-serving of ecclesiastics were fairly pictured. The
fundamental attitude of the law in regarding the slave as the creature
of his master's convenience was shown with historic fidelity. But the
book took its name from a negro, half-prophetic, half-crazed, who
maintained in the Dismal Swamp a refuge for slaves, and purposed an
uprising to conquer their freedom. To Southern imaginations it might
well recall Nat Turner and the horrors of his revolt. Mrs. Stowe
inevitably idealized everything she touched; and to idealize the leader
of a servile insurrection might well be regarded as carrying fire into a
powder magazine. The moving expostulation of the Christian slave Milly
with Dred, the death of Dred, the frustration of his plans, and the
pitiful wrongs he sought to redress, veiled from the Northern reader the
suggestion of other dangers and tragedies to which the Southern reader
was keenly alive. As we read the book now, the glimpses of coming terror
and disaster in Dred's visions seem like a presage of the war which in
truth was only four years away.

But the prevailing temper of the time was as yet little clouded by any
such forebodings. It was a great wave of popular enthusiasm, sane,
resolute, and hopeful, which moved forward in the first Presidential
campaign of the Republican party in 1856. The convention met at
Philadelphia in June. Its temper was well described in a letter from
Samuel Bowles to his paper, the _Springfield Republican_,--which which
from moderate anti-slavery Whig had become ardently Republican when the
Missouri compromise was repealed.[1]

"Certainly we never saw a political convention in which there was so
much soul as in that at Philadelphia. It was politics with a heart and a
conscience in it. Cincinnati (the Democratic convention) gathered the
remains of a once powerful national party and contributed to its further
sectionalization and destruction. Philadelphia called together the
heart, the independence, and the brains of all parties, to establish a
broader and juster nationality. Such a fusion of contradictory elements
was never witnessed in this country before since the times of the
Revolution. Nor could it happen now save under a great emergency, and
from a controlling necessity. Such a combination of the material and
mental forces of the republic as was represented in the Philadelphia
convention, and united in its enthusiastic and harmonious results, has
more power than any political combi