stone's-throw of the Capitol, where floated the Stars and Stripes. Slavegangs, handcuffed and chained, wives and husbands, parents and children, separated forever, with weary steps and weeping eyes, were taken from the slave prison through the streets of Washington, on their way to the southern market. The people of the Northern States said that it was wicked, a shame and disgrace; that slavery was an institution of the States, and not of the nation. They petitioned Congress to abolish it in the District of Columbia. The presentation of the petitions gave great offence to the slave-holders. California was south of the line of the Missouri Compromise agreed upon in 1830. The slave-holders would not consent to its admission as a free State, except on the condition that slaves who had run away and escaped into the free States should be returned to their masters. The Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1850, made it a crime to aid a slave in escaping, or to refuse to aid in recapturing one who had escaped. Everywhere, except in the Southern States, people were beginning to comprehend that liberty is the birthright of every man; that what God has given him cannot be taken away. They were beginning to see that what in itself is wrong can never be made right by act of Congress or Legislature. The law was hateful because it was repugnant to their sense of right. What the world looked upon as right in other days, had come to be regarded as all wrong in 1850. "We will not be slave-catchers," said the people of the Northern States, and they passed laws which made it very difficult for a slave-holder to recapture those who had escaped. "If the Constitution will not protect our property, we will dissolve the Union," said the slave-holders. The great mass of the people in the Northern States had no thought of interfering with slavery in the States, but they were determined that it should not be recognized in any way as a national institution. The Abolitionists demanded that the Union should be dissolved, and denounced the Constitution as "a covenant with Death and a league with Hell." There were riots and mobs, which increased the bitterness between the North and South. In 1854 the law of 1820, which prohibited slavery north of the southern boundary of Missouri, was repealed. The object was the extension of slavery into Kansas and Nebraska. The slave-holders of Missouri hastened into Kansas. The people of the free States organized emigration societies to assist in making it a free State. There was much fighting, which intensified the growing bitterness. A majority of the settlers were opposed to slavery, and Kansas became a free State. Times had changed. No one in the South now expected that slavery would die; on the contrary, every effort was made to extend it over the whole country. It was regarded as a blessing, a beneficent institution. A class of men had risen in the South who regarded themselves as born to govern. "The right to govern resides in a very small minority; the duty to obey is inherent in the great mass of mankind. The real civilization of a country is in its aristocracy." So wrote Mr. De Bow, of New Orleans. "To make an aristocrat," he said, "in the future we must sacrifice a thousand paupers. We would, by all means, make aristocracy permanent by the laws of entail and primogeniture." That was the plan of the great slave-holders-to set up a government in which a poor man should always be poor and low down in the world, with no opportunity to better himself; the rich to have everything their own way; the plantation descending from father to son, the oldest son having the best chance. Said Mr. De Bow, "We must teach that slavery is necessary in all societies, as well to protect as to govern the weak, poor, and ignorant... It is the duty of society to protect all its members, and it can only do so by subjecting each to that degree of government constraint, or slavery, which will best advance the good of the whole. . . . To protect the weak, we must first enslave them. . . . Slavery is necessary as an educational institution, and is worth ten times more than all the common schools of the North." The state of society which this class desired to bring about was slavery for the colored people, degradation for the poor white men, wealth, power, landed estates, offices, titles, and nobility for themselves. The writings of some of this class will read strangely a century hence. Rev. Mr. Thornwell, of Columbia, South Carolina, was a learned and able writer, a doctor of divinity, respected and reverenced through the South. In a sermon preached in 1860, he said, "We confidently anticipate the time when the nations which now revile us would gladly exchange places with us. In its last analysis slavery is nothing but an organization of labor.... Society is divided between princes and beggars. . . . The only way by which labor can be organized as a permanent arrangement is by converting the laborer into capital; that is, by giving the employer a right in the capital employed; in other words, by slavery. . . . Strange as it may seem to those not familiar with the system, slavery is a school of virtue." ... Rev. Mr. Palmer, a Presbyterian preacher in New Orleans, a native of South Carolina, maintained that slavery was a divinely ordained institution, and that the social condition of the South was much better than that of the North. He deplored the condition of the people of the Northern States. "The so-called free States," he said, "are working out a social problem under conditions peculiar to themselves. These conditions are sufficiently hard, and their success is too uncertain to excite in us the least jealousy." The preachers, writers, politicians, leaders of thought, those who wanted to belong to the aristocracy, were for the extension and perpetuation of slavery. A convention of slave-holders was held at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1857, which appointed a committee to report upon affairs at the next meeting, which was held at Montgomery, Alabama, in May, 1858. Thus read the report: "Two antagonistic forms of society have met for contest on this continent. The one assumes that all men are equal; that equality is right. On that theory it is levelling its members to the horizontal plane of democracy. The other assumes that all men are not equal; that equality is not right; and standing on that theory, is taking to itself the rounded form of social aristocracy. The former is the view of the North, the latter of the South." The committee advocated the reopening of the slave-trade with Africa. They said, "It will give us political power; it will give us population, it will draw foreign enterprise to its embrace, foreign capital to its support; it will drive the North from every field of competition. If the South were to stand out for itself, crowns would bow before her, kingdoms and empires would break a lance to win the smile of her approval, and it will be her option to become the bride of the world rather than remain, as now, the miserable mistress of the North." In June, 1857, a fast sailing-vessel, the Wanderer, owned by Mr. Lamar, of South Carolina, sailed to Africa, obtained a cargo of slaves, landed them at Brunswick, Georgia, whence they were taken into the interior and sold. In former years Congress had passed a law which made the slave-trade piracy, and this cargo was brought as a deliberate violation of the law and to reopen the trade. Mr. Lamar notified the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Howell Cobb, of Georgia, who was a slave-holder, that he intended to violate the law. Nothing was done to prevent him. Said the leading magazine of the South, De Bow's Review, "An exasperated South will blow the Union to shivers if hordes of Northern immigrants continue to seize upon and monopolize the whole of that territory which the South mainly acquired. The revival of the African slave-trade, the reduction in the price of negroes, and the increase of their numbers, will enable us successfully to contend in the settlement of the new territories with the vast immigration of the North. Nothing else can.” The slave-holders knew that the time was at hand when they could no longer control the government; that they must lose the political power which they had long enjoyed. They believed that the North was prosperous because of its connection with the South. They were ignorant of the laws which govern the economic world, and had little comprehension of the rising spirit of the age. They were blind to the great movements which have characterized the century-the rise of the people everywhere to a larger liberty and nobler civilization; they knew almost nothing of the power of a free people and their institutions. The record will ever stand in history that they deliberately determined to destroy the Union and establish a government based on slavery and class distinction. In the development of the historic drama, an actor, unheralded, appeared upon the scene-John Brown, who had taken a conspicuous part in making Kansas a free State, who had seen one of his sons ruthlessly murdered by ruffians set on by the slave-holders. In October, 1859, with seventeen men he seized the United States arsenal, where the waters of the Potomac break through the Blue Mountains at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. He believed that the slaves of Virginia would flock to him, that he could arm them with muskets from the arsenal, and that he could in a short time bring about the abolition of slavery. He It was a plan devoid of reason. There was no chance of success. was captured by a company of United States marines commanded by Robert E. Lee, whom we shall frequently see in this story of the war. He was hung at Charleston as a criminal, Henry A. Wise, governor of Virginia, signing his death-warrant. The world thought John Brown a lunatic, but Wendell Phillips, Boston's greatest orator, looking down into his grave, said, "He has abolished slavery;" and James Russell Lowell, poet, said, "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Keeping watch above his own." John Brown went to his death as a criminal, but a million men, a few months later, sung his apotheosis in the march, by the bivouac fire, in the uproar of battle. I heard it rising like a dirge upon the evening air along the green banks of the Potomac. I heard it like the voice of many waters when the accompaniment was the diapason of the cannonade; but noblest, grandest, most impressive, was the mighty chorus which I heard ascending to heaven in the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, on a calm, still night, when a brigade of colored troops marched past old St. Michael's church, where the moon was throwing the shadow of the churchspire across the grave of Calhoun, the great apostle of the rights of the State as superior to that of the nation-a brigade of men, slaves once, sold on the auction-block within a stone's-throw of that church-yard-freemen evermore, citizens of the Republic, soldiers of the mighty army, with the protecting folds of the Stars and Stripes above them, redeemed and elevated to citizenship by Abraham Lincoln. This the song: "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave; His soul is marching on." The people of the South regarded the attempt of Brown to liberate the slaves as indicative of the future action of the people of the North. It aroused indignation and intensified the bitterness. Those who were |