, had both a positive
and a negative side. It was the positive side that could be seen and
judged at long range. And this was what Lincoln saw, which appeared to
him to have created the dominant issue in 1860.

The negative side of the Southern movement he did not see. He was too
far away to make out the details of the picture. Though he may have
known from the census of 1850 that only one-third of the Southern whites
were members of slave-holding families, he could scarcely have known
that only a small minority of the Southern families owned as many
as five slaves; that those who had fortunes in slaves were a mere
handful--just as today those who have fortunes in steel or beef are mere
handfuls. But still less did he know how entirely this vast majority
which had so little, if any, interest in slavery, had grown to fear and
distrust the North. They, like him, were suffering from a near horizon.
They, too, were applying the principle "Stand with anybody so long as
he stands right" But for them, standing right meant preventing a violent
revolution in Southern life. Indifferent as they were to slavery, they
were willing to go along with the "slave-barons" in the attempt to
consolidate the South in a movement of denial--a denial of the right of
the North, either through Abolitionism or through tariff, to dominate
the South.

If only Lincoln with his subtle mind could have come into touch with
the negative side of the Southern agitation! It was the other side, the
positive side, that was vocal. With immense shrewdness the profiteers of
slavery saw and developed their opportunity. They organized the South.
They preached on all occasions, in all connections, the need of all
Southerners to stand together, no matter how great their disagreements,
in order to prevent the impoverishment of the South by hostile
economic legislation. During the late 'fifties their propaganda for an
all-Southern policy, made slow but constant headway. But even in 1859
these ideas were still far from controlling the South.

And then came John Brown. The dread of slave insurrection was laid deep
in Southern recollection. Thirty years before, the Nat Turner Rebellion
had filled a portion of Virginia with burned plantation houses amid
whose ruins lay the dead bodies of white women. A little earlier, a
negro conspiracy at Charleston planned the murder of white men and the
parceling out of white women among the conspirators. And John Brown had
come int