of the Plains. He had raised a
National Blood Feud.

No hand could stay the scourge. The Red Thought burst into a flame that
swept North and South, as a prairie fire sweeps the stubble of autumn.
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ had prepared the stubble.

From the Northern press began to pour a stream of vindictive abuse. A
fair specimen of this insanity appeared in the New York _Independent_:

"The mass of the population of the Atlantic Coast of the slave region of
the South are descended from the transported convicts and outcasts of
Great Britain. Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aristocracy of the
South! Peerless first families of Virginia and Carolina! Progeny of the
highwaymen, the horse thieves and sheep stealers and pickpockets of Old
England!"

The fact that this paper was a religious publication, the outgrowth of
the New England conscience, gave its columns a peculiar power over the
Northern mind.

The South retorted in kind. _De Bow's Review_ declared:

"The basic framework and controlling inference of Northern sentiment is
Puritanic, the old Roundhead rebel refuse of England, which has ever
been an unruly sect of Pharisees, the worst bigots on earth and the
meanest tyrants when they have the power to exercise it."

When the Conventions met a few months later to name candidates for the
Presidency and make a declaration of principles, leaders had ceased to
lead and there were no principles to declare.

The mob mind was supreme.

The Democratic Convention met at Charleston, South Carolina, to name
the successor of James Buchanan. Their constituents commanded a vast
majority of the voters of the Nation. The Convention became a mob. The
one man, the one giant leader left in the republic, the one constructive
mind, the one man of political genius who could have saved the nation
from the holocaust toward which it was plunging was Stephen A. Douglas
of Illinois. He could have been elected President by an overwhelming
majority had he been nominated by this united convention. He was
entitled to the nomination. He had proven himself a statesman of the
highest rank. He had proven himself impervious to sectional hatred or
sectional appeal. He was a Northern man, but a friend of the South as
well as the North. He was an American of the noblest type.

But the radical wing of his party in the South were seeing Red. Old
Brown's words to them meant the spirit of the North. They heard echoing
and reechoing from every newspa