Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/339

Rh political document, and sent broadcast over the North indorsed by Speaker Colfax, sixty-four distinguished members of Senate and House, as well as by the leaders generally of the Republican party. The book was well adapted to incense the South, but its special purpose was to inflame the Northern mind. It was a long stride beyond Uncle Tom s Cabin in its incendiary aim. It proscribed the slave owner as ineligible for any office. It declared against all patronage of slave-holding merchants, lawyers, physicians, editors or hotels, and denounced all political and religious communion with the whole class. This incendiary work of a malicious enthusiast was reduced into convenient form, printed and circulated as a campaign document by the hundred thousand at a time, when the slavery struggle had actually ceased in Kansas, and the South was presenting no scheme of slavery extension. The ill-timed production was designated by the pompous superscription—"A Manifesto,&quot; and its title, &quot;The Impending Crisis.&quot;

There was no crisis impending of which the Southern people had any knowledge. The records of the winter of 1858 and the spring of 1859 entirely failed to disclose a disposition of the South to engage in any agitation in which the North might not freely and fraternally participate. There was a lull in crisis-producing causes. Minnesota had just come, May, 1858, into the sisterhood of States with an anti-slavery constitution. Oregon was admitted also as a Free State, February, 1859. The first cable had been recently stretched across the Atlantic, over which the Queen of England talked with President Buchanan. The only impending crisis was the trouble with the other twin relict of barbarism, the polygamous Mormons, which General Albert Sidney Johnston was adjusting. There was, however, a crisis impending of which the South had no suspicion. Across the Potomac lurked one of the Kansas fighters who had become notorious there as Ossawatomie Brown, the