ohn Brown is too familiar to be repeated here; but
how strange that in so short a time his captor, Robert E. Lee,
should become famous as one of the greatest leaders of force in
rebellion against the government he then served.

John Brown was captured and hanged. He had but few sympathizers
in the North, but his attempt to incite the slaves to rebellion
greatly stirred up the entire South, and hastened secession.

Very soon the second National Republican Convention was held at
Chicago. At this convention, which nominated Lincoln for the
Presidency, the resolutions declared for "the maintenance inviolate
of the right of each State to order and control its own domestic
institutions according to its own judgment exclusively," and
condemned the attempt to enforce the extreme pretensions of a purely
local interest (meaning the slave interest), through the intervention
of Congress and the courts, by the Democratic administration. They
derided the new dogma that the Constitution of its own force carried
slavery into the Territories, and denied the authority of Congress,
or of a Territorial Legislature, or of any individual to give leave
of existence to slavery in any Territory of the United States.

After the failure of the efforts to make of Kansas a Slave State,
it had become plain that the South could not hope to keep its
equality of representation in the Senate without reversing what
appeared to be settled popular opinion concerning the status of
the Northern Territories. Resolutions to this general effect were
moved by Jefferson Davis early in February, 1860, and passed by
the Senate. It was in effect the ultimatum presented to the
Democratic party at its National Convention when it assembled,
April 23, at Charleston, S. C. The warring factions failed to come
to an agreement, and the convention adjourned to meet at Baltimore
on the eighteenth of June. There Douglas was at last nominated.
The delegates who had seceded at Charleston were joined by other
seceders at Baltimore, and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky
for President. A month later, May 19, a third faction, calling
itself the "Constitutional Union Party," assembled in convention
at the same city, Baltimore, and nominated John Bell of Tennessee
and Edward Everett of Massachusetts, on a platform whose distinguishing
battle-cry was "The Constitution, the Union of the States, and the
enforcement of the laws." Three days before this, May sixteenth,