Speech of Hon. A.P. Butler, of South Carolina, on the difficulty of Messrs. Brooks and Sumner and the Causes Thereof. [New York]:  [New York Weekly Day Book?], [1856]. 8vo, 24 pp. Disbound. 

A rare printing of Andrew Pickens Butler's speech addressing the recent congressional scandal. In Charles Sumner's inflammatory "Crime Against Kansas" speech in May 1856, he denigrated South Carolina and Butler personally, stating that Butler "has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. I mean the harlot, Slavery." In response, Preston Brooks, a cousin of Butler, beat Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor 2 days later. The incident is widely regarded as one of the major flashpoints in the lead-up to the Civil War.

Here, Butler responds to the incident, stating that "if I had been present, I should have asked the Senator before he finished some of the paragraphs personally applicable to myself, to pause; and if he had gone on, I would have demanded of him, the next mornign, that he should review that speec, and retract or modify it, so as to bring it within the sphere of parliamentary propriety. 

A much more common printing of the speech was published by the Congressional Globe Office in Washington, D.C. in 1856. This copy appears to have been issued by the publishers of the New York Weekly Day Book. The short advertisement printed above the speech states unequivocally, "The Day Bookenters this upon the sevent of its publication...it is Anti-abolition, Anti-Black Republican, in a word, anti-fanatical in every respect." Evidently, they published this speech in direct support of their pro-slavery and anti-abolitionist cause. 

RARE. While copies of the Congressional Globe are more common, we found no other copies of this publication. 

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