onation, which, if it had been a little more nasal, would
have been an exact reproduction of the tone and manner of the Down-east
Yankee. He shared these peculiarities with hundreds of the descendants
of the Puritans who settled in the mountains of East Tennessee and North
Georgia. He had no wish for the luxuries of life; and though he lived
comfortably, he never, even when by close economy he had accumulated one
of the largest fortunes in Georgia, cared to live finely. He was a plain
man at first and a plain man at last, always temperate, industrious, and
economical.

His term of office in the governor's chair was for two years, and at
the end of that time he had almost entirely remolded and refashioned his
party. He had stamped his own personality and character upon it, and it
became in truth and in fact the party of the people,--the common people.
In his management of State affairs he had introduced the plain business
methods suggested by common sense; he dispensed with all unnecessary
officials; he shook off all the hangers-on; he uprooted all personal
schemes: so that when the time came to nominate a man to succeed him, it
was found that the people had no other choice. His party thought of no
other name.

The year of Joe Brown's second nomination, as we have seen, was the year
that witnessed John Brown's ridiculous raid into Virginia. The people of
the South, however, thought it was a very serious matter, and the people
of Georgia were not different from those of the rest of the South. Some
very wise men allowed themselves to be led away by their passions. Even
Joe Brown, as Alexander Stephens once said, "tucked his judgment under
the bed" for the time being. Back of the indignation created by the John
Brown raid was the unconfessed and half-formed fear that the Northern
abolitionists would send their agents to the South and organize a negro
insurrection. Many of the Southern people remembered the horrors of San
Domingo, and there was a vague and an undefined but constant dread that
such a rising of the blacks would take place in the South. But there
never was any such danger in Georgia. The relations between the slaves
and their masters were too friendly and familiar to make such an
uprising possible. The abolitionists did send agents to the South to
stir the negroes to rebellion, and some of them came to Georgia, but
in every instance their mission became known to the whites through the
friendliness of the black