The hashtags are new, but the conflict is old-school.

When Mitch McConnell silenced Elizabeth Warren on the senate floor, it reminded Harvard Historian Nancy Koehn of another heated exchange that happened there in 1856.

In that year, Rep. Preston Brooks attacked Sen. Charles Sumner with a walking cane in response to a speech he’d given supporting his abolitionist position.

“Charles Sumner was an outspoken abolitionist — a senator from Massachusetts who had, from early in the 1850s, really spoken out against slavery, and then [spoke] out against all the different aspects of government legislation that seemed to be reinforcing what he and many people ... called the slave power,” Koehn told Boston Public Radio.

The conflict really began with the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, which turned the process of deciding the legality of slavery on its head, according to Koehn.

“It said all this land, most of which was north of the boundary set for the expansion of slavery in 1820 ... would be subject not to congressional mandate or lawmaking about slavery but to popular sovereignty,” Koehn said. “In other words, the citizens or the residents of those territories would vote on whether slavery was legal or not in those territories.”

Sumner was vocally opposed to the act, according to Koehn, which formed the basis of his conflict with Brooks. Brooks bloodied Sumner with a cane after Sumner insulted his cousin in a passionate speech.

So can we draw an comparisons between Sumner's caning and the silencing of  Senator Warren?

“Regardless of how frustrated we might be in current times with Congress," Koehn says, "we think about the Senate as having at least some wisps and some slight sense of augustness about it” .

Nancy Koehn is an historian at the Harvard Business School, where she holds the James E. Robison Chair of Business Administration. Her forthcoming book is "Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times." To listen to her interview on BPR in its entirety, click on the audio link above.