And then came John Brown.  The dread of slave insurrection was laid deep in Southern recollection.  Thirty years before, the Nat Turner Rebellion had filled a portion of Virginia with burned plantation houses amid whose ruins lay the dead bodies of white women.  A little earlier, a negro conspiracy at Charleston planned the murder of white men and the parceling out of white women among the conspirators.  And John Brown had come into Virginia at the head of a band of strangers calling upon the slaves to rise and arm.

Here was a supreme opportunity.  The positive Southern force, the slave profiteers, seized at once the attitude of champions of the South.  It was easy enough to enlist the negative force in a shocked and outraged denunciation of everything Northern.  And the Northern extremists did all that was in their power to add fuel to the flame.  Emerson called Brown “this new saint who had made the gallows glorious as the cross.”  The Southerners, hearing that, thought of the conspiracy to parcel out the white women of Charleston.  Early in 1860 it seemed as if the whole South had but one idea-to part company with the North.

No wonder Lincoln threw all his influence into the scale to discredit the memory of Brown.  No wonder the Republicans in their platform carefully repudiated him.  They could not undo the impression made on the Southern mind by two facts:  the men who lauded Brown as a new saint were voting the Republican ticket; the Republicans had committed themselves to the anti-Southern policy of protection.

And yet, in spite of all the labors of pro-slavery extremists, the movement for a breach with the North lost ground during 1860.  When the election came, the vote for President revealed a singular and unforeseen situation.  Four candidates were in the field.  The Democrats, split into two by the issue of slavery expansion, formed two parties.  The slave profiteers secured the nomination by one faction of John C. Breckinridge.  The moderate Democrats who would neither fight nor favor slavery, nominated Douglas.  The most peculiar group was the fourth.  They included all those who would not join the Republicans for fear of the temper of the Abolition-members, but who were not promoters of slavery, and who distrusted Douglas.  They had no program but to restore the condition of things that existed before the Nebraska Bill.  About four million five hundred thousand votes were cast.  Lincoln had less than two million, and all but about twenty-four thousand of these were in the Free States.  However, the disposition of Lincoln’s vote gave him the electoral college.  He was chosen President by the votes of a minority of the nation.  But there was another minority vote which as events turned out, proved equally significant.  Breckinridge, the symbol of the slave profiteers, and of all those whom they had persuaded to follow them, had not been able to carry the popular vote of the South.  They were definitely in the minority in their own section.  The majority of the Southerners had so far reacted from the wild alarms of the beginning of the year that they refused to go along with the candidates of the extremists.  They were for giving the Union another trial.  The South itself had repudiated the slave profiteers.