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for three years, galvanized antislavery sentiment in the North. “Knots of men” on street corners pronounced it “a gross outrage on an American Senator and on freedom of speech,” reported the Boston Daily Evening Transcript. Even the moderate supporters of the Nebraska bill “expressed themselves as never so much aroused before by the slave power.” Mass public meetings, so crowded that thousands were unable to gain entrance, convened in cities and towns to protest the caning. Truly to “see the slave aggression,” one of Sumner’s supporters wrote, the North had first to see “one of its best men Butchered in Congress.” Other antislavery men had been assaulted, the New York Tribune observed, “but the knocking-down and beating to bloody blindness and unconsciousness of an American Senator while writing at his desk in the Senate Chamber is a novel illustration of the ferocious Southern spirit.” The beating reached into the people’s hearts and minds, which political events rarely touch, the historian William Gienapp has argued. It “proved a powerful stimulus in driving moderates and conservatives into the Republican party.”

If Sumner became a hero in the North, Brooks was equally lionized in the South, where the press almost universally applauded the assault. The Richmond Enquirer spoke for many when it pronounced the act “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence.” Celebratory gatherings were held everywhere, and in Columbia, South Carolina, the governor presented Brooks with a silver goblet and walking stick in honor of his good work.

More ominous still was the reaction of the distinguished Richmond Whig, a professed opponent of extremism on sectional issues. “We are rejoiced at this,” the Whig proclaimed. “The only regret we feel is, that Mr. Brooks did not employ a horsewhip or a cowhide upon his slanderous back, instead of a cane. We trust the ball may be kept in motion. Seward and others should catch it next.” The Petersburg [Virginia] Intelligencer sounded a similar theme. “If thrashing is the only remedy by which the foul conduct of the Abolitionists can be controlled…it will be very well to give Seward a double dose at least every other day until it operates freely on his political bowels…his adroit demagoguism and damnable doctrines are infinitely more dangerous to the country than the coarse blackguardism of the perjured wretch, Sumner.” The antipodal reactions of North and South, David Donald notes, made it “apparent that something dangerous was happening to the American Union when the two sections no longer spoke the same language, but employed rival sets of clichés to describe the Brooks-Sumner affair.”

With emotions running high in Illinois, “all shades of antislavery opinion” flocked to the Bloomington convention—“old-line Whigs, bolting Democrats, Free-Soilers, Know Nothings, and abolitionists.” Lincoln’s fears were put to rest. Every faction seemed willing to concede something to create a party that all could stand behind.

The adopted platform united disparate factions on the issue of slavery extension without giving in to the bigoted views of the Know Nothings. Lincoln then delivered a powerful speech, full of “fire and energy and force,” that further fortified the jarring factions into a united front. “That is the greatest speech ever made in Illinois,” state auditor Jesse Dubois said, “and puts Lincoln on the track for the presidency.” So enthralled were those in the audience that reporters cast aside their pens so as to concentrate on what Lincoln said, and the unrecorded speech has become known to history as the famous “Lost Speech.” Lincoln was now the acknowledged leader of the new Republican Party in Illinois.

BY THE LATE SPRING of 1856, branches of the Republican Party had already been organized in at least twenty-two states and the District of Columbia, a remarkable beginning for a new party, giving hope to the leaders that this time, with the Whig Party all but dissolved and the Democratic Party split in two, they stood a solid chance in the presidential election.