The Republican campaign was conducted with a degree of passion
that had scarcely been equaled in America before that day. To
the well-ordered spirit of the conservative classes the tone
which the Republicans assumed appeared shocking. Boldly
sectional in their language, sweeping in their denunciation of
slavery, the leaders of the campaign made bitter and effective
use of a number of recent events. "Uncle Tom's Cabin", published
in 1852, and already immensely popular, was used as a political
tract to arouse, by its gruesome picture of slavery, a hatred of
slaveholders. Returned settlers from Kansas went about the North
telling horrible stories of guerrilla warfare, so colored as to
throw the odium all on one side. The scandal of the moment was
the attack made by Preston Brooks on Sumner, after the latter's
furious diatribe in the Senate, which was published as "The Crime
Against Kansas". With double skill the Republicans made equal
capital out of the intellectual violence of the speech and the
physical violence of the retort. In addition to this, there was
ready to their hands the evidence of Southern and Democratic
sympathy with a filibustering attempt to conquer the republic of
Nicaragua, where William Walker, an American adventurer, had
recently made himself dictator.
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