THE CIVIL WAR PERIOD -1857-1864 85 



deeming his promise to maintain the Union had gone to 

 lengths which startled and disappointed many of his most 

 devoted supporters. Civil war had broken out in Kansas 

 and Nebraska, with murder and massacre: desperate at- 

 tempts were made to fasten the hold of the pro-slavery 

 party permanently upon the State, and as desperately were 

 these efforts repelled. A certain John Brown, who re- 

 quited assassination of free-state men by the assassination 

 of slave-state men, a very ominous appearance, began 

 to be heard of; men like Professor Silliman, who, during 

 my stay at Yale had spoken at Union meetings in favor of 

 the new compromise measures, even including the fugitive 

 slave law, now spoke publicly in favor of sending rifles to 

 the free-state men in Kansas ; and, most striking symptom 

 of all, Stephen A. Douglas himself, who had led the Demo- 

 cratic party in breaking the Missouri Compromise, now 

 recoiled from the ultra pro-slavery propaganda of Presi- 

 dent Buchanan. Then, too, came a new incitement to bit- 

 terness between North and South. John Brown, the 

 man of Scotch-Covenanter type, who had imbibed his 

 theories of political methods from the Old-Testament an- 

 nals of Jewish dealings with the heathen, and who had in 

 Kansas solemnly slaughtered in cold blood, as a sort of 

 sacrifice before the Lord, sundry Missouri marauders who 

 had assassinated free-state men, suddenly appeared in 

 Virginia, and there, at Harper 's Ferry, with a handful of 

 fanatics subject to his powerful will, raised the standard 

 of revolution against the slave-power. Of course he was 

 easily beaten down, his forces scattered, those dearest to 

 him shot, and he himself hanged. But he was a character 

 of antique mold, and this desperate effort followed by his 

 death, while it exasperated the South, stirred the North to 

 its depths. 



Like all such efforts, it was really mistaken and unfortu- 

 nate. It helped to obscure Henry Clay's proposal to ex- 

 tinguish slavery peaceably, and made the solution of the 

 problem by bloodshed more and more certain. And in the 

 execution of John Brown was lost a man who, had he 



