John Brown

( Originally Published 1898 )

JAMES BUCHANAN, in private life a bland and entertaining old gentleman of between sixty and seventy years of age, was, as President of the United States, able to command the respect and regard of neither South nor North. The difference between him and Pierce, his predecessor, and holding the same political faith, was marked. The latter was a man of rigid principle, strictly impartial between South and North, and resolved to uphold the Constitution and preserve the Union, without regard to what men or what party he might conciliate or alienate by so doing. Because he satisfied his own conscience, he forfeited the political support of party men on both sides, and went into retirement because he was too courageous and sincere to sacrifice conviction for place. Buchanan, on the contrary, though he declared that he was no candidate for a second term, and that he therefore could have no object in view but the welfare of the country, was from the beginning an abject truckler to Southern wishes and dictation. His principles were a sickly mush of compromise, trickery, and underhand intrigue in support of slavery. His public utterances were uncandid and often prevaricating; his decisions were often cowardly, and against the dictates of morality. Yet the only reward he could hope to gain from this behavior was the regard of the Southern planter aristocracy; and even this he failed of securing; for the Southern planter was a man of spirit and honor, and though he would condescend to use a tool like Buchanan, would kick him aside when he could no longer serve his turn. This seems an anomaly :—that a man of age and experience, with some reputation to lose, should adopt a course so inexpedient, to say the least of it, with no other result than the sort of pitying ignominy which attaches to those who have done evil without being positively evil themselves. The explanation is to be sought in the fiber of the personal character : Buchanan was a sort of soft-natured snob, who dreaded stern collisions, and the forcing of difficult passes; who wished everything to go with a smirk and a slide, who courted the strongest, and who, believing the Southerners to be the stronger, paid his assiduous court to them. He tortured the unhappy Constitution to make it fit their will, and even professed his services to alter it to suit them if possible; he affronted morality, and juggled with phrases, to make the worse appear the better reason; but all his labor and sweat were in vain; he left the country on the verge of the most dangerous abyss that could ever threaten it, which might have been avoided altogether by a President of firmness and moderate genius. He was an illustration of the familiar fact that weak men do more harm than bad men, in public as well as in private relations. Buchanan had brains, sagacity and knowledge of affairs; and he was what ladies would call a nice old man; there may have been moments in our history when he might have filled the Presidential office without doing any harm; but at this supreme juncture he was no better fitted for it than would have been an English butler, suave, apologetic and jesuitical.

Hardly had he reached the steps of the White House than he began his prevarication. His inaugural address must perforce contain a reference to the burning question as to whether slave owners might carry their slaves with impunity into free states; and it happened that the case of a negro who had for several years posed as plaintiff in a typical action was about to be decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. This negro, Dred Scott by name, had so long ago as 1838 brought suit to recover his freedom on the plea that his master had taken him into a free state; he had been ever since used by lawyers on both sides of the question as an anvil on which to hammer out their views and arguments. After having won and lost several times, the moment for the final decision had arrived. Not only was the Supreme Court about to pronounce its verdict, but it had already arrived at it; and it is not to be supposed that the President, with whose politics the majority of the Court was in sympathy, could have been ignorant of the direction in which their opinions would incline. Nevertheless, in his inaugural, he deprecated excitement on the matter, remarking that the judgment of the Court was about to be given, and that whichever way it went, he should loyally uphold it, and trusted the country would do the same. A few days later, the judgment was pronounced, and it consigned Dred Scott to slavery. Had this conclusion been reached before the elections, it is nearly certain that Fremont instead of Buchanan would have been President; for, coming as it did on the top of the Kansas troubles, it would have warned the people against admitting a slave sympathizer to the highest office. Of the whole Bench, two judges only, McLean and Curtis, dissented. The verdict had this peculiarity, that it first disposed of the case by declaring that no negro of African descent could be entitled to be plaintiff before a court. This ended the matter; but after this the Court went on to give a gratuitous opinion as to the merits of the situation. Having denied the man's citizenship, they said that the Missouri Compromise was illegal; that a slave could be carried into any territory without thereby gaining immunity from his status as a slave; and that, in short, as the Chief-justice, Taney, expressed it (the same man who, as Secretary of the Treasury under Jackson, drew out the funds from the United States Bank), the slave had no rights which white men were bound to respect. The decision was founded on special reasoning, and ignored the true merits of the question, as well as the views of such giants of Constitutional law and the principles of human rights as Jefferson and the English Mansfield. Dred Scott, the individual, was afterward freed by the voluntary act of his master; but the precedent thus established remained as a menace to peace and freedom in America.

Governor Geary of Kansas came up to Washington after the inauguration to discover the drift of things, and perceiving that it was hostile to him, he resigned his office. R. J. Walker, an honest man, was sent out as his successor, his avowed aim being to support the will of the majority. The indictments against the political defendants were quashed, and Robinson was set at liberty; and as a means of arriving at a satisfactory settlement, Walker advised the free state men to abandon the Topeka principles and submit their cause to the polls under the legally established regime. Not without misgivings, this was agreed to; and the result showed a large preponderance of free state votes. But the pro-slavery men were not going to yield so easily; and under the lead of a political scoundrel named Calhoun—no relation of the great statesman—the plan was evolved of foisting a slave constitution upon the country without submitting it to the people ; thereby annulling the value of the late vote for freedom. Not all of the legislature would agree to this, however; and a compromise finally was made by which the question should be submitted to the people whether they would have the constitution with slavery or without slavery : leaving all the rest of the articles of the constitution to be accepted in any event: —and they were so framed as practically to make slavery inevitable. Walker protested against this swindle, and went to Washington to remonstrate; but Buchanan informed him that the government would support Calhoun. When the voting day came, the free state men declined to go to the polls, and the pro-slavery party won by a ten to one vote. But when it came to electing state officers under this constitution, the free state supporters came out, and reversed the verdict; and the final result of the whole Kansas struggle was, that the pro-slavery men were utterly defeated, though the result of the trial was kept as long as possible from being made known, and the admission of Kansas as a free state was postponed until there should be a census of 93,000 in-habitants. Meanwhile Walker had resigned.

The Dred Scott decision and the Kansas muddle had created much indignation and uneasiness in the North; but during the autumn and winter of 1857 there was another period of financial and business disaster, due to too reckless borrowing of money on all sides, relying on an impossible standard of prosperity to make money good. Banks again suspended payment, towns went bankrupt, there were wide-spread mercantile failures, and all looked pinched and gloomy. In this state of things, the people were disinclined to go to dangerous lengths in politics, and the election showed no very decided condemnation of the administration. But upon the whole, the Democrats appeared to be losing their cohesion, while in Congress there was a compact minority in op-position. Buchanan however was imprudent enough to urge the admission of Kansas as a slave territory, in defiance of the patent preferences of its inhabitants; and at this juncture Douglas himself, who was responsible for the whole Kansas imbroglio, came out with an unexpected pro-test against the conduct of the administration. Whether or not his new attitude was sincere may be questioned; it had the appearance of being a courageous act, alienating many Southern adherents; and it was undoubtedly a step in the direction of justice. But Douglas was far from lacking in political insight, and one is disposed to ask whether he might not have thought this a good way of bringing himself again into prominence, and conciliating Northern support. But, again, it may have been a genuine impulse, which he turned to political advantage. He was an ingrained demagogue, and loved conspicuousness, and the clamor of audiences; and later on he showed symptoms of wishing to hedge somewhat on his valiant attitude; but the secret heart of a politician is an obscure place to grope in, nor does what one finds there often reward the pain of search. The House voted for an investigation of the Kansas proceedings; but Orr, the Speaker of the House, by appointing a committee of pro-slavery men, succeeded in stifling the matter. There were prolonged and disorderly debates, in which drunken members from Southern states called Northerners bad names, and denounced Northerners in general as the "mudsills of society." This had no special bearing on the merits of the topic under discussion; but Jefferson Davis spoke to the point when he recommended keeping United States troops in Kansas, to keep down "disorder." He had perceived, before the end of Pierce's administration, as Secretary of War, that' war was likely to occur in these States, and had conducted the affairs under his supervision with an eye to preparing the South for that contingency.

Kansas did not monopolize the disorders of the country ; far away on the further side of the Continent the new community of Utah came into collision with the government. Brigham Young had been the governor chosen by the people, and accepted under the Pierce administration; and he was not only the temporal ruler of the people, but their religious head as well. Buchanan, not appreciating this peculiarity, thought to supplant him by an appointee of his own; and sent out a gentleman of good character named Cumming; and apprehending that in so remote a wilderness contingencies might arise, he caused a detachment of regulars to accompany him. His only mistake was in not having sent regulars enough; Young and his Mormons defied him and the minions of oppression, and managed so to interrupt their supplies that the situation became awkward. The Mormons, indeed, in spite of their many saints, were capable of great fierceness ; and terrible tales were told of the exploits of their sect of thugs known as Danites, who made away with the unfaithful. Buchanan was equal to this emergency, however, inasmuch as politics were not concerned in it; and he sent out more troops, until the Mormons succumbed. But whatever might be their external aspect as to allegiance to the Uinted States, their true head would always be Brigham Young, so long as life remained in his stalwart and defiant body.

As time went on, the administration lost more and more its hold upon the country. For the first time in twenty years Pennsylvania ceased to support the South. A contest which aroused general interest was that between Douglas and Lincoln in Illinois. They were both of them picturesque men on the stump, though of very opposite styles, principles, and appearance : Lincoln being six feet four inches in height, and of comparatively rustic bearing, and homely speech; while Douglas was a manikin in height, though big enough in brain and energy. Lincoln was a humorous, but straight-forward and logical reasoner; Douglas had all the tricks of the demagogue, and a great gift of becoming hail-fellow-well met with "the boys." His principles were of the laisser aller order as regarded slavery; he professed to care nothing about it one way or the other on sentimental or moral grounds; he would have it let alone where it was, but would not advocate its being violently forced upon a free majority; let it expand toward Mexico and Cuba, if it would. Lincoln finally cornered him with a question growing from the Dred Scott decision : What had he to say about the right to hold slaves in a territory by virtue of the federal compact? Douglas replied that without prejudice to the Supreme Court view, if a people or a territory wished to exclude slavery from it, they would always be able to do so. Unfriendly legislation by the local legislature could settle it. This answered Douglas's immediate purpose of carrying his Illinois audiences; but Lincoln, in eliciting the statement from him, had had in view the far more important contest of 1860; for Douglas, by his answer, had definitely alienated Southern support for his Presidential aspirations. The South would demand perfect explicitness in the support of slavery, in their candidate. Although, therefore, Lincoln lost the immediate prize of the senatorship, he prepared the way for defeating Douglas for the Presidency. But he, also, had uttered a sentiment which was remembered against him by the South—" A house divided against itself cannot stand : I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. . . . It will become all one thing or all the other." The idea here ex-pressed was the same as that of Seward : "the irrepressible conflict." These two men were already the most eminent in the Republican party; Seward had the best chance of being chosen the standard-bearer; but the bridge is not crossed until one comes to it.

The manifest defeat of Buchanan's effort to win Kansas for the South prompted him to seek compensation for them elsewhere; and in his message at the opening of the year 1859 he recommended expansion in Mexico and the South American countries. There were always disturbances there sufficient to form a pretext for military interference, if the United States were set upon it ; but his suggestions were not taken up. Cuba could not be got by purchase, and there was no likelihood that the Cubans would co-operate in an attempt to shake off Spain. Moreover, England and France were opposed to our annexing any more territory, and took such measures to prevent it as might be effective without being too obvious. But England was led into the mistake of rousing our susceptibilities as to the right of search, which they were always claiming, in season and out, and which they now sought to practice on the plea of checking the violation of the slave trade law. The government at once sent an American fleet to the scene, and the English made explanations; but it was a pity that the only occasion on which Buchanan had an opportuinty to show spirit in foreign policy should have been in a cause so discreditable as this. Beg-gars cannot be choosers.

The previous year had not gone by without further advance in the line of scientific improvement; an Atlantic cable was laid, and messages exchanged; but the cable soon broke, and was not permanently reistablished till after the war. More important, for the moment, was the discovery of coal oil in Pennsylvania, by which great fortunes were made in record time, and a beautiful region was, incidentally, trans-formed into a lurid wilderness. Horse railroads were running in most of the great eastern towns; Arctic exploration continued; rowing regattas were held between Yale and Harvard; Heenan and Morrisey fought in the prize-ring, and Thackeray, greatest of English novelists, read his lectures on the Four Georges to the descendants of those who had thrown off their yoke and forgotten it. Music and the drama were developed, and literature had now achieved an importance which compelled recognition outside of this country. It was a larger and richer life, though much of it assumed trifling and frivolous forms. The people wished to be instructed in the lore of the world, and the lyceum bureaus brought information to them through the mouths of eminent lecturers. But most of this quasi-intellectual activity was at the North; the South, like the English aristocracy, affected to look down upon such things with good-natured scorn. They stuck to politics as the proper pursuit for gentlemen. Three eminent Southerners, Rhett, Davis and Alexander Stephens, made speeches advocating the enactment by Congress of a slave code directly protective of the institution; and also demanding that the slave trade be permitted to such states as chose to practice it. They continued to seek southern enlargement of boundaries, and founded the order of the Knights of the Golden Circle to that end, of which Walker, in his final and fatal expedition, was one of the most distinguished members. But these movements and propositions did not attract general attention; and it was not until October, 1859, that an event occurred which at once aroused the most intense feelings both North and South, and the echoes of which lasted through the war, and after it.

In the year 1800 there was born at the little town of Torrington, Connecticut, of a family which claimed Pilgrim origin, a child named John Brown. When he was six years old, his family removed to Ohio, where the boy learned the tanner's and currier's trade; and when he was a man grown, he became a wool merchant. But misfortune pursued him in all his efforts to make a living; while on the other hand he bred a family of patriarchal dimensions. But he was an earnest though narrow thinker, and one who wished to carry his thought into act; he had been deeply impressed by the anti-slavery lucubrations of Garrison's "Liberator," and emigrating to Kansas in 1855, he became active against the pro-slavery part of the community. Sorrow, disappointment and hardship, as well as the old Pilgrim strain in his blood, had made him a fanatic; and the good and bad qualities of the type were strongly accented in him. In his conflicts with the slaveholders he was helped by his sons, and saw more than one of them die; on his part, he slew without compunction, and would drag inoffensive persons out of their beds and kill them, for no other crime than holding opinions which he deemed damnable. At Ossawatomie he defeated with a small band a greatly superior force of Missouri invaders ; and the exploits of this action gained him the title of Ossawatomie Brown, by which he was afterward known. He was a very formidable personage, inconvenient to those who were in general sympathy with his anti-slavery ideas, as well as terrible to his avowed enemies. He was prepared for anything; and the arts of diplomacy were beneath his contempt. Perhaps he was at this time hardly in his right mind; there was abundant reason why he should not have been. Death by violence had struck down those nearest to him, and long brooding over the wrongs of the slave had made him implacable to those whom he held responsible for them. He was a tall, shaggy, impressive figure; a great heap of disordered hair piled up on his tall, narrow head; a long tangled beard, and a bony, athletic frame. His eyes gazed out sternly from beneath his rugged brows, and his manner was grave and harsh. But there was in him indomitable courage, and the iron fiber of the old Covenanters. His almost savage manhood, however, was not destitute of its tender side, which was noted and marked by his intimates and biographers; but it may be said of him, as of others, that nothing in old John Brown's troubled life so well became him as did the closing scenes of it.

In 1858 he had already conceived his grotesque plan of emancipating the blacks single-handed, and by force. It is needless to say that he despised politics and politicians. He had seen slavery talked against for many years, and it was now more strongly established than ever. He understood that the moral reprobation with which the North professed to regard slavery was not strong enough to induce them to lift a hand to crush it; they would prate of the Union and the Constitution, and let "I dare not" wait upon "I would." But John was withheld by no constitutional scruples; he had seen those he loved die, and he had slain men in cold blood with his own hand; and he pictured to himself the slaves rising at his call, and massacring their masters wholesale, while he himself led them to the slaughter and gloried in it. The slaves, he imagined, were ready to spring up like tigers at the signal, and he would be at the head of a million fighters who, should the United States government side with the South against them, would fight the government too, and conquer them, with the aid of the white abolitioinsts who would also join him; and a new republic would be established on the ashes of the present one, in which whites and blacks would be equal, man for man, and before the law. In planning thus, Brown must have imagined that all negroes and all other white abolitionists were monomaniacs like himself, who would hold their lives at a pin's fee, and fight to the death. And if one can picture an army of John Browns, it is not difficult to surmise that all the resources of the mighty States might have been insufficient to put it down. Fanatics —monomaniacs—men who will literally die rather than yield —are more formidable than many times their number of ordinary brave soldiers, no matter how well disciplined and armed. Ordinary human courage has its well-defined limits; and after ten men have been killed out of a hundred, the ninety will generally retreat; if twenty have been killed, the retreat becomes a flight. But what should be done with a hundred men who would fight till ninety of them were slain, and then still fight till not one was left alive? With a million men of this stamp, it was not unreasonable to believe that Brown might have conquered any army or armies in the world; and were he to lose half his million, or nine-tenths of it, or all of it, that would make no difference to him; he would have put an end to slavery.

The error Brown made, then, was not in theory, wild and almost incredible though that was, but in the belief that his army, if he could raise it, would resemble him. There happened not to be a million John Browns available in the United States; indeed, so far as we know, there never was or would be but one. But even that one was enough to shake the whole nation to its center; and had he not lived and died, it is possible that slaves would still be slaves to-day. In this world, no power equal to the one man power has yet been found.

Brown was a practical man in ordinary respects, and he could reason out the details of his plan logically. The slaves must have arms. It would not be possible to arm them all at once ; but that was not necessary ; if he could put guns in the hands of a few thousand of them, that would do for a beginning; when the army got to its work, it could obtain arms from its enemies. There was an arsenal at Harper's Ferry, a small village on the Virginia side of the Potomac, at the point where the river breaks asunder the barriers of the Alleghanies. There was a little Virginia farmhouse near the village, which Brown rented, ostensibly for farming purposes; but little work was done upon it; only his farm wagon made frequent visits to the railway station, and returned loaded with heavy cases, which might have contained books, or farming tools, but which really were full of rifles. With the aid of these rifles, in the hands of himself, his sons, and a few more, he meant to capture the arsenal; and the rest would be easy. Messengers should go forth to notify the slaves of the rendezvous; as fast as they came in they would receive the weapons: and then woe to the slaveholders! It was such a vision as might have risen before the mind of an opium eater, or perhaps of a dime novelist; but only John Brown would have attempted actually to take it out of the region of insane notions, and clothe it with flesh and blood.

Brown's recruits came in slowly; and by the time a dozen or more had arrived, the old man felt that he must strike. With his sons, his army numbered eighteen all told. But that, in one sense, was already more than enough; for the neighbors, though Brown had avoided all association with them as much as possible—and he was not a man easy to approach at any time—were beginning to show curiosity as to why eighteen farmers who never did any farming were living in a small cottage out there in the wilds of the hills. They must show what they were there for before they were asked, or it would be too late.

Therefore, on the evening of Sunday, October 16, 1859, John Brown took his gun and ordered his men to fall in. Down to the village by the river they tramped, the eighteen men who were to put an end to slavery. On the way they met a negro, one of the race they were going to save; and Brown bade him fall in, and enjoy the distinction of being the first recruit of his color in the emancipating army. The negro was no doubt a fool; but he may have had brains enough to make a rapid calculation of the odds between this army and the power of the United States; and he decided, on the instant, that the right thing for him to do was to run away. But here he showed his folly; he had not calculated on John Brown. The negro was a slave, and Brown was ready to die for him; but meanwhile he shot him down to prevent him from hindering his emancipation. It was the first blood shed in this war; and it indicated that Brown was determined to rescue the victims of slavery even if, in order to do it, he was obliged to kill not only their tyrants, but themselves. He was what the English would call "thorough."

Sunday evening villagers, who have never seen a shot fired in anger, are not likely to put up much of a fight on so brief warning; and Brown and his army succeeded in getting into the arsenal without loss, except of the one recusant recruit above-mentioned, who was free, indeed, however abruptly. He was the only slave whom Brown succeeded in freeing with his own hands.

But the first step in the great campaign was a success; and Brown fortified himself in his narrow quarters, and was ready for a siege ; meanwhile he posted guards on the rail-way bridge, and, not to be unprovided with all supplies which an army should have, he captured a couple of prisoners. When the train came along, he stopped it; but presently allowed it to continue on its way to the North, possibly imagining that it would come back filled with armed abolitionists. No other evidence is needed to prove that he had no conception whatever of the position he occupied in the eyes of the entire law-abiding population of the United States. The North was just as anxious to put a stop to him as the South was; even Wendell Phillips and Lloyd Garrison did not start for Harper's Ferry. The inhabitants of that village, in addition to keeping up a desultory firing on the arsenal, had dispatched telegrams up and down the line, whose tenor indicated that a vast slave rebellion had broken out, and that everybody was going to be massacred out of hand; and by morning of the 17th of October, soldiers were on their way to the seat of war, not knowing how many hundred thousand desperate revolutionists they would have to encounter. The mayor of Harper's Ferry, and a few other citizens, had been killed or wounded by the fire from the arsenal before the soldiers arrived. It was not until after dark that night that a soldier who had seen war, Colonel Robert E. Lee, with a detachment of marines, appeared on the scene, and upon learinng that the entire revolution, so far as was yet known, was cooped up in that little arsenal, felt like the leader of a fire-brigade which rushes to extinguish the conflagration of a city, and finds only a burning match-box. Artillery was not needed, he thought, to reduce this fortification; a scaling ladder applied as a battering-ram would suffice. It was desirable to take this army prisoners; and besides, there were citizens of Harper's Ferry inside there, whose lives must not be endangered. So the marines, under his directions, advanced with the heavy ladder, and pounded in the door; and there knelt John Brown, a ghastly spectacle, with six or seven wounds on his body, two of his sons dead on the floor beside him, and eight other men beside them. The war of emancipation was at an end; now were to follow the consequences.

Brown and the other prisoners were jailed, and they were tried and hanged with inspiring promptness. One can imagine what a red-handed ogre of iniquity Brown must have appeared to the South. But in fact, the letting of blood, and the refusal of a single slave to join his banner, had cleared the brain of the old man, and he realized his mistake. Possibly, too, he realized that his defeat and death would win for his cause more than he himself could have hoped to gain. He did not assume the airs of a martyr; sensational to the last degree though his exploit was, he was not in the least capable of conscious sceinc display. He sat, with his wounds, amid his enemies, quiet and unrepining, ready for the end, reasonable and gentle enough, but if he had any regrets, they were not that he had wished and tried to free the slaves, but that he had lacked the means to do it. He loved the negroes with the strange, impersonal love of the fanatic; and the little negro pickanniny that he kissed on his way to the scaffold was to him a symbol of the race—no more. He maintained his rude dignity and stoic courage to the end; and the authorities, as they choked the life out of him, doubtless wished, like Othello, that the wretch had twenty thousand lives : one was too poor, too weak for their revenge. But it turned out, later, that the execution of a single John Brown was quite as much as this nation could afford. His body mouldered in its grave, but his soul, militant still, marched from battlefield to battlefield, and witnessed the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of human lives, poured out to defend or to defeat the cause for the sake of which he had put his head in the halter. The excuse of the Civil War was indeed secession; but its reason was slavery. And after all had been said as to Brown's insanity, and folly, and treason, and unconstitutionality, and bloodthirstiness, and wickedness, our people saw only the figure of a man who had laid down his life for an idea, and a noble and unselfish one. It was a revelation, for it was not a tendency, nor a purpose, but an accomplished fact. A man had been found, not to talk about this thing, but to actually do it. And he was not a pale priest or a metaphysical ascetic, but a plain ordinary American such as you may meet in the village grocery on Saturday afternoons. He had done and suffered terrible things, but so may any plain American with strong thoughts in his mind, and little education; and with a heart that could be both fierce and tender. The North understood him, felt with him, pitied him and gloried in him; and his name and story were better known to this nation than those of any other man of that age. There was nothing factitious in the feeling he aroused; it grew slowly, but it gathered strength surely; and the final verdict of history, now that passion is no more, is kinder and more respectful than ever to Old Brown.

The South was in a tremor for some time after this episode, for it seemed incredible that Brown had not been the cat's-paw of some gigantic conspiracy in the North, which would be revealed later. But when investigation showed that he had been utterly alone in his enterprise, he was called a murderous madman, and everybody felt relieved ; but all the same, measures were taken by the South to get in a defensive position. If one such madman could come from the North, there might be others. In Congress, defiances were exchanged between Democrats and Republicans., There were a good many outspoken remarks on slavery, pro and con, which would not have been uttered before John Brown died. The North, of course, would not in any way justify his deed; but it felt less inclined than before to maintain a conciliating attitude toward the South. Brown had not been conciliating: why should they?

In June of this year, Buchanan vetoed the Homestead bill, on the ground that Congress had no power to give away the public domain; but the true reason was lest the lands should pass into the hands of free labor; for Southerners were not able to take advantage of such a law for them-selves. Soon after Covode of Pennsylvania carried a motion to investigate the acts of the administration; and in spite of the President's protests, the inquisitors unearthed a large mass of testimony indicative of corruption, favoritism., bribery, violence and treachery; for, indeed, it was notorious that every kind of political iniquity had flourished under his rule. The committee made no attempt to impeach Buchanan; they were satisfied to let the matter rest with the exposure; and Buchanan could only say that if wrong had been done, it was inadvertently, in the dispatch of routine business. The inquisition was certainly partisan; it was of no benefit to the country, however much it may have hurt Buchanan; and its chief use was to show, what had been already suspected, that Congress is a place where a great deal of evil may be done. By way of diverting attention, the President tried once more to intrigue the country with Mexico, with a view to further annexation; and there were rich jobs afoot in relation to transit routes across the Isthmus; but no change of policy could be effected. The country was becoming too much absorbed in its own affairs to take interest in anything else.

The Democratic Convention met at Charleston in the spring of 1860. The platform committee reported that Congress and territorial legislatures had no right to prevent the holding of slaves in any territory; the Douglas men could not accept this except on condition that the Supreme Court first pass upon it; the Convention adopted the Douglas side of the argument, and the other delegates thereupon with-drew. They met in a convention of their own, and nominated Breckinridge for President. Douglas was nominated by the others a month later, with Fitzpatrick of Alabama for Vice-President. In Baltimore assembled a sort of respectable coalition convention, which named Bell and Everett for their candidates, on the platform of "no political principle other than the Constitution of the country, the Union of the states, and the enforcement of the laws." The Republican Convention met in Chicago, which thus first takes its place in national political history; it already had the indomitable spirit of which we see some of the results to-day. There was danger of the Republicans, in their search for a candidate, going astray among the cranks and hypocrites of whom their ranks afforded many specimens; but Seward, Chase and Lincoln were finally brought to the front as the best men from whom to select a winner. Seward's long and clear record of ability and service entitled him to first consideration; but along with many friends he had made many enemies, not all of them outside of his own party; and it was necessary to pick a man who would win. Abraham Lincoln had many friends, and he had kept out of public life to a degree that left him to a great extent unhampered. His speeches during his contest with Douglas two years before were remembered favorably ; and things seemed to be coming his way. Chase was also strong, but was thought not to have so good a chance. Other candidates were Bates and Cameron.

The hall in which this Convention met had been made for them, and was gayly decorated; there was space for an enormous audience in addition to the Convention members themselves; and the most lively interest was shown. Seward led in the first ballot; but Lincoln, greeted with a great shouting, was second. The next ballot gave Lincoln all Cameron's votes, and brought him within three of Seward, amid great excitement; then Ohio and Massachusetts fell into line, and gave him a majority; still other states followed these, until, with a whirlwind of commotion, and the thundering of cannon, Lincoln was made the Republican nominee by 354 votes out of 466. The result was undoubtedly a popular one; but of course no one knew of what vital importance it really was. The election was not to be the triumph of orators or famous names, but of fundamental principles; and as a matter of fact it was to the exposition of these that the candidates devoted themselves. Morality was the watchword of the Republicans; they had tried the effect of compromising with wrong, and had been defeated. Concession was the cry of the Democrats, whose split put them at a disadvantage. All except Breckinridge were for the Constitution; and he was also, with the proviso that the equality of states be maintained. Lincoln, who kept quiet and made a good impression on all who saw him, gained strength and influence daily; Seward generously took the stump for him, and Cameron brought Pennsylvania to his support. Carl Schurz, who had lately become a citizen, harangued the Germans with good results, and Henry Ward Beecher and George William Curtis lent their aid; but Wen-dell Phillips seemed to scent some suspicion of negro slavery in Lincoln's garments, and with his usual patriotism and sagacity denounced him as "the slave-hound of Illinois." On the popular and demonstrative side, this campaign somewhat recalled that of "Tippecanoe" ; there were vast meetings and torchlight processions and emblematic standards; and Lincoln having once earned a living splitting rails, rails were prominent among the insignia; and the shout of thousands of lusty lungs in unison—" Abraham—Lincoln—Rail—SplittAR !"—will never be forgotten by those who heard it. He was a John Brown with all Brown's virtues and none of his faults; a man of the people, a great man, and a good man. And he was indefinitely more than John Brown could ever have been; the depth of his mind, the breadth of his sympathies, have never been sounded or measured. His humor was a national treasure, and all the simple and manly facts of his early life, as they became known, endeared him more and more to his countrymen. His stature has only within these last few years been appreciated by the generality; but wherever an American goes in this world, he will find no better passport to take with him than that of being Lincoln's fellow-countryman. The love and reverence with which his name is regarded in many out-of-the-way corners of the old world would be hardly credited by those who have not witnessed it. Goodness, and faithful labor for others, go far, and the memory of them dieth not.

Buchanan gave his support to Breckinridge, though he announced that Democrats might take their choice of either him or Douglas, no regular nomination having been made. Douglas, though he was left to fight for his own hand, was the more formidable candidate of the two. He took the stump in his own behalf, and no man could have done it more effectively. Breckinridge was the disunion candidate, though he would not admit it; and the force of sentiment behind him was as strong at least as that behind Lincoln; but it lacked numbers. The South were fighting for their reputation, and for their existence as members of the old Union; for it would be a mistake to think that the majority of Southerners at this time wished to secede. They only thought that if their principles suffered defeat at the polls, not only would they be discredited before the world, but they would be obliged to set up housekeeping by themselves thereafter. If some of them anticipated war, they fancied it would be short—a mere matter of form. But the prevalent idea was that the secession would be accomplished peaceably, as Calhoun had dreamed long ago.

The October elections favored the Republicans, and showed which way the popular verdict would fall. The polls for the Presidential election closed just after sunset on the 6th of November, and by midnight it was known that Lincoln was President of the United States. Breckinridge got the vote of eleven out of the fifteen slave states; Douglas did better with the popular than with the electoral votes; Bell carried Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. There was to be no more slave domination in the Union. Even the prospects of expanding in other directions than northward were dispelled. It seemed to the South that they had stood by the Constitution, while the North had played fast and loose with it in order to win. But the result at the polls was undeniable; there was no question of fraud; and it was the duty of the South to accept the result. Instead of that, the threats of secession began to be heard immediately; and South Carolina took the lead. A convention was summoned on the 17th of December, two weeks after the meeting of Congress, and on the 20th passed an ordinance of secession. Among their grievances they named abolitioinsm at the North, abuse of slavery as sinful, the passage of the acts to prevent the recapture of fugitive slaves, and Lincoln's declaration that the house divided against itself could not stand. The North, they affirmed, taxed the South for its own benefit. But if the slaveholding states would stand together, their cotton and tobacco would make all the world court them, and their territory, larger than Europe, would become the richest and happiest in the world. The other states showed themselves well disposed to follow their sanguine sister.

Three commissioners were now sent to Washington to arrange for the division of public property in South Carolina, and for the surrender of the Charleston forts. All the South-ern States, of course, had within their boundaries a great deal of government property, paid for by Northern as well as Southern taxpayers, and to this property they had no more right than they had to the Tower of London or the Porcelain Pagoda in China. At this time there were in Charleston Harbor three forts—Castle Pinckney, Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter; Moultrie was occupied by a garrison of sixty men—more than ten times too small for it; Sumter was not in fighting order; but it was more defensible, being on an island in the center of the harbor, and to it Major Anderson moved his men on the night of the 26th of December, after the adjournment of the Convention, and the announcement of secession. Anderson was a faithful officer, and saw that it might be necessary to stand on his defense. The next morning there was great to-do in Charleston; and acting upon the principle that might makes right, the local authorities baldly appropriated Pinckney and Moultrie and hoisted over them the Palmetto flag of the state. Anderson had taken the precaution to spike Moultrie's guns before leaving; but the arsenal was taken a few days later, with half a million dollars' worth of national arms in it. This picking of the national pocket by the seceding states was an awkward accompaniment of secession; but there seemed no way of avoiding it. It would have been more dignified had it been preceded by a definite act of war. It is amusing to note that, with the breathless American haste to be up with the events which they themselves were creating, the South Carolinian newspapers headed their dispatches from the Northern states, "Foreign News." The three commissioners carried out the game; they demanded to be recognized as representatives of an independent country; while poor Buchanan was still master of the White House, and for aught any one could say, the President-elect might never live to hold the reins. They ordered Buchanan—for the tone they took was that of masters rather than of ambassadors —much less of traitors who merited hanging—to move Anderson out of Fort Sumter at once, otherwise their outraged country would put him out by force of arms (stolen from the Uinted States for that purpose). Buchanan deserves no sympathy for this insult; for he had unfaithfully refused to adopt Winfield Scott's advice, given long before, to put these forts in a proper posture of defense, in view of precisely the contingency which had now happened. All he could do now was to submit the correspondence to Congress. His Cabinet was by this time dissolving; he accepted Howell Cobb's resignation as Secretary of the Treasury, though it was known that his conduct of the office had been grossly imprudent if not much worse; the molluscous Cass next left him; and Floyd, Secretary of War, who had taken advantage of his position to prevent the reinforcement of Southern forts, followed. The President took it all very meekly. The country gained by his appointment of an unknown lawyer of Ohio, Edwin M. Stanton, as Attorney-general. Stanton was destined to see Secession out as War Secretary under Lincoln; and proved himself to be the right man in the right place. An order to send the cruiser "Brooklyn" with reinforcements to Anderson was delayed; and finally the "Star of the West," with two hundred and fifty men, but no armament, was dispatched; upon her arrival at the harbor, she was fired on by the Charleston batteries, January 9th, 1861, and she immediately put about and returned. Two other members of the Cabinet, Thomas and Thompson, both disloyal, and dishonest into the bargain, now resigned; and again the nation profited; for John A. Dix was called to Thomas's place (Secretary of the Treasury), and it was he who soon after ordered his officers, "If any man attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot." During the few remaining weeks of Buchanan's term, a sort of armistice with the South was agreed upon, according to which the forts were to remain without reinforcements, and were not to be captured by the South.

Meanwhile delegates from six seceding states met at Montgomery, Alabama, and made a constitution for the provisional government of the Confederate States of America. It made slavery its piece de resistance; and matters relating to public property and debts were to be adjusted between them and the United States on just and equitable terms. The proposal was for peaceable secession. Jefferson Davis was elected President of this new Confederacy, though no appeal had been made to the people, even in choosing the delegates that elected him. The government was an oligarchy. Alexander Stephens was made Vice-President; his views were more conservative and moderate than those of the others, and he was willing to accommodate the quarrel even yet, if the North would repeal its "personal liberty" bills, preventing return of fugitive slaves. He was of opinion that the best men at the North would always be ready to agree with the South as to national measures; and remarked, not without truth, that "the South has controlled the government in its every important action from the beginning." Nor did he consider that Lincoln's election was fair cause. for secession. Lincoln wrote to him under date of December 22, 1860, that the Republican administration would not interfere with slaves; but that the point of divergence was that "you think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong, and ought to be abolished." Stephens's response to this was that the pride of the South was touched at being made the object of moral diatribes. This seems childish, but after all, it is pride of this kind that influences men and nations more strongly than almost any other cause, and has led to more wars than any other. It was pride that made England fight the war of the Revolution, and pride that prompted Mexico to undertake the struggle that lost her California and Texas. Such pride is costly; but it is worth its cost; since without it a nation is neither respected nor respects itself.

At the same time that the Confederacy between the six states (South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi) was formed, a peace convention met in Washington, at the instance of Virginia. The scheme was got up by John Tyler, the ex-president, and the meeting contained representatives of twenty states, North and South, the North being in the majority. It seems probable that Tyler had treasonable designs in this affair; he asked for a truce while it was deliberating, and thus kept the North from making needful preparations; and when the sittings had issued in no result, he returned to Richmond and declared that the Union could not be saved and that the sooner Virginia joined the seceding states the better.

Lincoln left his home on February 11th and traveling by Pittsburgh, Buffalo and New York, reached Washington on the 23d, having journeyed from Philadelphia incognito, guarded by the detective Allan Pinkerton; for it was believed that a plot was afoot in Baltimore to kidnap or kill him while crossing the city.