“There was no hope of compromise with boisterous, swaggering Toombs of Georgia, or his truculent colleague, Iverson; with insolent Slidell of Louisiana, or Judah P. Benjamin, with his purring, musical voice and his lawyer’s subtleties; with sick, defiant Clay of Georgia, or Wigfall of Texas, with his fierce, scarred face. Most influential among them was a cold, fastidious man, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. He was a graduate of West Point, who had served with distinction in Mexico, and had been Secretary of War during the Pierce administration. In his military bearing and romantic conceptions of honor, he symbolized the Southern ideal which had produced this revolution. Such men would listen to no appeals to patriotism. ‘You cannot save this Union by making 4th of July speeches,’ sneered Senator Wigfall. ‘Whipped syllabub is not the remedy for the patient. You have to come down to your work, and you got to do something practical.’
On the other side of the Senate Chamber sat men who were no less unyielding, the men who grown strong with the rise of the young Republican party; men who denied State sovereignty, hated slavery and loved power.”
— Reveille in Washington: 1860-1865 by Margaret Leech. The setting is Washington just before the Civil War, a time of even greater division between the two political parties than now.
