positions and exercise influence. Emerson noticed a certain tenderness in the people, not before remarked.' As he put it,The young men were born with knives in their brain.' It was the
beginning of liberal humanitarianism in the United States, and it took many forms, but slavery
was the issue around which it concentrated. Increasingly, direct action of various kinds began to
take over from propaganda alone. An underground developed to get escaped slaves across the
borders on to free soil and protect them there. It was run by `conductors' like Harriet Tubman
(1821-1913), a Maryland slave who had escaped in 1849, the Quaker Levi Coffin (1789-1877),
and the ferocious John Brown. There were about 1,000 conductors in all, and although their
successes were numerically insignificant-not more than 1,000 a year after the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made such operations increasingly risky-their effect on
Southern morale was disproportionately great. Moreover, Southern slave-hunters, moving into
Northern states in hot pursuit of fugitives, were highly unpopular especially when, as often
happened, they grabbed the wrong black. From 1843 in Boston we get the first examples of an
abolitionist mob releasing a recaptured fugitive slave by force. Whittier echoed the feelings of
many with his lines:
No slave-hunt in our borders-no pirate on our strand!
No fetters in the Bay State-no slave upon our land!
During the 1850s, moreover, Northern legislatures passed laws making it exceedingly
difficult, and sometimes impossible, to enforce the provisions of the 1850 federal act. The fact is
that Southern aggression was all the time pushing Northern moderates into more extreme
positions, particularly when the threat to the North's freedom of action became apparent. As
William Jay, son of Chief Justice Jay, put it, We commenced the present struggle to obtain the freedom of the slave-we are compelled to continue to preserve our own.' James G. Birney (1792- 1857), another former slave-owner who favored a modern position and was the Liberty Party candidate in 1840, put the point thus:It has now become absolutely necessary that slavery
should cease in order that freedom may be preserved in any portion of our land.'
As we have seem, from 1854 Kansas became the battleground of Southern extremists and anti-
slavery activists. Indeed, it could be said that the Civil War started there. And it was inevitable,
perhaps, that the kind of violence which became a daily occurrence in bleeding Kansas' should spread. In particular, John Brown, who had received much applause for his 'Pottawatomie Massacre'-'Brown of Pottawatomie' became a slogan of Northern militants-was given money and other help to set up a stronghold in the mountains of western Virginia to assist slaves traveling on the Underground Railroad. Not content with this, on October 16, 1859, with twenty men, he seized the US arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Two days later, Colonel Robert E. Lee and a regular army unit recaptured the post, killed ten of Brown's men, and made him prisoner. He was condemned to death and hanged on December 2. Some, including Lincoln, condemned Brown; others, including Emerson, hailed him asThe new saint who will make the gallows glorious like
the cross.' Brown's violent act completed the process of transforming the South, or at least its
leadership class, into a tremulous and excitable body-a case of collective paranoia-which
believed anything was preferable to a continuation of the present tension and fear. Some
predicted a general rising of the slaves. Others looked to separation as the only safeguard of their
property and way of life.
Against this background, the Democrats met for their presidential convention in April 1860 in
Charleston, the South Carolina city which was the capital of Southern extremism. The