h. The governor of
Virginia turned a deaf ear to pleas for clemency based on the ground
that the prisoner was simply a lunatic. "This is a beautiful country,"
said the stern old Brown glancing upward to the eternal hills on his way
to the gallows, as calmly as if he were returning home from a long
journey. "So perish all such enemies of Virginia. All such enemies of
the Union. All such foes of the human race," solemnly announced the
executioner as he fulfilled the judgment of the law.

The raid and its grim ending deeply moved the country. Abolitionists
looked upon Brown as a martyr and tolled funeral bells on the day of his
execution. Longfellow wrote in his diary: "This will be a great day in
our history; the date of a new revolution as much needed as the old
one." Jefferson Davis saw in the affair "the invasion of a state by a
murderous gang of abolitionists bent on inciting slaves to murder
helpless women and children"--a crime for which the leader had met a
felon's death. Lincoln spoke of the raid as absurd, the deed of an
enthusiast who had brooded over the oppression of a people until he
fancied himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them--an attempt
which ended in "little else than his own execution." To Republican
leaders as a whole, the event was very embarrassing. They were taunted
by the Democrats with responsibility for the deed. Douglas declared his
"firm and deliberate conviction that the Harper's Ferry crime was the
natural, logical, inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of
the Republican party." So persistent were such attacks that the
Republicans felt called upon in 1860 to denounce Brown's raid "as among
the gravest of crimes."

=The Democrats Divided.=--When the Democratic convention met at
Charleston in the spring of 1860, a few months after Brown's execution,
it soon became clear that there was danger ahead. Between the extreme
slavery advocates of the Far South and the so-called pro-slavery
Democrats of the Douglas type, there was a chasm which no appeals to
party loyalty could bridge. As the spokesman of the West, Douglas knew
that, while the North was not abolitionist, it was passionately set
against an extension of slavery into the territories by act of Congress;
that squatter sovereignty was the mildest kind of compromise acceptable
to the farmers whose votes would determine the fate of the election.
Southern leaders would not accept his opinion. Yancey, speaking for
Alabama,