Senator Seward, at Rochester, New York, some weeks later, reannounced the doctrine, declaring that the contest was "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces; and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either an entirely slave-holding nation or entirely a free labor nation."
The utterances of Lincoln and Seward were distinctly radical. The question was, would this radical idea ultimately dominate the Republican party?
Less than eighteen months after the announcement in 1858 of the doctrine of the "irrepressible conflict," John Brown raided Virginia to incite insurrections. With a few followers and 1,300 stands of arms for the slaves who were to join him, he captured the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Only a few slaves came to him and, after a brief struggle, with some bloodshed, Brown was captured, tried by a jury, and hanged.
In the South the excitement was intense; the horror and indignation in that section it is impossible to describe. Brown was already well known to the public. He was not a lunatic. Not long before this, in Kansas, "at the head of a small group of men, including two of his sons and a son-in-law, he went at night down Pottowattamie Creek, stopping at three houses. The men who lived in them were well known pro-slavery men; they seem to have been rough characters; their most specific offence (according to Sanborn, Brown's biographer and eulogist) was the driving from his home, by violent threats, of an inoffensive old man. John Brown and his party went down the creek, called at one after the other of three houses, took five men away from their wives and children, and deliberately shot one and hacked the others to death with swords."[63]
Quite a number of people, some of them men of eminence in the North, aided Brown in his enterprise. Among the men of repute were Gerrit Smith, a former candidate for the presidency; and Theodore Parker, Dr. Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of Boston, who were all members of a "secret committee to collect money and arms for the expedition." With them was F. S. Sanborn, who has since the war vauntingly revealed the scheme in his "Life of John Brown."[64]
Sanborn intimates that Henry Wilson, subsequently vice-president, was more or less privy to the design.[65] At various places in the North church bells were tolled on the day of John Brown's execution; meetings were held and orators extolled him as a martyr. Emerson, the greatest thinker in all that region, declared that if John Brown was hanged he would glorify the gallows as Jesus glorified the cross; and now many Southern men who loved the Union reluctantly concluded that separation was inevitable. John Bell, of Tennessee, Union candidate for President in 1860, is said to have cried like a child when he heard of Brown's raid.
The great body of the Northern people condemned John Brown's expedition without stint. Edward Everett, voicing the opinion of all who were really conservative, said of Brown's raid, in a speech at Faneuil Hall, that its design was to "let loose the hell hounds of a servile insurrection, and to bring on a struggle which, for magnitude, atrocity, and horror, would have stood alone in the history of the world."
But they who had been preaching the "irrepressible conflict," they whom public opinion might hold responsible, did not feel precisely as Mr. Everett did. They were concerned about political consequences, as appears from a letter written somewhat later during the State canvass in New York by Horace Greeley to Schuyler Colfax. Horace Greeley afterward proved himself in many ways a broad-minded, magnanimous man, but now he wrote: "Do not be downhearted about the old John Brown business. Its present effect is bad and throws a heavy load on us in this State ... but the ultimate effect is to be good.... It will drive the slave power to new outrages.... It presses on the irrepressible conflict."[66]
The fact that such a man as Horace Greeley was taking comfort because that outrage would "drive the slave power to new outrages"[67] throws a strong side-light on the tactics of the anti-slavery leaders. They were following Garrison. Garrison, the father of the Abolitionists, had begun his campaign against slave-holders by "exhausting upon them the vocabulary of abuse," and he had shown "a genius for infuriating his antagonists."[68] The new party—his successor and beneficiary, was now felicitating itself that ultimate good would come, even from the John Brown raid. It would further their policy of "driving the slave power to new outrages."
People at the North, conservatives and all, held their breath for a time after Harper's Ferry. Then the crusade went on, in the press, on the rostrum, and from the pulpit, with as much virulence as ever. No assertion was too extravagant for belief, provided only its tendency was to disparage the Southern white man or win sympathy for the negro. From the noted "Brownlow and Pryne's Debate," Philadelphia (Lippincott), we take the following as a specimen of the abuse a portion of the Northern press was then heaping on the Southern people. Brownlow quotes from the New York Independent of November, 1856: