856, eleven States chose
Republican electors, viz.: all New England, also New York, Ohio,
Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Evidently the Democracy had at last found
a foe at which it were best not to sneer. The Dred Scott decision
immensely aided the growth of this new political power, as it was now
quite generally believed in the North that the whole policy of the South
was a greedy, selfish grasping for the extension of slavery.

[1858]

Out of this conviction, apparently, grew the John Brown raid into
Virginia in 1858. John Brown was an enthusiast, whom sufferings from the
Border Ruffians in Kansas, where one of his sons had been atrociously
murdered and another driven to insanity by cruel treatment as a
prisoner, had frenzied in his opposition to slavery. He had dedicated
himself to its extirpation. The intrepid old man formed the purpose of
invading Virginia, and of placing himself with a few white allies at the
head of a slave insurrection that should sweep the State. Friends in
the North had contributed money for the purchase of arms, and on October
16th, Brown, with fourteen white men and four negroes, seized the United
States Armory at Harper's Ferry. He stopped the railway trains, freed
some slaves, and assumed to rule the town. United States troops were at
once despatched to the scene, when the misguided hero, with his devoted
band, fortified themselves in the engine house, surrendering only after
thirteen of them, including two of Brown's sons, were killed or mortally
wounded. Brown and the other survivors were soon tried, convicted, and
hung. This insane attempt was deprecated by nearly all of all parties;
but the fate of Brown, with his resolute bravery, begot him large
sympathy, and the false assumption of the South that he really
represented northern feeling made his deed helpful to the anti-slavery
movement, of which the Republican Party was now the centre.

[Illustration: Portrait.]
John Brown.

[1860]

Notwithstanding all this the Democracy might still have elected a
president in 1860 had it been united. But it was now desperately at feud
with itself, the cause of this, beautifully enough, lying back in that
very device of Repeal which was intended to make Kansas a slave State
and so to perpetuate the democratic sway. Judge Douglas, and most of the
northern Democrats with him, had insisted so long and earnestly upon the
doctrine of squatter sovereignty that they could not now possibly recede