ally. While the majority of the actual natives of Kansas were "free-soilers" opposed to slavery, the votes of the Missourians enabled slavery supporters to gain control of the territorial legislature. Furious free-soilers defiantly formed their own legislature and petitioned for admittance into the United States as a free state. Violence broke out between pro- and anti-slavery factions all along the Missouri-Kansas border, and the badly splintered nation's spiral toward civil war accelerated. Congressmen took to arming themselves before attending sessions of Congress, and in May 1856 House member Preston Brooks, a Southerner, violently beat Republican Charles Sumner in the Senate chambers after the latter gave a speech that included a stinging rebuke of slaveholders (Sumner was unable to return to his job for three years). The ugly incident further inflamed passions between the two sides, as Southern papers hailed Brooks as a defender of Southern honor and Northern commentators castigated him as the inevitable product of a region made mean and corrupt by slavery. In 1857 the Supreme Court--which had a Southern majority at the time--ruled that Congress had no power to limit slavery in the Western territories. This decision, known as the Dred Scott case in reference to the slave who brought the suit, also held that blacks--whether free or enslaved-were inferior beings who could not hold U.S. citizenship, and ruled that slaves were the property of their owners no matter whether they had ever resided ina free state. The Dred Scott decision further aggravated sectionalism and galvanized abolitionists, who felt that the decision might extend slavery. "To the utter amazement of the abolitionists," wrote Alan Axelrod and Charles Phillips in What Every American Should Know about American History, "the court had invoked the Bill of Rights in a ruling that denied freedom to a black slave. For the southern slave-owners, the decision implied that ...
