Shiloh, 1862 Read Online Free PDF Page A

newspapers and journals. By then the arguments of national politics had become almost completely sectional and adversarial. In 1850, when California sought to join the Union, it was admitted as a free state, prompting South Carolina’s Calhoun, then nearly on his deathbed, to declare that the move had “upset the equilibrium of the nation and [would] lead to Civil War.”
    To assuage the furious South, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that made northerners personally responsible for the return of runaway slaves. Where before many in the North had little or no opinions or feelings on slavery, this law seemed to demand their direct assent to the practice of human bondage, and it galvanized Northern sentiments against slavery.
    Another polarizing incident between the two sections occurred upon the 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, which depicted the slave’s life as a relentless nightmare of sorrow and cruelty. Northern passions were incensed and inflamed, while southerners dismissed the tale as outrageously skewed, overdramatized, and unfair. 4
    In 1854 agitation by both sides over the future of the Kansas Territory resulted in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, sponsored by future presidential candidate and Lincoln debater Stephen A. Douglas. This new law overturned the Missouri Compromise and authorized settlers in the Kansas Territory to decide for themselves whether they wanted their state to be slave or free. This was known as “popular sovereignty.”
    Outraged abolitionists began raising funds to send antislavery settlers to Kansas, prompting equally outraged southerners to fund their own settlers, and a brutish group from slaveholding Missouri known as Border Ruffians went into Kansas to make trouble for the abolitionists. Into this ill-fated mix rode an abolitionist fanatic named John Brown with his three sons, and as the murders and massacres began to pile up, newspapers throughout the land began to carry headlines of “Bleeding Kansas.”
    Other changes were in store for the political class, especially in the Senate, where southerners had dominated, if not always in numbers, at least in oratory style. For every Yankee Daniel Webster, it seemed, there was a Henry Clay, or a Calhoun, or a Thomas Hart Benton to speak the part of the South. But in 1851 two new Northern senators—then Democrats but soon to be Radical Republicans—entered the chamber. Together, they brought great political weight and bearing to what was otherwise a notoriously staid and compromising body politic.
    Judge Ben Wade of Ohio was one of them and 40-year-old Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was the other. Sumner was tall, statesmanlike, and had the looks of “an Apollo,” a sharply honed, speechified Boston lawyer who was vehemently opposed to slavery. Wade, on the other hand—and this according to an admirer—was a “self-made, untutored yokel, heavy, old, glum and square,” who not only opposed slavery but had the brass to silence those who weren’t. Once seated in the formally genteel Senate chambers Wade was just uncouth enough to shout “You’re a liar” at gentlemen from the Cotton Kingdom who were trying to defend their “peculiar institution,” as slavery had come to be known. And when the Southern gentlemen objected to his behavior, Wade was justbold enough to retort “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
    Those words were far more weighty than they are now, for while the practice of dueling over insulted honor was banned in many states and the District of Columbia, it was still very much alive as means of settling personal disputes, including those in Congress. In Ben Wade’s case, his reputation had preceded him. He was vouched to be an expert shot with a squirrel rifle from his days as a backwoodsman, and the advantage Wade had—and he knew it—was that, if challenged, the choice of weapons would be his. And Southern gentlemen, while they may have been