Steedman had to sleep on the floor during the whole of the Convention, while they slept in his beds." Sleeping on a carpeted floor was not a particularly severe hardship for the sinewey Steedman, for when under great mental or nervous excitement he can not sleep at all. At the Cincinnati Convention of 1856, in which he was the leading Ohio wire-puller, he went for four days and nights without closing his eyes, and three fourths of the time he was on his feet on the cold stone floor of the Burnett House, "manipulating" the politicians. He can neither eat nor drink under great excitement. At the battle of Chickamauga he ate nothing for two days, and though he carried a canteen of whisky through the entire battle, he forgot all about it until after the retreat to Rossville, when a wounded soldier in the hospital asked for a drink, and Steedman gave him his canteen. Steedman was a Douglas Democrat of very strong proclivities, and very much astonished his friends, when the war was about beginning, by arguing in his paper, the Toledo Herald and Times, the propriety of permitting the Southern states "to go out," _i.e._, to peaceably secede. Such a doctrine from a Douglas Democrat was astonishing, and the article created much comment. Without saying that the states ought to be allowed to depart, he argued that secession was its own punishment; that the seceded states could not hold together if allowed to secede; and that a few years only would elapse before they would be begging their way back into the Union; and that, while it would cost a river of blood to keep them in, a war would not more effectually settle the question of secession than if allowed to fall of its own weight. Steedman's friends declared him crazy, but he only laughed at them, and in the next issue of his paper finished his argument, or rather gave the other side of the question. Claiming that the first conclusion was correct, and that the course suggested would be equally effective with war, he then went on to show that it was not the one which a great people could pursue; that peaceable secession was a doctrine we ought not to admit merely for the sake of the humanitarian argument of "no bloodshed," and that nothing was left for the loyal people but the other bitter alternative of war. That alternative the people of the North, he declared, would unanimously accept in the spirit of right and justice, and that it became the people to prepare for the blood-letting which was to ensue. The first of these articles eventually found its way into Congress at a time when Steedman's confirmation as brigadier general was pending, and being construed into "Copperheadism," retarded that confirmation for nearly two years, Mr. Ashley, who had defeated Steedman for Congress, holding it over his head as a balance of power to keep the general from running against him for that position. At the next election, instead of agreeing to abandon the field to Ashley, and