Americans supported. His administration was able and successful, and an easy victory fell to him and the party in 1858. He could scarcely be claimed by the Conservative, certainly not by the Radical, wing of the party. The Republican was his cordial supporter. In this year the intensifying anti-slavery sentiment of the partythough it still in its resolutions stood steadily on constitutional ground-found voice through the president of the state convention, John A. Andrew. "I believe," said he, "in the Republican party, because I believe that slavery, the servitude of humanity, has no business to exist anywhere; because it has no business to exist and no right to be supported where the sun shines or the grass grows or water runs."

The Republican foretold ill to the party in the doubtful states for want of a broader policy. On the 12th of October - election day in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana-it said: "The undertow of politics is running against the Republicans." But the next day's news was of victory along the whole line. The voice of the great central states was decisive. "Mr. Buchanan," said the Republican, October 16, "has been in office a little less than two years, and his Administration and himself are practically overthrown. The popular voice is declared against him and his policy, and he falls no more to rise. The South, which has flattered and fooled him, will forsake him in the end, for his power is gone. Sic semper tyrannis! . . It is now plainly seen that it is in the power of those who are opposed to slavery, and in favor of free labor, to elect the next President of the United States."

The November elections confirmed the October verdict. The Republicans had obtained a majority in the House of Representatives. The Senate was still Democratic. But Kansas was free beyond reversal, and the Repub

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