Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Fighting Words, Civil War,” on the fiery debates about free speech, political violence, and slavery that led to armed conflict between the Union and the Confederacy, with Paul Quigley, professor of Civil War History at Virginia Tech and director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies.
Just like in our own time, the years leading up to our nation’s Civil War found Americans wrestling with thorny questions related to free speech. Among the questions being asked: Who got to say what to whom? Which words were so incendiary as to justify physical reprisal?
These questions became more urgent than ever in 1856, when South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks used a cane to beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner unconscious in the Senate chamber in retaliation for Sumner’s Senate speech denouncing slavery and personally insulting Brooks’s relative. Although the caning lasted barely a minute, it greatly intensified the fight over slavery that ultimately led to the Civil War.
Professor Paul Quigley examined that notorious incident, its impact, and its relevance to today in depth for his book The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War. He’ll connect the caning to wider struggles over free speech, violence, and slavery in a talk that will deepen your understanding of our nation’s history and deepest divisions.
He’ll describe how proslavery Americans, realizing that antislavery talk could spark slave uprisings, censored abolitionism by any means necessary, burning abolitionist pamphlets and carrying out the 1837 murder of newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy.
Undeterred, abolitionists embraced the power of provocative language as they repeatedly exposed slaveholder brutality and the injustice of enslavement. Their heated rhetoric fueled increasing acceptance of antislavery violence, culminating in John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
The spiral of rhetorical and physical violence escalated the conflict until it erupted in secession and a war that we’ve never completely put in our past. Could today’s political tensions lead to a similar outcome? (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)