its
savage enemies and his own fellow competitors with fury.

And he succeeded.

The odds against him sharpened his powers, made keen his mind, toughened
his muscles.

The Southern planter, on the other hand, represented the sharpest
contrast to this mental and physical attitude toward life. He came of
the stock of the English Squire. And if he came from Scotland he found
this English ideal already established and accepted it as his own.

The joy of living, not the horror of life, was the mainspring of his
action and the secret of his character. The Puritan hated play. The
Southerner loved to play. He dreamed of a life rich and full of
spiritual and physical leisure. He enjoyed his religion. He did not
agonize over it. His character was genial. He hated fear and drove it
from his soul. He loved a fiddle and a banjo. He was brave. He was loyal
to his friends. He loved his home and his kin. He despised trade. He
disliked hard work.

To this hour in the country's life his ideal had dominated the nation.

The Puritan Abolitionists now challenged this ideal for a fight to the
finish. Slavery was protected by the Constitution. All right, they burn
the Constitution and denounce it as a Covenant with Death, an agreement
with Hell. They begin a propaganda to incite servile insurrection in
the South. They denounce the Southern Slave owner as a fiend. Even
the greatest writers of the North caught the contagion of this mania.
Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier and Emerson used their pens to blacken the
name of the Southern people. From platform, pulpit and forum, through
pamphlet, magazine, weekly and daily newspapers the stream of abuse
poured forth in ever-increasing volume.

That the proud Southerner would resent the injustice of this wholesale
indictment was inevitable. Their habit of mind, their born instinct of
leadership, their love of independence, their hatred of dictation, their
sense of historic achievement in the building of the republic would
resent it. Their critics had not only been Slave holders themselves as
long as it paid commercially, but their skippers were now sailing the
seas in violation of Southern laws prohibiting the slave trade. Our
early Slave traders were nearly all Puritans. When one of their ships
came into port, the minister met her at the wharf, knelt in prayer and
thanked Almighty God for one more cargo of heathen saved from hell.

Brown's whole plan of attack was based on the certainty of rese