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Senator Charles Sumner's 1856 speech, "The Crime Against Kansas," is best known for provoking Congressman Preston Brooks to beat Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor. The caning helped propel the country toward civil war and is now a standard topic in U.S. history textbooks. In Charles Sumner, Slavery, Sexual Assault, and the 1856 Election, Michael D. Pierson offers a new interpretation of this notorious incident and its aftermath. His close reading of Sumner's speech highlights Sumner's subtle emphasis on the sexual violence inherent in American slavery-a reading that explains why so many men endorsed the caning as a way to suppress Sumner's provocative antislavery rhetoric in Congress.

Pierson's study provides a new understanding of antebellum politics. It begins in the realm of "high" politics, including Senate speeches and election campaigns at the state and federal levels, but it also shows how women, African Americans, and other citizens brought discussions of sexual assault into civil society, driving vital changes in northern public opinion that influenced Charles Sumner and other Republicans. Pierson uses the historiography of gender studies and rape culture to inform what was at stake in Sumner's speech and the reaction to it. By tracing the interactions between Sumner and activists who changed the ways we think about sexual violence, the book advances a bold reassessment of an event we thought we knew well.