State authorities; the slaves did not rise; they had proved, as the Senator from Virginia says, their loyalty; there was no danger anywhere, no reasonable ground for apprehension, that we could see, from any quarter.

SENATOR IVERSON.-The Senator misunderstood me. I did not have any reference to a want of tender of aid. No, sir; I said that no parties at the North had given any public demonstration of sympathy for Virginia and the South. Virginia would have considered it an insult to have aid tendered to her. She was able to take care of herself.

Senator Fessenden then addressed himself to the charge of Senator Hunter that the North and its Senators approved of John Brown's act.

I represent the public sentiment of my State. Sir, from the beginning to the end, from the time this affair happened down to the present day, although I have conversed with all classes of men, I have not met the first man of any party, of any sect, who has not denounced the act of John Brown and his associates as criminal in the highest degree, and who has not said that in the eye of the law-leaving out of the question magnanimity and all which might address itself to the minds of the people of the State of Virginia and the executive of that State-that, in the eye of the law, if John Brown was a sane man when he committed those acts, he deserved death; and that I will venture to say is the all but universal sentiment of the people of the States of this Union, and yet gentlemen refuse to hear it.

Gentlemen of the South, if you give us an opportunity to unite in the investigation, we shall endeavor to aid you. Even if you shall endeavor to do it yourselves in your own way, and to your own extent, I trust that you will succeed, and that there will be an end to everything of this description; but I beg Senators here, and I beg those whom they represent elsewhere, to remember that nothing is to be gained by denunciations of opponents. We are not to be put upon the defensive. We are not responsible, and we do not mean to admit our responsibility in one way or another. We stand as clear and as clean and as pure, with reference to this matter, as the most ultra-slavery man among you. We have our objects, constitutional, legal, as we believe, rightful. They are avowed by us as a party; we have stood by them; and let me tell Senators that, in spite of all the excitement which may be raised on this question, we are prepared to stand by them yet.

Senator Brown, while reiterating that he accepted the repudiation of John Brown's act by Northern Senators, held that the act was not repudiated by the North in general, but, on the contrary, was endorsed.

Is it usual for notorious malefactors, murderers, robbers, and traitors to have sympathy expressed for them through the leading journals of the Senator's party at the North?

If John Brown, instead of engaging in a foray against slavery, and against the peace and quiet of Virginia, because she was a slave State, had made a similar foray into Massachusetts, with a view of overturning the government of that State, would the Tribune, would the Evening Post, would other Republican journals have expressed the sympathy for him which they have expressed? Would New England clergymen have called their congregations together in prayer-meetings for the soul of such a man? Would there have been in public meetings, religious and political, the same sympathy expressed for him which we have heard? Suppose an expedition should be fitted out from Virginia and Carolina to go and capture the armory at Springfield and hold it with the avowed object of overturning the government of Massachusetts, and the whole government of the New England States and of the North, and planting slavery there; then suppose, when you had captured the leader and gibbeted him upon the gallows, the Southern people should hold meetings, religious and political, to express sympathy with the man; suppose every wind that swept from the South should bring upon its wings the tolling of Southern bells over the fate of such a man: Senators of New England, what would be your conclusion? Suppose I came before you under such circumstances, professing that I had no sympathy with this man, that my people had no sympathy with him: what would be your reply? "Why, sir, we believe you speak honestly." I am sure you would say so to me; but you would ask, as I ask you, why have you not rebuked these things at home? You did not owe it to Virginia, you did not owe it to the South to say anything; but you will allow me to say that I think you owed it to yourselves. Why allow the impression to become almost universal in the South that the sympathy expressed for this wretched old man was a reflection of Northern sentiment? Why do you not rebuke your newspapers now? Why is the Tribune allowed from day to day to offend even your sentiments, the sentiments of every honest man in the whole community, by holding up this man Brown as a martyr to the sacred cause of liberty?

What, then, is it that elicits all this sympathy for him? It is not for John Brown, heroic as you have said he was, but it is for the cause in which he was engaged. He came to levy war upon a slave State, to murder slaveholders, because they were slaveholders. It is for that, and that alone, that sympathy has been elicited.

A meeting was held at Natick, at which the Senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Wilson] was present. He has disclaimed all sympathy with it. I am willing to believe that he feels no sympathy with it; and yet he failed to rebuke it. Suppose I had attended a public meeting where resolutions were passed hostile to your interests, advising forays across your borders, making war upon your people, would it be satisfactory for me to come a month afterward and say that I was there, but did not approve of the resolutions? So far it would be well; but would you not think it was my duty at the time to have said as much, to have warned my neighbors and friends, to have used the potential voice of an American Senator to rebuke such madness at the right time and in the right place?

If, then, we have been led into error, as I trust we have been, there is yet time enough to put it right. Let the future prove not only that you are sincere in your own declarations, as I do not question that you are, but that you are not mistaken in the sentiment of your own people. Let this open and undisguised sympathy with a murderer, with a traitor, cease and cease at once. Tell your editors, tell your Horace Greeleys and your Thurlow Weeds that the course in which they are proceeding is treasonable treasonable to the country, treasonable to you; that from your high places here in this great national council-house you will denounce them unless they cease their persistence in such folly. Let us have that. Let your people assemble in meetings and repudiate the reproach which even you yourselves must admit has been cast upon them. Let that be done. Let the Republicans of Boston, of New York, of Philadelphia, and everywhere where these meetings have been held and the firing of cannon has been heard, assemble in mass meetings as Republicans and rebuke the whole thing. They will not do it. Gentlemen may protest and continue to protest, but the "irrepressible conflict" will go on. Whenever the Northern people shall, in public meetings or in public elections or in any other manner which an intelligent man can accept, rebuke this thing, I shall be as ready to do them justice as those who represent them immediately on this floor; but their silence, their silence under extraordinary circumstances, under a most extraordinary state of facts, does

excite my suspicion, that after all they do sympathize with forays into the slave States for the purpose of overthrowing their institutions.

This much I will say, in reference to the wretched old man who died on the gallows at Charlestown: he was less guilty than the great men who prompted him to his misconduct. The "irrepressible conflict" could end nowhere else. You encouraged him on to madness, and by your counsels and your conduct to deeds of desperation, and then you disavow the deeds. Let the whole conduct change; let the "irrepressible conflict" cease by your own acts; come to learn that Virginia has all the rights in the Confederacy that belong to Massachusetts; that she has as much right to have slaves as Massachusetts has not to have them; that they are equals, and exact equals in all regards; learn that principle, cherish it, and practice upon it, and you will have no occasion to sympathize with John Brown for outrages such as that which we all protest against and deplore.

SENATOR CHANDLER.-The Senator from Mississippi [Mr. Brown] asks what would you say if Virginia and Carolina were to attack the armory at Springfield. I do not know what is the population at Springfield, but I will guarantee that if seventeen or twenty-two of the generals, not captains (they say these men were to be captains) of the States of Virginia and North Carolina were to attack Springfield, if there was not a man within five thousand miles of there the women would bind them in thirty minutes, and would not ask sympathy, and the matter would not be deemed of sufficient importance to ask for a committee of investigation on the part of the corporation. Why, sir, Governor Wise compared the people of Harper's Ferry to sheep, as the public press states. It is a libel, it is not true, for I never saw a flock of fifty or a hundred sheep in my life that had not a belligerent ram among them. We do not understand this case, sir. We understand no such panic as this. If seventeen men were to attack the city of Detroit in any capacity, and the mayor should appoint as a guard more than seventeen constables to take care of them, the city auditor would decline to audit the account.

The facts in this case, as they appear to be, are these: The fugitive slaves at Chatham, in Canada, got together some timeI do not know when-and organized a provisional government for the United States. There are, I understand, about sixty thousand fugitive slaves in the Province of Canada. They got together in Chatham, in Canada, and there resolved to organize a provisional government for these United States. They did so;

and they sent as their agents-this I gather from newspaper accounts-to put their government in motion, John Brown and sixteen other white men and five negroes, without any hopes of support from any source. Now, gentlemen ask, where did all these funds come from? All that was needed would amount to about probably twenty cents on each head of your own fugitive slaves in Canada; and yet the great Republican party of the North, representing one million three hundred thousand voters, is to be charged with complicity in this miserable fugitive slave government established at Chatham some time-God knows when, and I do not know nor care. Sir, it is too ridiculous. I cannot treat it with any sort of serious consideration.

The Senator from Georgia states that your Northern allies are in a hopeless minority. Well, sir, that is true. You have crowded them a little too far. You have left their bones bleaching all over the land. They are politically dead, hopelessly dead, beyond any resurrection. The trumpet of the archangel will never reach them politically. You have crowded them too far, sir. You have forced them to vote for your Lecompton constitution. You forced them to vote for the repeal of the time-honored Missouri compromise. You have kept the "nigger" eternally before them, and, whether he was acceptable or obnoxious to them, you made them swallow the "nigger" in large or small doses as you saw fit to present him, and it has been a fatal dose; you have given too much.

Sir, I hope this resolution will pass unanimously, and I hope the action of this committee will be effective. I hope it will be searching and thorough, and, my word for it, some other party than the Republican party will come up delinquent under its action.

On December 14 the resolution of Senator Mason and the amendment of Senator Trumbull came to a vote. The amendment was rejected by 22 yeas and 32 nays, and the resolution was unanimously adopted.

President Buchanan's annual message to Congress appeared on December 19, 1859. It opened with an attempt to allay the bitter hostility which had arisen over the John Brown affair between the two sections, and had been displayed before his troubled eyes in the Senate. The allusion in it to himself as "an old public functionary," whose heart felt for the whole country, was not taken kindly by the Republicans, who blamed the President for the part he had played throughout his