The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South

by Jr. Thomas Dixon

No hand could stay the scourge. The Red Thought burst into a flame that swept North and South, as a prairie fire sweeps the stubble of autumn. Uncle Tom's Cabin had prepared the stubble.

From the Northern press began to pour a stream of vindictive abuse. A fair specimen of this insanity appeared in the New York Independent:

"The mass of the population of the Atlantic Coast of the slave region of the South are descended from the transported convicts and outcasts of Great Britain. Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aristocracy of the South! Peerless first families of Virginia and Carolina! Progeny of the highwaymen, the horse thieves and sheep stealers and pickpockets of Old England!"

The fact that this paper was a religious publication, the outgrowth of the New England conscience, gave its columns a peculiar power over the Northern mind.

The South retorted in kind. De Bow's Review declared:

"The basic framework and controlling inference of Northern sentiment is Puritanic, the old Roundhead rebel refuse of England, which has ever been an unruly sect of Pharisees, the worst bigots on earth and the meanest tyrants when they have the power to exercise it."

When the Conventions met a few months later to name candidates for the Presidency and make a declaration of principles, leaders had ceased to lead and there were no principles to declare.

The mob mind was supreme.

The Democratic Convention met at Charleston, South Carolina, to name the successor of James Buchanan. Their constituents commanded a vast majority of the voters of the Nation. The Convention became a mob. The one man, the one giant leader left in the republic, the one constructive mind, the one man of political genius who could have saved the nation from the holocaust toward which it was plunging was Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. He could have been elected President by an overwhelming majority had he been nominated by this united convention. He was entitled to the nomination. He had proven himself a statesman of the highest rank. He had proven himself impervious to sectional hatred or sectional appeal. He was a Northern man, but a friend of the South as well as the North. He was an American of the noblest type.

But the radical wing of his party in the South were seeing Red. Old Brown's words to them meant the spirit of the North. They heard echoing and reechoing from every newspaper and pulpit: