Discuss the relevancy of Preston Brooks to American History.

Preston Brooks' most relevant aspect is his beating of
fellow legislator Charles Sumner on the Senate Floor in 1856.  Sumner was from
Massachusetts and an ardent abolitionist, while Brooks was a Representative from South
Carolina.  While Sumner was delivering a particularly scathing speech against South
Carolina and its senator, Andrew Butler, a relative of Brooks, the South Carolina
Representative took exception.  A couple days after the speech, Brooks approached Sumner
in a near empty chamber, declared his exception taken, and then proceeded to use his
cane to beat the Senator.  The image is probably one of the most stark and horrifying in
American History.  The Senate, the center of the legislative branch where all problems
are settled through discussion and debate, where civility is to reign above all, and
where the Framers saw the hopes of the nation realized, became the setting for one
legislator beating another into a crippled mass with a cane.  It was also not lost on
the public that a Southerner was beating up a Northerner, and crippling him in the
process.  In a nation that was growing apart because of different paths to economic
progress along with the issue of slavery becoming a more divisive issue, Southerners saw
it as a vindication of sorts.  Thousands of Southern supporters sent canes to their
legislators and to Brooks as a sign of support and solidarity.  Brooks' attack
demonstrated how the Civil War was unavoidable.