e latter section has never been given
its full importance at the hands of chroniclers. Brown's acknowledged
and boasted purpose to set free the slaves and arm them against their
masters in insurrection was looked upon by every Southern woman as a
direct threat--of which the carrying out was averted only by the hand
of an over-ruling Providence--against that which her womanhood most
prized. She knew what would have been the effect of the loosing upon the
community of a horde of semi-savages, mad with the lust of blood and
rapine, drunk with the liberty which they would look upon as unbridled
license; for such, as she well knew, would the majority of the slaves
become under conditions which would appeal to their worst side and would
in their novelty lead to all excess. The narrow view which sees in the
burning anger of the South toward this attempt only dread of loss of
property is utterly false; it was the personal aspect of the matter
which appealed to every Southern woman, and, because of this, to every
Southern man. Even the partial success of such an attempt would have
meant ruined and dishonored homes throughout the Southern land; the
honor of its women, that most precious of all possessions, was in peril
in such enterprise, and it was the threat against this that set the
Southland aflame with rage against the would-be perpetrators of such an
atrocity. It was not the menace to property or even to life; it was

"the unutterable shame
That turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame."

For the South knew the negro, his bad qualities as well as his good;
and, while the women of the South knew that their elder house-servants
would protect them with their lives, if necessary, they also knew that
the horde of fieldhands, intoxicated by a liberty whose nature they
could not understand, would turn at once to the gratification of the
savage nature which slept chained within them and would make of the land
an offense to heaven.

This was bad enough; but worse yet, since the attempt had miserably
failed, was the fact that the North saw none of these things. It did
not, seemingly could not, understand. Where the woman of the South saw
in John Brown only the brutal assailer of all that womanhood held most
precious, she of the North,--who could she have realized the peril in
which her Southern sister stood, would have stirred the North with her
cry,--saw in him only the martyr to