Mr. George Lunt, of Boston, in his work, The Origin of the Late War, writes:
"It thus appears that an active and alarming system of aggression against the South was in operation at the North thirty years ago, threatening to excite servile insurrection, to imperil union, to stir up civil war. This fact rests upon testimony which cannot but be considered impartial and conclusive."[[261]]
Again the same author, referring to the attempt of John Brown and his associates, writes:
"Nothing was here wanting to insure a more widespread scene of horror and desolation than the world perhaps had ever before witnessed, except a totally different relation between the masters and their servants in the South than that falsely imagined by the conspirators and by those in sympathy with them either before or after the fact."[[262]]
VIEWS OF BURGESS
Professor John W. Burgess, of Columbia University, in his work, The Civil War and the Constitution, has portrayed the disastrous effects upon the sentiment in favor of emancipation in various parts of the South, occasioned by the virulence of these agitators and above all by the attempt of John Brown and his followers to precipitate servile insurrection.
"If the whole thing," writes Professor Burgess, "both as to time, methods, and results, had been planned by his Satanic Majesty himself, it could not have succeeded better in setting the sound conservative movements of the age at naught, and in creating a state of feeling which offered the most capital opportunities for the triumph of political insincerity, radicalism and rascality over their opposites. No man who is acquainted with the change of feeling which occurred in the South between the 16th of October 1859 and the 16th day of November of the same year can regard the Harper's Ferry villainy as any other than one of the chiefest crimes of our history. It established and re-established the control of the great radical slaveholders over the non-slaveholders,—the little slaveholders, and the more liberal of the large slaveholders, which had already begun to be loosened."[[263]]
Professor Burgess then proceeds to show the still more disastrous effects upon conservative sentiment in Virginia and the South which resulted from the demonstrations at the North on the day of John Brown's execution.
"Brown and his band," says Professor Burgess, "had murdered five men and wounded some eight or ten more in their criminal movement at Harper's Ferry.... Add to this the consideration that Brown certainly intended the wholesale massacre of the whites by the blacks in case that should be found necessary to effect his purposes and it was certainly natural that the tolling of the church bells, the holding of prayer-meetings for the soul of John Brown, the draping of houses, the half-masting of flags, &c., in many parts of the North should appear to the people of the South to be evidences of a wickedness which knew no bounds and which was bent upon the destruction of the South by any means necessary to accomplish the result.... Especially did terror and bitterness take possession of the hearts of the women of the South, who saw in slave insurrection not only destruction and death, but that which to feminine virtue is a thousand times worse than the most terrible death.
"From the Harper's Ferry outrage onward the conviction grew among all classes that the white men of the South must stand together and must harmonize all internal differences in the presence of the mortal peril with which as a race they believed themselves threatened. Sound development in thought and feeling was arrested, the follies and hatreds born of fear and resentment now assumed the places born of common sense and common kindliness."[[264]]