That could be. Seems like nowadays, if you don't speak in short little sentences prepackaged by the mainstream media and institutions of learning, you're labeled an eccentric. People are so discouraged from using reason anymore and ridiculed if they veer from the mainstream even slightly before anyone even considers what was said.
I would give nearly anything to have been a fly on the wall during Sumner's Crime Against Kansas.
And the intellectual rebuttle from the Senator from South Carolina? :^)
Actually, he was a Representative, a cousin of the Senator, who was rather elderly.