In the same year, 1859, there was discovered in Colorado the New gold and Gregory lode of gold, and in Nevada the famous Comstock lode, the latter an immensely rich vein of gold and silver, which in six years yielded $50,000,000.

silver mines.

GENERAL REFERENCES

RHODES, United States, I-II; McMASTER, United States, VIII; ALLEN JOHNSON, Stephen A. Douglas; SCHURZ, Henry Clay, II, 315-414; HARDING, Orations, 267-291.

SPECIAL TOPICS

1. THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. Epochs, VII, 110-115; W. H. SIEBERT, Underground Railroad; M. G. MCDOUGAL, Fugitive Slaves; RHODES, United States, II, 74-77, and 361-365; Contemporaries, IV, 80-96.

2. THE CRIME AGAINST KANSAS. VILLARD, John Brown, 79–266; L. W. SPRING, Kansas, 37-257; Old South Leaflets, IV, 83; Epochs, VII, 164-168; Contemporaries, IV, 97-121; SPARKS, Expansion, 351–365; HARDING, Orations, 292–308.

3. THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS Debates. NICOLAY and HAY, Abraham Lincoln, II, 135-170; G. H. PUTNAM, ED., The Political Debates Between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas; HARDING, Orations, 309–341; Old South Leaflets, IV, 85; RHODES, United States, II, 320-338.

ILLUSTRATIVE MATERIAL

LONGFELLOW, Poems on Slavery; LOWELL, Stanzas on Freedom (Wendell Phillips, To William Lloyd Garrison, and On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington); STOWE, Uncle Tom's Cabin; WHITTIER, Ichabod, Stanzas for the Times -- 1850, and A Sabbath Scene; G. W. BAGBY, The Old Virginia Gentleman and Other Sketches.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

Why was California's application for statehood called "impertinent"? Trace the part of Henry Clay in each presidential contest from 1824 to 1848. Were Clay and Webster right in pushing the Compromise of 1850? State the difference between nullification in South Carolina and the personal liberty laws of the Northern States. Why was the Whig party a failure? Why did the Know-Nothing party fail? Give the causes for the failure of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Explain why the Dred Scott Decision was incompatible with popular sovereignty. Why was it a mistake for the Supreme Court to pass on the question of territorial slavery? Why was the Ostend Manifesto an affront to Spain? Ought Fillmore to have refused to sign the fugitive slave bill? Pierce the Kansas-Nebraska bill? and Buchanan tc have refused to send the Lecompton Constitution to Congress? How do you account for the wave of economic prosperity that swept the country after the Mexican War down to 1857? What were the leading issues before the people in the presidential campaigns of 1852 and 1856?

John

Brown's

raid at Har

ON Sunday night, the sixteenth of October, 1859, John Brown, the anti-slavery leader of Kansas, backed by the support of New England sympathizers, led a band of twenty-two men across the Potomac River from the Maryland shore to Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and made a daring but unsuccessful attempt to free the slaves of the surrounding region. Four of the inhabitants of the town and ten of the raiders were killed in the ensuing encounter and Brown himself and six of his confederates were arrested, while five others made their escape. Not a slave left his master to join the would-be deliverers.

per's Ferry, Virginia.

Greater excitement has seldom stirred the nation, both North and South, than that which flamed forth the instant this startling intelligence spread over the country. In the North anti-slavery Brown's enthusiasm was carried almost to the point of fanaticism, own defense. as Brown's words in defense of his acts were reported. As he lay with wounds gaping and bleeding, he said to a newspaper reporter: "I hold that the Golden Rule 'Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you' applies to all that would help others to gain their liberty. . . . I want you to understand that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of the colored people oppressed by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. . . . I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all you people at the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled, this negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet."

The South, roused to more ardent defense of its system, denounced Brown as worse than murderer, as one who would incite the slaves to insurrection and expose the whites to the horrors of a His servile war.

He was charged with treason and conspir- punishment. ing with others to rebel, and murder in the first degree, and after an exciting trial at Charlestown, Virginia, he was found guilty and hanged.

The opponents of slavery rallied to the standard of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown, and attacked slavery with unsparing vigor.

Arguments against slavery.

Its revolting features were held up to public condemnation

as never before. Now it was the barbarity of the punishment of offending slaves that was attacked, now the inhumanity of the slave auction, the separation of families, the brutal hunt for the runaway, and the cruelties and illegalities of the foreign slave trade, which was still openly carried on in defiance of the law. Such descriptions of a slave ship from Africa as the following depicted conditions against which humanity revolted. "The scene between decks was revolting. Stowed in sitting posture, with their knees drawn up close to their breasts, were over five hundred human beings, whose skin was black, mostly children and young persons, and some women. So close were they packed that they could not move, and could hardly breathe."

The defense of slavery.

The Southerners pointed out the fairer aspects of the system, how the negroes in slavery were more civilized and Christianized than were their brethren in the wilds of Africa, how they were cared for by their masters and were generally satisfied with their lot; how, though naturally prone to laziness and theft, they were forced by slavery into useful industrial occupations, to which otherwise they would not submit; how the New Testament enjoined upon slaves obedience to their masters; and how the very prosperity of the Southern States was bound up with slavery as an economic necessity. Whereas in the early days of the republic many of the "Fathers," even in the South, had deplored the institution of slavery, although seeing no practical way of dispensing with it, the generation of Southerners of 1860 defended it with ardor upon both moral and economic grounds.

Helper's
"Impending
Crisis."

An influential book, "The Impending Crisis in the South, How to Meet It," written by Hinton Rowan Helper, a poor white of North Carolina, made a startling comparison of the economic results of slavery and of freedom. The Southern States were shown to be even farther behind the states of the North in industries and commerce than in 1832, and "the causes which have impeded the progress and prosperity of the South... may be traced to a common source slavery." An illustration shows the drift of the argument. Helper stated that when the first census was taken in 1790, New York had a population of 340,000 and Virginia 740,000, while sixty years later New York numbered 3,000,000 and Virginia 1,400,000. In 1791 the exports of the northern state equaled $2,500,000 and those of the southern state $3,100,000; in 1852

those of the former state amounted to $87,000,000 and those of the latter to $2,700,000. Although in the earlier year the imports of the two states were about equal, those of the northern state in 1853 reached $178,000,000 and those of Virginia only $400,000. The products of mining, manufacturing, and of the mechanic arts in the one case were valued in 1850 at $237,000,000 and in the other at $37,000,ooo; in the same year the real and personal property in Virginia, excluding slaves, was slightly over $390,000,000, and in New York, where there were no slaves, $1,080,000,000. New York City alone was worth more than the whole state of Virginia.

His call for

the abolition of slavery.

Helper called upon the non-slaveholding whites of the South to unite in a political party of their own and to work for the definite abolition of the system, which so retarded their section. "And now, sirs, we have thus laid down our ultimatum. What are you going to do about it? Something dreadful, of course! Perhaps you will dissolve the Union again. Do it, if you dare! Our motto, and we would have you to understand it, is 'the abolition of slavery and the perpetuation of the American union.' If by any means you do succeed in your treasonable attempts to take the South out of the Union to-day, we will bring her back to-morrow." With the written indorsement of sixty-eight Congressmen of the new Republican party, this book was circulated as a political campaign document by the Republicans in the state campaigns The influence of 1859. It aroused such fiery opposition among the of the book. Democrats that in the House of Representatives in Washington the choice of the Speaker in 1859-1860 hinged upon indorsement or non-indorsement of the book.

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1860

The

Swayed by the undying debate over slavery, the country again faced the necessity of electing a President. The leading question in dispute between the two parties was still how to deal with slavery in the territories. On this point the Democratic Democratic Convention. party split into two irreconcilable factions, the extreme southern faction on the one hand, which stood firmly for the principle of the Dred Scott Decision that slavery went into the territories with the Constitution, and the followers of Stephen A. Douglas on the other, who favored allowing the people in the territories themselves to decide whether or not they would have slavery. After the regular Democratic convention of the year had broken up in a bitter quarrel, the southern faction named for President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, while the other faction gave their nomination to Douglas.

The
Republican
Convention.

The split greatly elated the Republicans, who came together in a harmonious convention, nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, and declared again as in 1856 for the Missouri Compromise plan of congressional control of slavery in the territories. It was generally recognized that William H. Seward of New York deserved the Republican nomination, but he was passed over, as he had been four years earlier, for the reason that his prominence had brought him too many enemies to lead a cause which depended for its success upon winning new recruits. To the enunciation of the "higher law," which, from the moment Seward first gave utterance to it in 1850, had been constantly gaining adherents, he had added that of the "irrepressible conflict," shortly after the Lecompton struggle in Congress. By this phrase he meant that the contest between slavery and freedom was bound to go on till the nation was all free or all slave. This also was the position of Lincoln in his address to the Republican state convention of Illinois that nominated him for Senator against Douglas. "A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

The Consti

A fourth party, known as the Constitutional Union party, the distinguishing characteristic of which was its refusal to commit itself on the great question of the day, nominated John Bell of Tennessee.

tutional

Union party.

The threat of secession.

So far as slavery itself was concerned, the campaign debate centered about the principles of the Missouri Compromise, the KansasNebraska Act, and the Dred Scott Decision; but the most exciting phase of the issue concerned secession from the Union and the formation of a separate southern republic, which the Southerners threatened to carry out if a Black Republican should be elected President.

The reasons for such a radical step were many. The Southerners avowed that a victory of the party, the leaders of which denounced Arguments slavery as "a relic of barbarism" and stood for the prinfor secession. ciples of the "higher law," the "irrepressible conflict," and the "house divided against itself," would inevitably lead to more personal liberty laws, more open repudiation of the Dred Scott Decision, more attempts to exclude slavery from the territories, and more John Brown raids, until the existence of slavery even in the states would be threatened and the great agricultural interests dependent upon it be endangered. When it is realized that the crops