The Great American Outrage Machine

Resentment and indignation are feelings dangerous to the possessor and to be sparingly used. They give comfort too cheaply; they rot judgment, and by encouraging passivity, they come to require that evil continue for the sake of the grievance to be enjoyed. — Jacques Barzun, Science: The Glorious Entertainment

The level of incivility in American political discourse has ebbed and flowed over the years, but it probably reached its high-water mark in 1856 — the year that South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks walked into the main chamber of the US Senate and beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner senseless with a cane.

The triggering event for Brooks was a speech titled “The Crime against Kansas” that Sumner, a fiery abolitionist, had given several days earlier in the same chamber. At the time, Kansas was the focal point of the national debate over slavery. Under the highly controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, Kansas could choose for itself whether to enter the Union as a slave or a free state. Two different state legislatures convened and produced two different constitutions — one that supported and one that opposed slavery. To nobody’s surprise, pro-slavery president Franklin Pierce insisted on accepting the pro-slavery constitution.

Brooks, whose second cousin, Senator Andrew Butler, was attacked by name in the speech…