Northern papers rightly saw Brooks’s act of violence against Sumner as an attack on free speech; Sinha cites The New York Times editorializing that “without freedom of speech, there can be no freedom any kind—and the liberties of the Republic may well be regarded as in peril when such an act can be perpetrated with impunity.”

Despite Brooks’s public bravado, many of his contemporaries understood that what he had done was an act of cowardice. Anson Burlingame, a representative from Massachusetts, denounced Brooks on the House floor. “Strike a man when he is pinioned—when he cannot respond to a blow! Call you that chivalry? In what code of honor did you get your authority for that?” Mocking both Brooks and Butler as the “gallant nephew” and “gallant uncle,” Burlingame declared, “when we utter something which does not suit their sensitive natures, we desire to know it.” The speech was so memorable that The New York Times cited it in Burlingame’s 1870 obituary.

An infuriated Brooks challenged Burlingame to a duel. Burlingame accepted. The two men were meant to meet in Canada, where, according to The New York Times, an eager Burlingame hurried after stopping in New York to ensure that his skills with a rifle had not atrophied. The Times reported at the time that the proprietor of the shooting gallery “had witnessed, in his time, some accurate shooting, but nothing that equaled this.”

A member of Brooks’s entourage was spying on Burlingame, and according to the Times, witnessed “the shooting of the Broadway gallery.” He telegraphed Brooks in Philadelphia, who suddenly decided not to proceed to Canada on the grounds that he would have to travel through “a hostile country.” Brooks’s headstone would later say that heaven itself never opened its arms to a “manlier spirit.” It is perhaps kind to describe that as an exaggeration. Brooks was a precious little snowflake who melted at first thaw.

The antebellum South was a society built on the violent exploitation of defenseless people; it is in no sense strange or odd that slaveholders would see no incompatibility between their concept of freedom and valor, and ambushing and caning a man who said something that hurt their feelings. Brooks was a hopelessly craven bully who bludgeoned a man in ambush and then shrank from a fair duel with an equal once he realized he would lose.

I don’t mean to fetishize courage, which can be possessed by good and evil alike. I tell this story to show that in politics, one defends cruelty or cowardice by cloaking it in a delusion of valor.

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On May 25, witnesses say, Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate in the special election for the seat vacated by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, grabbed the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs by his neck and slammed him to the ground. Jacobs was attempting to ask Gianforte about his position on the American Health Care Act, a bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimates would lead to some 23 million fewer people having health insurance. Gianforte defeated his Democratic opponent Rob Quist Thursday evening without ever taking a clear public position on the bill, which is deeply unpopular.