Mon, Aug 17
|801 E St NW
Profs & Pints DC: Fighting Words, Civil War
n the fiery debates about free speech, political violence, and slavery that led to armed conflict between the Union and the Confederacy, with Paul Quigley, professor of Civil War History at Virginia Tech and director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies.
Time & Location
Aug 17, 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM
801 E St NW, 801 E St NW, Washington, DC 20004, USA
About the event
Profs and Pints DC presents: “Fighting Words, Civil War,” on the fiery debates about free speech, political violence, and slavery that led to armed conflict between the Union and the Confederacy, with Paul Quigley, professor of Civil War History at Virginia Tech and director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies.
Just like in our own time, the years leading up to our nation’s Civil War found Americans wrestling with thorny questions related to free speech. Among the questions being asked: Who got to say what to whom? Which words were so incendiary as to justify physical reprisal?
These questions became more urgent than ever in 1856, when South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks used a cane to beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner unconscious in the Senate chamber in retaliation for Sumner’s Senate speech denouncing slavery and personally insulting Brooks’s relative. Although the caning lasted barely a minute, it greatly…