It seems that his studies of the classics have all been in those haunts where ladies cannot go, and where gentlemen never read Latin.”

Sumner recovered from his beating in a couple of months. He received visitors in his house, including the terrorist John Brown, and visited European spas, but Sumner left his seat vacant for three years in order to indulge his sense of martyrdom.

But of course, they would want a phalanx of Nation of Islam guards to insure their own safety, cowards that they are.