Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

CHAPTER VIII.

Excited Condition of the South.—The John Brown Raid at Harper's
Ferry.—Character of Brown.—Governor Wise.—Hot Temper.—Course
of Republicans in Regard to John Brown.—Misunderstanding of the
Two Sections.—Assembling of the Charleston Convention.—Position
of Douglas and his Friends.—Imperious Demands of Southern Democrats.
—Caleb Cushing selected for Chairman of the Convention.—The South
has Control of the Committee on Resolutions.—Resistance of the
Douglas Delegates.—They defeat the Report of the Committee.—
Delegates from Seven Southern States withdraw.—Convention unable
to make a Nomination.—Adjourns to Baltimore.—Convention divides.
—Nomination of both Douglas and Breckinridge.—Constitutional
Union Convention.—Nomination of Bell and Everett.—The Chicago
Convention.—Its Membership and Character.—Mr. Seward's Position.
—His Disabilities.—Work of his Friends, Thurlow Weed and William
M. Evarts.—Opposition of Horace Greeley.—Objections from Doubtful
States.—Various Candidates.—Nomination of Lincoln and Hamlin.—
Four Presidential Tickets in the Field.—Animated Canvass.—The
Long Struggle over.—The South defeated.—Election of Lincoln.—
Political Revolution of 1860 complete.

The South was unnaturally and unjustifiably excited. The people of the slave States could not see the situation accurately, but, like a man with disordered nerves, they exaggerated every thing. Their sense of proportion seemed to be destroyed, so that they could no longer perceive the intrinsic relation which one incident had to another. In this condition of mind, when the most ordinary events were misapprehended and mismeasured, they were startled and alarmed by an occurrence of extraordinary and exceptional character. On the quiet morning of October, 1859, with no warning whatever to the inhabitants, the United-States arsenal, at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, was found to be in the possession of an invading mob. The town was besieged, many of its citizens made prisoners, telegraph wires cut, railway-trains stopped by a force which the people, as they were aroused from sleep, had no means of estimating. A resisting body was soon organized, militia came in from the surrounding country, regular troops were hurried up from Washington. By the opening of the second day, a force of fifteen hundred men surrounded the arsenal, and, when the insurgents surrendered, it was found that there had been but twenty-two in all. Four were still alive, including their leader, John Brown.

JOHN BROWN AT HARPER'S FERRY.

Brown was a man of singular courage, perseverance, and zeal, but was entirely misguided and misinformed. He had conceived the utterly impracticable scheme of liberating the slaves of the South by calling on them to rise, putting arms in their hands, and aiding them to gain their freedom. He had borne a very conspicuous and courageous part in the Kansas struggles, and had been a terror to the slave-holders on the Missouri border. His bravery was of a rare type. He had no sense of fear. Governor Wise stated that during the fight, while Brown held the arsenal, with one of his sons lying dead beside him, another gasping with a mortal wound, he felt the pulse of the dying boy, used his own musket, and coolly commanded his men, all amid a shower of bullets from the attacking force. While of sound mind on most subjects, Brown had evidently lost his mental balance on the one topic of slavery. His scheme miscarried the moment its execution was attempted, as any one not blinded by fanaticism could have from the first foreseen.

The matter was taken up in hot wrath by the South, with Governor Wise in the lead. The design was not known to or approved by any body of men in the North; but an investigation was moved in the Senate, by Mr. Mason of Virginia, with the evident view of fixing the responsibility on the Northern people, or, at least, upon the Republican party. These men affected to see in John Brown, and his handful of followers, only the advance guard of another irruption of Goths and Vandals from the North, bent on inciting servile insurrection, on plunder, pillage, and devastation. Mr. Mason's committee found no sentiment in the North justifying Brown, but the irritating and offensive course of the Virginia senator called forth a great deal of defiant anti-slavery expression which, in his judgment, was tantamount to treason. Brown was tried and executed. He would not permit the plea of unsound mind to be made on his behalf, and to the end he behaved with that calm courage which always attracts respect and admiration. Much was made of the deliverance of the South, from a great peril, and every thing indicated that the John Brown episode was to be drawn into the political campaign as an indictment against anti-slavery men. It was loudly charged by the South, and by their partisans throughout the North, that such insurrections were the legitimate outgrowth of Republican teaching, and that the national safety demanded the defeat and dissolution of the Republican party. Thus challenged, the Republican party did not stand on the defensive. Many of its members openly expressed their pity for the zealot, whose rashness had led him to indefensible deeds and thence to the scaffold. On the day of his execution, bells were tolled in many Northern towns —not in approval of what Brown had done, but from compassion for the fate of an old man whose mind had become distempered by suffering, and by morbid reflection on the suffering of others; from a feeling that his sentence, in view of this fact, was severe; and lastly, and more markedly, as a Northern rebuke to the attempt on the part of the South to make a political issue from an occurrence which was as unforeseen and exceptional as it was deplorable.

The fear and agitation in the South were not feigned but real. Instead of injuring the Republican party, this very fact increased its strength in the North. The terror of the South at the bare prospect of a negro insurrection led many who had not before studied the slavery question to give serious heed to this phase of it. The least reflection led men to see that a domestic institution must be very undesirable which could keep an entire community of brave men in dread of some indefinable tragedy. Mobs and riots of much greater magnitude than the John Brown uprising had frequently occurred in the free States, and they were put down by the firm authority of law, without the dread hand of a spectre behind which might in a moment light the horizon with the conflagration of homes, and subject wives and daughters to a fate of nameless horror. Instead, therefore, of arresting the spread of Republican principles, the mad scheme of John Brown tended to develop and strengthen them. The conviction grew rapidly that if slavery could produce such alarm and such demoralization in a strong State like Virginia, inhabited by a race of white men whose courage was never surpassed, it was not an institution to be encouraged, but that its growth should be prohibited in the new communities where its weakening and baleful influence was not yet felt.

Sentiment of this kind could not be properly comprehended in the South. It was honestly misrepresented by some, willfully misrepresented by others. All construed it into a belief, on the part of a large proportion of the Northern people, that John Brown was entirely justifiable. His wild invasion of the South, they apprehended, would be repeated as opportunity offered on a larger scale and with more deadly purpose. This opinion was stimulated and developed for political ends by many whose intelligence should have led them to more enlightened views. False charges being constantly repeated and plied with incessant zeal, the most radical misconception became fixed in the Southern mind. It was idle for the Republican party to declare that their aim was only to prevent the extension of slavery to free territory, and that they were pledged not to interfere with its existence in the States. Such distinctions were not accepted by the Southern people. Their leaders had taught them that the one necessarily involved the other, and that a man who was in favor of the Wilmot Proviso was as bitter an enemy to the South as one who incited a servile insurrection. These views were unceasingly pressed upon the South by the Northern Democracy, who, in their zeal to defeat the Republicans at home, did not scruple to misrepresent their aims in the most reckless manner. They were constantly misleading the public opinion of the slave States, until at last the South recognized no difference between the creed of Seward and the creed of Gerrit Smith, and held Lincoln responsible for all the views and expressions of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. The calling of a National Republican Convention was to their disordered imagination a threat of destruction. The success of its candidates would, in their view, be just cause for resistance outside the pale of the Constitution.