Shiloh, 1862 Read Online Free PDF

many things, were rarely accomplished squirrel hunters.
    Wade’s tactics soon cast a pall over the Southern senators, who at least had better judgment than to face Wade’s squirrel rifle on the field of honor, even as they seethed furiously at the embarrassment of their situation. For its part, the Southern press held up Wade as an indelible symbol of that bullying kind of Yankee, the abolitionist tyrant.
    Senator Sumner, on the other hand, owned no squirrel rifle, or weapon of any kind, so far as it was known, but relied on logic, a higher sense of morality, and advanced oratory skills to overwhelm opponents in the slavery debates. Southerners, already careful, lest they provoke Ben Wade, generally chose their words cautiously, but nevertheless managed to drive home the point that so far as old Dixie was concerned slavery wasn’t going away and in fact was destined to spread to the far-flung outlands of the nation.
    One day in 1856 Senator Sumner startled even his fellow radicals during a lofty, three-hour disquisition against slavery by singling out his colleague Andrew Butler for a severe personal ridicule. Among other things, Sumner declared that Senator Butler kept “a mistress who, though ugly to others, is lovely to him … I meanthe harlot, slavery”; moreover, he further proceeded to mock the 59-year-old South Carolinian, who had suffered a stroke, for his posture and manner of speech.
    This so infuriated Butler’s nephew, a congressman named Preston Brooks, that two days later he accosted Sumner at his desk in the Senate chamber and caned him nearly to death with a gold-headed gutta-percha walking stick.
    The incident triggered profound indignation throughout the North and helped give rise to the formation of the Republican Party, which had a firm antislavery platform. 5 Later that year the Republicans’ candidate for President was the western explorer John C. Frémont, the famed “pathfinder” of the 1840s, and even though Frémont was defeated his candidacy established the Republicans as a force to be reckoned with.
    By this time the country had been lurching from political crisis to crisis for more than a decade, and secession talk increasingly inflamed the South and was seriously taken. In 1857 the Supreme Court delivered its infamous
Dred Scott
decision, which elated southerners and enraged northerners. It was the opinion of the court that a slave was neither a “citizen” nor, for that matter, even a “person,” and “so far inferior that [slaves] have no rights which the white man [is] bound to respect.” The immediate effect of the ruling was that southerners could now move their slaves into and out of free states and territories without losing them; for northerners the decision drove more people into the antislavery camp.
    In 1859 John Brown, of “Bleeding Kansas” notoriety, staged amurderous raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in hopes of inspiring a general slave uprising. The raid was thwarted by U.S. troops, and Brown was tried for treason and hanged, but when it came out that he was being financed by wealthy Northern abolitionists, Southern anger was profuse—especially after the Northern press elevated Brown to the status of hero and martyr.
    As the election year of 1860 approached it seemed the nation was consumed in a furor as political parties dissolved or split into factions. Influential Southern fire-eaters insisted that Northern “fanatics” intended to free the slaves “by law if possible, by force as necessary,” and hectoring Northern newspapers and orators (known as “black” or Radical Republicans) provided ample fodder for that conclusion.
    When the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln as their candidate, the Southern press whipped up its populace to such a pitch of fury it seemed as if John Brown himself had been put on the ticket. Lincoln was lampooned in words and cartoons as an archetypal abolitionist—a kind of Antichrist who would turn