instructions of Brigham Young, the successor of Joseph Smith, and their spiritual head and appointed governor, they destroyed the records of the United States Court in their district. They also resolved to set up an independent government, and looked to Young for all laws, in defiance of those of the United States. President Buchanan resolved to enforce the latter, and depriving Young of the office of governor of the Territory, he put Colonel Alfred Cumming, a superintendent of Indian affairs on the Upper Mississippi, in his place. He also appointed Judge Eckles chief justice of the Territory, and sent twenty-five hundred armed men, with experienced officers, to protect them in the discharge of their duties. Young at first determined to resist the National Government. He issued a proclamation denouncing the army as a mob, forbidding it to enter he Territory, and calling the people of Utah to arms to repel its advance. When it entered the Territory early in the autumn, it was assailed by mounted Mormons, who destroyed several supply trains and seized eight hundred of the oxen at the rear of the army. The little force, thus crippled, and caught among the snows in the mountains, went into winter quarters. Colonel A. Sidney Johnston was in command of them; and Governor Cumming proclaimed the Territory of Utah to be in a state of rebellion. Finally, in the spring of 1858, a pacification took place. The President offered pardon to all Mormons who should submit to the national authority, and Brigham Young, evidently believing discretion to be the better part of valor, received the new governor courteously, but resolved to leave the country with his people rather than submit to "Gentile " rule. But he and they are there yet, and have been asking for admission into the Union as a State, but without sucTheir last application was made in 1862, when they had formed a State constitution, and elected senators and representatives under it. Instead of acting upon the application, Congress passed a law "to punish and prevent the practice of polygamy in the Territories of the United States" and in other places, and disapproving and annulling certain acts of the Legislature of Utah. The law against polygamy has remained a dead letter; but circumstances have recently occurred which will doubtless cause the speedy destruction of polygamous Mormonism, and so remove from our country a foul moral stain.

cess.

CHAPTER II.

PUBLIC QUIET BROKEN BY JOHN BROWN'S RAID-INCIDENTS OF THAT RAID AND ITS EFFECTSTHE REPUBLICAN PARTY-A PRETEXT FOR REVOLUTION-CONVENTION OF DEMOCRATS AP CHARLESTON-DISRUPTION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY-INCIDENTS OF THE PLAN-NOMINAFOR PRESIDENT-PRINCIPLES OF THE PARTIES-LINCOLN ELECTED-ACTION OF THE SOUTHERN POLITICIANS-YANCEY'S MISSION-FATAL POWER OF THE POLITICIANS.

TIONS

I'

N the fall of 1859, the feverishness in the public mind, excited by the vehement discussion of the topic of slavery, had somewhat subsided; the Mormons were quiet; difficulties which had occurred between our Government and that of Paraguay, in South America, had been settled; troubles with the Indians on the Pacific coast were drawing to a close, and the fillibustering operations of Walker in Nicaragua were losing much of their interest. The summer had passed away in public quietude, and the topics of a Pacific Railway, Homestead and Soldiers' Pension bills, and other measures for the promotion of peace and national prosperity, were engaging the attention of the people. The equinoctial gales had swept over the land and sea, when suddenly a rumor went out of Baltimore, as startling as a thunder peal on the genial October air, that the Abolitionists had seized the Government Armory and Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, at the junction of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, and that an insurrection of the slaves in Virginia was imminent.

The rumor was true. John Brown, of Ossawatamie, who had fought and won a battle on the Kansas prairie in 1856, had struck a blow at slavery, on Sunday evening, the 16th of October. Brown was a native of Connecticut, in the sixtieth year of his age, and had espoused the cause of the Abolitionists (as the opponents of the slave-labor system, who wished to abolish it, were called) in early life. He was enthusiastic, fanatical, and brave. He had been active in the midst of the troubles in Kansas, and had suffered much; and he believed himself to be the destined liberator of the slaves in our Republic. With a few white followers and twelve slaves from Missouri, he went into Canada West, and at Chatham a convention of sympathizers was held in May, 1859, whereat a “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States" was adopted, not, as the instrument

declared, "for the overthrow of any government, but simply to amend and repeal." This was part of a scheme for promoting the uprising of the slaves for obtaining their freedom.

Brown spent the summer of 1859 in preparation for his work. He hired a farm a few miles from Harper's Ferry, where he was known by the name of "Smith." There, one by one, a few followers congregated stealthily;

and pikes and other weapons were gathered, and ammunition was provided, with the intention of striking the first blow in Virginia, and arming the insurgent slaves. Under cover of profound darkness, Brown, at the head of seventeen white men and five negroes, entered the village of Harper's Ferry on that fatal Sunday night, put out the street lights, seized the Armory and the railway bridge, and quietly arrested and imprisoned in the Government buildings the citizens found here and there in the streets at the earliest

CHAP. II.

AN ATTEMPT TO FREE THE SLAVES.

1409

hours of the next morning, each one ignorant of what had happened. The invaders had seized Colonel Washington, living a few miles from Harper's Ferry, with his arms and horses, and liberated his slaves; and at eight o'clock on Monday morning, the 17th of October, Brown and his few followers (among whom were two of his sons) had full possession of the village and Government works. When asked what was his purpose and by what authority he acted, Brown replied, "To free the slaves, and by the authority of God Almighty." He felt assured that when the blow should be struck, the negroes of the surrounding country would rise and flock to his standard. He sincerely believed that a general uprising of the slaves of the whole country would follow, and that he would win the satisfaction and the honors of a great liberator. He was mistaken.

The news of this alarming affair went speedily abroad, and before Monday night Virginia militia had gathered at Harper's Ferry in large numbers. Struggles between these and Brown's little company ensued, in which the two sons of the leader perished. The invaders were finally driven to the shelter of a fire-engine house, where Brown defended himself with great bravery. With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying child with one hand, held his rifle with the other, and issued oral commands to his men with all the composure of a general in his marquee, telling them to be firm and to sell their lives as dearly as possible.

On Monday evening, Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived at Harper's Ferry, with ninety United States marines and two pieces of artillery. The doors of the engine-house were forced open, and Brown and his followers were captured. He was speedily indicted for murder and treason; was found guilty, and on the 3d of December (1859) he was hanged at Charlestown, not far from the scene of his exploits. The most exaggerated reports of this raid went over the land. Terror spread throughout Virginia. Its governor (Henry A. Wise) was excited almost to madness, and declared that he was ready to make war on all the free-labor States. In a letter to President Buchanan, written on the 25th of November, he declared that he had authority for believing that a conspiracy to rescue John Brown existed in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and other States.

Brown was suspected of being an emissary of the Abolitionists, and attempts were made to implicate leaders of the Republican party and the inhabitants of the free-labor States generally in a scheme for liberating the slaves. A committee of the United States Senate, with the author of the Fugitive-Slave Law (James M. Mason) at its head, was appointed to investigate the subject. The result was positive proof that Brown had no accom. plices and only about twenty-five followers.

John Brown's attempt to free the slaves was a crazy one in itself, and utterly failed, but it led to events that very soon brought about the result he so much desired. His bitterest enemies acknowledged that he was sincere, and a real hero, and he became, in a manner, the instrument of deliverance of millions from bondage. His effort aroused the slumbering party spirit of the combatants for and against slavery to great activity, and at the beginning of 1860, a remarkable and growing strength of the Republican party was everywhere manifested. Its central idea of universal freedom attracted powerful and influential men from all other political parties, for it bore a standard around which persons differing in other things might gather in perfect accord. The elections held in 1858 and 1859 satisfied the opponents of this party that they were rapidly passing to the position of a hopeless minority, and that the domination in the National Councils which the friends of the slave-system had so long enjoyed would speedily come to an end.

The sagacious leaders of the pro-slavery party in the South, who had been for years forming plans and preparing a way for a dissolution of the Union, so as to establish the great slave-empire of their dreams within the Golden Circle (to be noticed presently), believed that they would not be able to elect another President of their choice, and that the time had come for the execution of their destructive scheme. A pretext more plausible than that of the violations of the Fugitive-Slave Act at the North afforded them, must be had, for that act had become too odious in the estimation of righteous men and women in all parts of the Union to inspire them with a desire for its maintenance. No such pretext existed, and the politicians in the slave-labor States deliberately prepared to create one, which, they knew, would be powerful. At that time they were in full alliance with the Democratic party of the North, which was then in power. If it should remain a unit and the fraternal relations with the Southern wing of the party should continue undisturbed, there might be a chance for the supremacy of the coalition awhile longer. But there were omens already of a speedy dismemberment of the Democratic party, for the Fugitive-Slave Law and the attempt to nationalize slavery had produced wide-spread defection in their ranks. A large portion of that party, led by Senator Stephen A. Douglas, showed a proclivity toward independent action, and even of affiliation with the Republican party on the subject of slavery; and the hopes of the friends of that system, of the undivided support of the Northern Democracy, vanished.

In view of this impending crisis, the Southern politicians deemed it expedient to destroy absolutely all unity in the Democratic party and make it powerless, when the Republicans might elect their candidate for the Pres