Historical Comment

Back in 1856, the country was deeply embroiled in the slavery question. The issue had exploded into violence in Kansas as emigrants to that territory competed to determine whether it would eventually enter the union as a slave or free state, resulting in multiple murders, assaults, the burning of towns and homes, and other wanton destruction. As the violence threatened to completely spin out of control, Senator Charles Sumner of New York stood up in Congress one day and made a speech denouncing the violence and holding pro-slavery forces largely responsible for the carnage. The next day, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the Senate chamber, walked up to Sumner, and proceeded to beat him mercilessly about the head with a cane. Sumner was rendered an invalid for the next several years (though he would re-emerge as a leading proponent of African-American rights during the post Civil War Reconstruction period). Within days, Brooks was inundated with gifts from his constituents-- replacements for the cane he broke as he pummeled his Congressional counterpart.

Twenty odd years before that, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina allowed a personal beef with President Andrew Jackson to escalate to the point where he nearly caused his state to secede from the union, compelling Jackson to send troops to the border to stop them. Luckily cooler heads prevailed and a compromise in Congress allowed the Civil War to be put off for another quarter century.

Oh yeah, and by the way, it was South Carolina hotheads who decided Abraham Lincoln's removal of federal troops from on-shore installations to an island near Charleston Harbor was not a good enough sign of his desire for peace, and so shelled Fort Sumner, irretrievably dragging the entire nation into Civil War.

Rep. Joe Wilson's idiotic (and, what a surprise, erroneous) outburst during President Obama's speech last night certainly doesn't sink to the depths of these earlier instances, but it does make me wonder: what is the deal with South Carolinians and the apparent inability of so many of their leaders to behave like adults?