But statesmen were not the only persons who predicted the downfall of slavery in the Republic; not the only persons who contributed to that end, nor yet the only persons who foretold its overthrow in blood.
The institution had grown to arrogant and intolerant as to brook no opposition, and its friends did not even seek to clothe its enormities.
A leading Southern journal, in 1854, honestly expressed the affection in which slavery was held:
"We cherish slavery as the apple of our eye, and we are resolved to maintain it, peaceably, if we can, forcibly, if we must."(127)
The clergy and religious people of the North came to believe slavery must, in the mill of justice, be ground to a violent death, in obedience to the will of God.
Theodore Parker, the celebrated Unitarian divine, a personal friend of John Brown, on hearing, in Rome, of his failure, trial, and sentence to the scaffold, in a letter to Francis Jackson of Boston, November 24, 1859, gave vent to what was then regarded as fanatical prophecy, but now long since fulfilled:
"The American people will have to march to rather severe music, I think, and it is better for them to face it in season. A few years ago it did not seem difficult, first to check slavery, and then to end it without bloodshed. I think this cannot be done now, nor ever in the future. All the great charters of Humanity have been writ in blood. I once hoped that American Democracy would be engrossed in less costly ink; but it is plain, now, that our pilgrimage must lead through a Red Sea, wherein many a Pharoah will go under and perish. . . .
"Slavery will not die a dry death. It may have as many lives as a cat; at last, it will dies like a mad dog in a village, with only the enemies of human kind to lament its fate, and they too cowardly to appear as mourners."(128)
Parker was fast descending, from broken health, into the grave, but in the wildest of his dreams he did not peer into futurity far enough to see that within a single decade the "sin of the nation" would be washed out, root and branch, in blood; and that in Virginia —the State that hung John Brown—at the home of its greatest Governor, Henry A. Wise, there would be seen "a Yankee school-marm" teaching free negroes—sons of Africa—to read and write—to read the Holy Bible, and she the humble daughter of "Old John Brown."(129)
One sample of prophecy of what disunion would be, we give from a speech of Henry Winter Davis of Maryland: