On the other hand, the slave-state men had a native
preference for the bowie-knife and the shot-gun, yet showed a kind of
respect for the ballot-box by insisting that it should be stuffed with
votes on their side. Thus for a long while was waged a dubious, savage,
and peculiar warfare. Imprisonments and rescues, beatings, shootings,
plunderings, burnings, sieges, and lootings of towns were interspersed
with elections of civil officers, with legislative enactments in
ordinary form, with trials, suits at law, legal arguments, and decisions
of judges. It is impossible here to sketch in detail this strange
phantasmagory of arson, bloodshed, politics, and law.
[Illustration: Lyman Trumbull]
Meantime other occurrences demand mention. In May, 1854, the seizure in
Boston of Anthony Burns, as an escaped slave, caused a riot in which the
court-house was attacked by a mob, one of the assailants was killed, and
the militia were called out. Other like seizures elsewhere aroused the
indignation of people who, whatever were their abstract theories as to
the law, revolted at the actual spectacle of a man dragged back from
freedom into slavery. May 22, 1856, Preston S. Brooks strode suddenly
upon Charles Sumner, seated and unarmed at his desk in the
senate-chamber, and beat him savagely over the head with a cane,
inflicting very serious injuries. Had it been a fair fight, or had the
South repudiated the act, the North might have made little of it, for
Sumner was too advanced in his views to be politically popular.
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