Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 28.djvu/192

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" Of course, a transaction so flagitious with its attendant circum- stances affording such unmistakable proof of the spirit by which no small portion of the Northern population was actuated, could not but produce the profoundest impression upon the people of the South. Here was an open and armed aggression, whether clearly understood and encouraged beforehand, certainly exulted in afterwards, by per- sons of a very different standing from that of the chief actor in this bloody incursion in a peaceful State."

fohn Brown and his associates did attempt insurrection, and did commit murder, in that attempt, upon the peaceful, harmless citizens of Virginia, and he expiated these, among the highest crimes known to the law, upon a felon's gallows. How was that execution received at the North ? And in what way did the representatives of the Republican party endorse and adopt as their own the conduct of this felon in his outrages, his "first blow" struck against the South ? We will let the same Northern writer tell. He says:

" In the tolling of bells and the firing of minute-guns upon the occasion of Brown's funeral; the meeting-houses were draped in mourning as for a hero; the prayers offered; the sermons and dis- courses pronounced in his honor as for a saint.

Two of Brown's accomplices were fugitives from justice, one in the State of Ohio, and the other in that of Iowa. Requisitions were issued for them by the Governor of Virginia; and the Governor of each of these Northern States refused to surrender the criminal, thus making themselves, and the people they represented, to a de- gree at least, particeps criminis. And the newspapers have recently informed us, that the present Chief Magistrate of this nation, and the head of the same party, which deified John Brown, and approved of his crimes, has visited and stood "uncovered" at his grave, as if he still recognized him as the "forerunner" of him whom they term the "Savior of the Country;" so we regard, and rightly re- gard, his attempted insurrection, as the legitimate forerunner of the cruel, illegal and unjustifiable war inaugurated and waged by Mr. Lincoln against the South.

AGGRESSIONS OF THE NORTH.

But we advance still a step further in the argument, to show from Northern authorities alone, still other aggressions of the North against the South, /// bringing on this u>ar. In his speech, entitled