May 22 · This Day in America
The Senate chamber is nearly empty in the afternoon. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts sits at his desk, head down, addressing copies of his fiery antislavery speech "The Crime Against Kansas." He does not see Preston Brooks of South Carolina cross the room. Brooks raises a heavy gold-topped cane and brings it down on Sumner's skull, again and again. Sumner, trapped by his bolted desk, finally tears it from the floor trying to escape, then collapses blinded by his own blood. It is over in a minute. Brooks walks out calmly. In the South he is sent dozens of new canes; in the North, Sumner's empty desk is left in place for years, a wound the country refuses to hide. The argument over slavery has stopped being an argument. The Civil War is now five years away, and everyone can feel it coming.
Source: www.senate.gov
Also on this day · 1849
A one-term Illinois congressman receives U.S. Patent No. 6,469 for a device of buoyant chambers to lift boats over river shoals — an idea he whittled into a model himself, inspired by a grounded steamboat he'd watched. It was never built. But it makes Lincoln the only president in American history to hold a patent, and the carved wooden model still sits in the Smithsonian.
Source: americanhistory.si.edu