Yikes

“Thoreau had watched his world slip deeper and deeper into the "hell" he had denounced in "Slavery in Massachusetts." On May 19, 1856, his friend Senator Charles Sumner delivered to the Senate a scathing speech condemning Southern aid to proslavery insurgents who were forcibly taking control of the government of Kansas. Two days later, a proslavery militia of several hundred men attacked the free-state town of Lawrence, Kansas, founded two years before by New England immigrants. The raiders sacked, looted, and burned the town, killing most of its male population, as many as two hundred men and boys. The next day, while Sumner sat alone writing at his desk on the Senate floor, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked him with a heavy cane, beating him on the head with its gold tip until Sumner, covered in blood, collapsed unconscious. Brooks kept beating Sumner's bleeding body while his South Carolina colleague, Representative Laurence Keitt, held off horrified spectators with a pistol. Finally the cane broke. Brooks threw it down and walked away. For this act he was levied a $300 fine and given neither jail time nor reprimand.” (P.445 Walls)