Sentiment of this kind could not be properly comprehended in the
South. It was honestly misrepresented by some, willfully misrepresented
by others. All construed it into a belief, on the part of a large
proportion of the Northern people, that John Brown was entirely
justifiable. His wild invasion of the South, they apprehended,
would be repeated as opportunity offered on a larger scale and with
more deadly purpose. This opinion was stimulated and developed
for political ends by many whose intelligence should have led them
to more enlightened views. False charges being constantly repeated
and plied with incessant zeal, the most radical misconception became
fixed in the Southern mind. It was idle for the Republican party
to declare that their aim was only to prevent the extension of
slavery to free territory, and that they were pledged not to
interfere with its existence in the States. Such distinctions were
not accepted by the Southern people. Their leaders had taught them
that the one necessarily involved the other, and that a man who
was in favor of the Wilmot Proviso was as bitter an enemy to the
South as one who incited a servile insurrection. These views were
unceasingly pressed upon the South by the Northern Democracy, who,
in their zeal to defeat the Republicans at home, did not scruple
to misrepresent their aims in the most reckless manner. They were
constantly misleading the public opinion of the slave States, until
at last the South recognized no difference between the creed of
Seward and the creed of Gerrit Smith, and held Lincoln responsible
for all the views and expressions of William Lloyd Garrison and
Wendell Phillips. The calling of a National Republican Convention
was to their disordered imagination a threat of destruction. The
success of its candidates would, in their view, be just cause for
resistance outside the pale of the Constitution.

MEETING OF CHARLESTON CONVENTION.

It was at the height of this overwrought condition of the Southern
mind, that the National Convention of the Democratic party met at
Charleston on the 23d of April, 1860. The convention had been
assembled in South Carolina, as the most discontented and extreme
of Southern States, in order to signify that the Democracy could
harmonize on her soil, and speak peace to the nation through the
voice which had so often spoken peace before. But the Northern
Democrats failed to comp