Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/471

1859] John Browns raid. 439 1859, one John Brown, at the head of a little band of less than twenty followers, seized the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry in Virginia, meaning to strike there a sudden blow for the freedom of the slaves, and, having set a servile insurrection aflame, make good his retreat to the mountains. It was the mad folly of an almost crazed fanatic ; the man was quickly taken and promptly hanged : his flame of war had flickered and died in the socket. But that was not all. Brown was from Kansas; he had come to Virginia, at midsummer in that anxious year 1859, with the stain still fresh upon him of some of the bloodiest of the lawless work done there in the name of freedom : a terrible outlaw, because an outlaw for conscience 1 sake ; intense to the point of ungovernable passion ; heeding nothing but his own will and sense of right ; a revolu- tionist upon principle ; lawless, incendiary, and yet seeking nothing for himself. He brought arms and means to Virginia with which he had been supplied out of New England, not for use in the South, but for use in Kansas. But southern men were not in a temper to discriminate. If northern men would pay for the shedding of blood in Kansas, why not for the shedding of blood in Virginia also ? Slavery was the object of the attack, and the slaveholders saw little difference, great as the difference was, between Abolitionists and Free-Soilers. And this terrible warning at Harper's Ferry was of a sort to put even cool men out of temper for just and sober thinking. A slave insurrection meant what it maddened southern men to think of: massacre, arson, an unspeakable fate for women and children. If this was what " anti-slavery " meant, it must be met and fought to the death, Union or no Union. It was in such a season of disturbed and headstrong judgment that the presidential campaign of 1860 came on. The Democrats were the first to attempt a nomination; but their convention proved a house divided against itself and went hopelessly to pieces ; and the outcome was two "Democratic"" nominations. One section of the party nominated Douglas for the presidency ; the other, which was the southern section, named John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as its candidate. A new party sprang into existence, the "Constitutional Union" party, made up of those who had been Know-Nothings until the Know-Nothing party died of inanition, and of those who had left the other parties but had found it impossible to digest the Know-Nothing creed of all who feared alike the Democratic and the Republican extremes of policy and doctrine, and still hoped the quarrel might be composed. These nomi- nated John Bell of Tennessee, and declared in a platform of great simplicity and dignity that they recognised " no political principle other than the Constitution of the country, the union of the States, and the enforcement of the laws." The Republicans alone were united and confident. They warmly disavowed all sympathy with attempts of any kind to disturb slavery where it was established by law; but they de- clared as flatly as ever against the extension of slavery to the Territories ; CH. XIII.