The Election of 1860 363politicians repudiated him. Even execu-
tion would probably not have made a
martyr of Brown had he behaved like a
madman after his capture. Instead, an
enormous dignity descended on him as
he lay in his Virginia jail awaiting death.
Whatever his faults, he truly believed in
racial equality. He addressed blacks who
worked for him as “Mister” and
arranged for them to eat at his table and
sit with his family in church.
This conviction served him well in
his last days. “If it is deemed necessary
that I should forfeit my life for the fur-
therance of the ends of justice, and
mingle my blood further with the
blood of... millions in this slave coun-
try whose rights are disregarded by
wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,”
he said before the judge pronounced
sentence, “I say, let it be done.”
This John Brown, with his patriar-
chal beard and sad eyes, so apparently
incompatible with the bloody terrorist of
Pottawatomie and Harpers Ferry, led thousands in the
North to ignore his past and treat him almost as a saint.
And so Brown, hanged on December 2, 1859,
became to the North a hero and to the South a sym-
bol of northern ruthlessness. Soon, as the popular
song had it, Brown’s body lay “a-mouldering in the
grave,” and the memory of his bloody act did indeed
go “marching on.”
John Brown’s Address Before Sentencingat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
Election of
By 1860 the nation was teetering on the brink of dis-
union. Radicals North and South were heedlessly pro-
voking one another. When a disgruntled North
Carolinian, Hinton Rowan Helper, published The
Impending Crisis of the South(1857), an attempt to
demonstrate statistically that slavery was ruining the
South’s economy and corrupting its social structure,
the Republicans flooded the country with an abridged
edition, although they knew that Southerners consid-
ered the book an appeal for social revolution. “I have
always been a fervid Union man,” one Southerner
wrote in 1859, “but I confess the [northern] endorse-
ment of the Harpers Ferry outrage and Helper’s infer-
nal doctrine has shaken my fidelity.”
Extremism was more evident in the South, and to
any casual observer that section must have seemed the
aggressor in the crisis. Yet even in demanding the
reopening of the African slave trade, southern radicals
believed that they were defending themselves against
ReadtheDocumentattack. They felt surrounded by hostility. The North
was growing at a much faster rate; if nothing was done,
they feared, a flood of new free states would soon be
able to amend the Constitution and emancipate the
slaves. John Brown’s raid, with its threat of an insurrec-
tion like Nat Turner’s, reduced them to a state of panic.
When legislatures in state after state in the South
cracked down on freedom of expression, made the
manumission of slaves illegal, banished free blacks,
and took other steps that Northerners considered bla-
tantly provocative, the advocates of these policies
believed that they were only defending the status
quo. Perhaps, by seceding from the Union, the South
could raise a dike against the tide of abolitionism.
Secession also provided an emotional release, a way of
dissipating tension by striking back at criticism.
Stephen A. Douglas was probably the last hope of
avoiding a rupture between North and South. But
when the Democrats met at Charleston, South
Carolina, in April 1860 to choose a presidential candi-
date, the southern delegates would not support him
unless he promised not to disturb slavery in the territo-
ries. Indeed, they went further in their demands. The
North, William L. Yancey of Alabama insisted, must
accept the proposition that slavery was not merely tol-
erable but right. Of course the Northerners would not
go so far. “Gentlemen of the South,” said Senator
George E. Pugh of Ohio in replying to Yancey, “you
mistake us—you mistake us! We will not do it!” When
southern proposals were voted down, most of the dele-
gates from the Deep South walked out and the con-
vention adjourned without naming a candidate.That politics was always a rough business is shown in this cartoon, which shows Lincoln,
assisted by an African American (who carries a basket of liquor bottles) while Douglas is
backed by some Irish pols, who have a basket overflowing with cash. John Breckinridge
thumbs his nose at the combatants as he hustles up the hill toward the White House.