that the John Brown episode was to be drawn into the
political campaign as an indictment against anti-slavery men. It
was loudly charged by the South, and by their partisans throughout
the North, that such insurrections were the legitimate outgrowth
of Republican teaching, and that the national safety demanded the
defeat and dissolution of the Republican party. Thus challenged,
the Republican party did not stand on the defensive. Many of its
members openly expressed their pity for the zealot, whose rashness
had led him to indefensible deeds and thence to the scaffold. On
the day of his execution, bells were tolled in many Northern towns
--not in approval of what Brown had done, but from compassion for
the fate of an old man whose mind had become distempered by suffering,
and by morbid reflection on the suffering of others; from a feeling
that his sentence, in view of this fact, was severe; and lastly,
and more markedly, as a Northern rebuke to the attempt on the part
of the South to make a political issue from an occurrence which
was as unforeseen and exceptional as it was deplorable.

The fear and agitation in the South were not feigned but real.
Instead of injuring the Republican party, this very fact increased
its strength in the North. The terror of the South at the bare
prospect of a negro insurrection led many who had not before studied
the slavery question to give serious heed to this phase of it.
The least reflection led men to see that a domestic institution
must be very undesirable which could keep an entire community of
brave men in dread of some indefinable tragedy. Mobs and riots of
much greater magnitude than the John Brown uprising had frequently
occurred in the free States, and they were put down by the firm
authority of law, without the dread hand of a spectre behind which
might in a moment light the horizon with the conflagration of homes,
and subject wives and daughters to a fate of nameless horror.
Instead, therefore, of arresting the spread of Republican principles,
the mad scheme of John Brown tended to develop and strengthen them.
The conviction grew rapidly that if slavery could produce such
alarm and such demoralization in a strong State like Virginia,
inhabited by a race of white men whose courage was never surpassed,
it was not an institution to be encouraged, but that its growth
should be prohibited in the new communities where its weakening
and baleful influence was not yet felt.