lican party was on the high road to possession of the government. In Illinois, the Republicans had a small majority of the entire vote, but by the apportionment of districts it fell out that a Democratic legislature was chosen, and Douglas was reëlected. He returned to Washington, to be deposed from the chairmanship of the Committee on Territories by the Southern and Administration influence, but still the foremost man of his party in the estimation of the people. Lincoln returned to private life and to comparative obscurity.

CHAPTER XXII.

JOHN BROWN.

N reality, as we now see, after the elections of 1858

Yet it still grasped at fresh conquests. A demand was urged by some of the leaders that Congress should enact a code for the regulation and protection of slavery throughout the territories; it being clear that whatever abstract right it possessed there under the Dred Scott decision would avail little without active Federal protection. The Administration conducted some ineffectual negotiations with Mexico for the purchase of more territory. There was a little talk about buying Cuba. An American adventurer, William Walker, made repeated attempts at conquests in Nicaragua, without effective hindrance from the Administration, and with considerable sympathy from the South. There was a greatly increased activity in the importation of African slaves to Cuba, and numerous vessels were sent out from New York for the traffic. Our government had been notably remiss in fulfilling its treaty stipulations with England for coöperation in the suppression of the slave trade; but when some of the English cruisers in the West Indies went a step beyond discretion, in examining suspected vessels under the American flag, our government bristled with wrath, war vessels were sent, and congressmen of both parties

threatened loudly. England conceded the rights of the flag; and the exemption from search, for which we had forty years before fought a war, that we might protect our sailors from impressment, without gaining a word of explicit concession, was now formally recognized in order to guard our sensitive honor against the inspection of ships which from their appearance might be slavers. But the Administration was roused to bestir itself against the trade, and a number of captures were made by our cruisers. The crew of one slaver, the Echo, captured with her freight of misery on board, were, against the clearest evidence, acquitted by a Charleston jury. One or two cargoes of Africans were landed at the South, and there was some agitation by Southern newspapers and politicians in favor of legalizing the traffic.

But none of these projects, for a congressional slave code, for the acquisition of slave territory, or for the re-opening of the African slave trade, had any prospect of success. The power of successful aggression had passed away from the slave-holding interest. The leaders of that interest saw in the steady march of the Republican party to power the approaching end of their own long control of the government. Meantime fresh events were teaching to both sections the irreconcilable hostility of their sentiments.

On the 16th of October, 1859, a company of nineteen men, led by John Brown, entered the little town of Harper's Ferry in Virginia, seized the United States Armory, killed, wounded, or captured several of those who resisted them, and maintained their position for thirty hours, when they were overcome by a company of United States marines. Eight of them, including two sons of Brown, were killed in the fighting; five escaped; and six, with Brown among them, were captured. The first news of the event-in a time of absolute civil peace

and comparative political quiet- amazed the whole country. Then, as its significance, as an attempt to free slaves by force and on the widest scale, was perceived, the South was filled with alarm and anger. The chronic latent dread of every Southern household was that of a negro insurrection. Brown was at once believed to be the product and representative, if not the direct agent, of the Republican party. Behind his single form the imagination of the South saw looming the whole power of the North. It read in the Harper's Ferry affair the menace of invasion, united with the horrors of servile insurrection. The Southern people did not credit the loyalty of the Republicans to the Constitution. That strong anti-slavery sentiment should co-exist with scrupulous respect for the legal rights of slavery was beyond their belief, and perhaps beyond their comprehension. Their own friends at the North, of the Democratic and "Union" parties, habitually encouraged this distrust by their charges against the Republicans. These political allies of the South now made haste to fix the responsibility for John Brown on the Republican party. What they said insincerely for political effect, the South believed with passion and with fear.

The majority of Northern people could ill comprehend the alarm of the South. They did not appreciate how slavery was interlinked with every usage and sentiment of Southern life; how much of kindliness and mutual attachment softened its rigors and quieted the master's conscience; nor, on the other hand, how the dangers attendant on it, both real and imaginary, environed every plantation and every fireside. The alarm which Brown's raid inspired was to most Northerners inscrutable and almost despicable. The Republicans, too, were so far from any responsibility for Brown, or any disposition to favor projects like his, that they

scarcely felt solicitude even to defend themselves against the imputation. Their attention, and that of the whole country, was soon closely fastened on John Brown himself.

Brown was a man of conscience, courage, and simplicity. Living amid a complex civilization, he was governed by ideas few and simple as those of an ancient Hebrew. He was a devout Presbyterian, and his library was the Bible. He had gone with his sons to Kansas, where he became a leader in the border warfare. Most of the free-state settlers had the aversion to violence which characterized the people of the Northern states, they stood on the defensive, and fought only when obliged to. Brown was of a different make; peaceful and inoffensive when not assailed, yet in a worthy cause of quarrel he was as ready to take up arms as the ordinary citizen is to take his case to the courts. He was prompt not only to repel the invaders but to retaliate on them. He accepted the situation as one of open warfare. Among other reprisals he crossed the Missouri line, and set free a few slaves; and this seems to have suggested to him the demonstration at Harper's Ferry. He fell into disfavor with his party; his way of settling the issue was by arms, theirs was by first exhausting all civil remedies. Leaving Kansas, bereft of a son in the conflict, he meditated an attack on the whole institution of slavery. The moral question was entirely simple to a mind like his Slavery was wrong,-then make war on it. His plan was to seize the arms at Harper's Ferry and establish in the mountains of western Virginia a fortified camp of refuge, to which the slaves should be invited to flee. His ultimate expectation seems to have been to so unsettle and disturb slave property that the institution would not be worth maintaining and would collapse. It was a scheme that miscalculated almost every element