Shiloh, 1862 Read Online Free Page B

firstborn son States Rights Gist, which he bore proudly until November 30, 1864, when, as a Confederate brigadier general, he was shot dead leading his men at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee.
    The squabble naturally spilled over into politics. The North, with its millions of immigrants pouring in, hopelessly outnumbered the South in population and thus controlled the House of Representatives. But by a sort of gentlemen’s agreement the Senate had effectively remained fifty-fifty, because whenever a territorywas admitted to the Union as a free state the South was “allowed” to add a corresponding slave state—and vice versa. 3
    But in 1820, when Missouri applied for statehood and antislavery forces insisted it must be free, there were no other slaveholding territories to offset the addition. Ultimately, this resulted in the Missouri Compromise (brokered by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky), which decreed that Missouri could come in as a slave state but that any other state created north of Missouri’s southern border would have to be free. That held the thing together for 30 years—longer than it deserved.
    By the 1840s abolitionism had become a full-fledged movement, with preaching from pulpits, stumps, and lecture halls across the North; the abetting of runaway slaves via the Underground Railway; and the distribution of pamphlets and other antislavery literature in the Southern mails. Not only that, the abolitionists had modified their position that slavery was merely a “social evil,” condemning it now as a “moral wrong,” and began to agitate on that basis.
    This shocked and angered many churchgoing southerners, who were distressed at being called scandalous names by northerners they did not even know. In turn, that inspired religious schisms that caused the Baptist and Methodist churches to split into Northern and Southern denominations. The Presbyterians hung together, but it was a strain, while the Episcopal Church remained a Southern stronghold and firebrand bastion among the wealthy and planter classes. Catholics also maintained their unity, prompting cynics to suggest it was only because they owed their allegianceto the pope of Rome rather than to any state, country, or ideal.
    Meantime, the cotton revolution had caused the southerners to evolve their notion of slavery as well, from a “necessary evil,” which is how Thomas Jefferson once characterized it, to a “positive good,” according to John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s prominent U.S. senator, a generation later. This naturally infuriated the abolitionists, who redoubled their efforts, prompting southerners to assert that the North was agitating for a murderous slave rebellion. Slave revolt was a horror that remained high on most southerners’ anxiety list. Bloody slave uprisings had occurred in Haiti, Jamaica, and Louisiana, and more recently resulted in the killing of 60 whites during the Nat Turner revolt in Virginia in 1831.

    During the Mexican War of 1846–48 the United States acquired vast territories in the West, which southerners sought to colonize as slave states. It was not so much that they believed slavery would be successful in the West—because of the climate and terrain most people in fact did not think so—but rather for purely political reasons having to do with control of the Senate.
    Early in that conflict, a near crisis arose when an obscure congressman from Pennsylvania placed an amendment onto the war funding bill of 1846 that would have banned slavery in any territory the United States acquired from Mexico, which became known, after its author, as the Wilmot Proviso. It did not pass into law, but the mere act became a cause célèbre for southerners, who offered it as further evidence that the North was out to destroy not only slavery but the South’s political power as well.
    The 1850s brought new levels of anger fueled by “fire-eaters” inthe South and “black radicals” in the North, backed by their