=John Brown’s Raid.=—­To the abolitionists the line of argument pursued by Lincoln, including his proposal to leave slavery untouched in the states where it existed, was wholly unsatisfactory.  One of them, a grim and resolute man, inflamed by a hatred for slavery in itself, turned from agitation to violence.  “These men are all talk; what is needed is action—­action!” So spoke John Brown of New York.  During the sanguinary struggle in Kansas he hurried to the frontier, gun and dagger in hand, to help drive slave owners from the free soil of the West.  There he committed deeds of such daring and cruelty that he was outlawed and a price put upon his head.  Still he kept on the path of “action.”  Aided by funds from Northern friends, he gathered a small band of his followers around him, saying to them:  “If God be for us, who can be against us?” He went into Virginia in the autumn of 1859, hoping, as he explained, “to effect a mighty conquest even though it be like the last victory of Samson.”  He seized the government armory at Harper’s Ferry, declared free the slaves whom he found, and called upon them to take up arms in defense of their liberty.  His was a hope as forlorn as it was desperate.  Armed forces came down upon him and, after a hard battle, captured him.  Tried for treason, Brown was condemned to death.  The governor of Virginia turned a deaf ear to pleas for clemency based on the ground that the prisoner was simply a lunatic.  “This is a beautiful country,” said the stern old Brown glancing upward to the eternal hills on his way to the gallows, as calmly as if he were returning home from a long journey.  “So perish all such enemies of Virginia.  All such enemies of the Union.  All such foes of the human race,” solemnly announced the executioner as he fulfilled the judgment of the law.

The raid and its grim ending deeply moved the country.  Abolitionists looked upon Brown as a martyr and tolled funeral bells on the day of his execution.  Longfellow wrote in his diary:  “This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new revolution as much needed as the old one.”  Jefferson Davis saw in the affair “the invasion of a state by a murderous gang of abolitionists bent on inciting slaves to murder helpless women and children”—­a crime for which the leader had met a felon’s death.  Lincoln spoke of the raid as absurd, the deed of an enthusiast who had brooded over the oppression of a people until he fancied himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them—­an attempt which ended in “little else than his own execution.”  To Republican leaders as a whole, the event was very embarrassing.  They were taunted by the Democrats with responsibility for the deed.  Douglas declared his “firm and deliberate conviction that the Harper’s Ferry crime was the natural, logical, inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of the Republican party.”  So persistent were such attacks that the Republicans felt called upon in 1860 to denounce Brown’s raid “as among the gravest of crimes.”