Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 2.djvu/81

 CHAPTER IV HE invasion of Virginia by John Brown with twenty-one armed followers, having for its avowed object the forcible liberation of slaves, struck terror to hearts of slaveholders of the entire South. The courage with which he and his followers met their fate, demonstrated the fact that there were those at the North who were so earnestly devoted to the emancipation of the slaves that they were willing to give their lives for the freedom of the oppressed, as in the war of the American Revolution. The martyrdom of John Brown and his band had won the admiration of the friends of liberty throughout the whole civilized world and had convinced the most sagacious defenders of the slave system in the South, that the war upon American slavery would never cease until the institution was overthrown. They at last realized that the Antislavery movement inaugurated by William Lloyd Garrison had grown to such formidable proportions that the destruction of slavery in the United States was only a question of time. The crusade begun by an obscure printer in Boston, who had been dragged through that city with a rope around his neck for publicly advocating the abolition of slavery, in less than thirty years had spread over the entire North and now numbered among its converts hundreds of thousands of earnest and conscientious disciples. The Republican party, which had just elected a President, was founded upon opposition to the extension of slavery. The Constitution alone stood between slavery and its gradual extermination. The realization of these facts led the defenders of the institution to counsel together, to devise some scheme by which it could be perpetuated. They finally