Southern communities through the medium of a single institution, itself half-understood. They saw, so to speak, only the suffering slave and his oppressor. They failed to see or forgot the general life of household and neighborhood, with its common, kindly, human traits. They did not recognize that Harper's Ferry was made up of much the same kind of people, at bottom, as Concord. They did not realize that a slave insurrection meant a universal social conflagration. Indeed, Brown's original scheme of a general flight of slaves to a mountain stronghold had a fallacious appearance of avoiding a violent insurrection, and it was with the background of this plan that Brown, a wounded prisoner with death impending, appealed to the Northern imagination as a hero and martyr.

But this glorification of him wrought a momentous effect in the South. It is best described by those who witnessed it. John S. Wise, son of the Governor who signed Brown's death-warrant, writes in his graphic reminiscences, The End of an Era: "While these scenes were being enacted' -the trial and execution of Brown and the Northern comments" a great change of feeling took place in Virginia toward the people of the North and toward the Union itself. Virginians began to look upon the people of the North as hating them, and willing to see them assassinated at midnight by their own slaves, led by Northern emissaries; as flinging away all pretense of regard for laws protecting the slave-owner; as demanding of them the immediate freeing of their slaves, or that they prepare against further attacks like Brown's, backed by the moral and pecuniary support of the North. During the year 1860 the Virginians began to organize and arm themselves against such emergencies."

The spirit of proscription against all anti-slavery men broke out afresh. At Berea, Kentucky, a little group of anti

slavery churches and schools had been growing for six years, championed by the stalwart Cassius M. Clay, and with the benignant and peaceful John G. Fee as their leader. A month after Brown's foray a band of armed horsemen summoned twelve of their men to leave the State. Governor Magoffin said he could not protect them, and with their families they went into exile-stout-heartedly chanting at their departure the 37th Psalm: "Fret not thyself because of evil-doers."

In the South itself there had been developing recently an antagonism to the slave power. Its strength lay not in the moral opposition to slavery, which indeed always existed, but was quiet and apparently cowed; but rather in the growing class of city residents,-merchants and professional men,-whose interests and feelings were often antagonistic to the large planters. The hostility to slavery on economic grounds, and in the white man's interest, found passionate expression in Helper's Impending Crisis, and in a milder form was spreading widely. But at the menace of invasion and servile insurrection all classes drew together. Especially the women of the South became suddenly and intensely interested in the political situation. The suggestion of personal peril appealed to them, and to the men who were their natural defenders. The situation is well described in Prof. J. W. Burgess's The Civil War and the Constitution,-a generally impartial book, written with personal appreciation of the Southern standpoint: "No man who is acquainted with the change of feeling which occurred in the South between the 16th of October, 1859, and the 16th of November of the same year can regard the Harper's Ferry villainy as anything other than one of the chiefest crimes of our history. It established and reestablished the control of the great radical slaveholders over the non-slaveholders, the little slaveholders, and the more

liberal of the larger slaveholders, which had already begun to be loosened. It created anew a solidarity of interest between them all, which was felt by all with an intensity which overbore every other sentiment. It gave thus to the great radical slaveholders the willing physical material for the construction of armies and navies and for the prosecution of war."

CHAPTER XIX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

EVERY American may be presumed to be familiar with the external facts of Abraham Lincoln's early life, the rude cabin, the shiftless father, the dead mother's place filled by the tender step-mother; the brief schooling, the hungry reading of the few books by the fire-light; the hard farmwork, with a turn now of rail-splitting, now of flat-boating; the country sports and rough good-fellowship; the upward steps as store-clerk and lawyer. But the interior qualities that made up his character and built his fortune will bear further study.

He was composed of traits which seemed to contradict each other. In a sense this is true of everyone. Dr. Holmes says (in substance): "The vehicle in which each one of us crosses life's narrow isthmus between two oceans is not a one-seated sulky, but an omnibus." Sometimes, as depicted in that wonderful parable, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one inmate ejects the others. But in Lincoln the various elements were wrought as years passed by into harmony.

He was prized among his early companions as a wit and story-teller. The women complained because at their parties all the men were drawn off to hear Abe Lincoln's stories. When he came to be a public speaker, he feathered the shafts of his argument with jest and anecdote. The vein of humor in him was rich and deep; it helped him through the hard places. When as President he announced

to his cabinet the Emancipation Proclamation, he first refreshed himself by reading to them a chapter from Artemus Ward.

His early growth was in rough soil, and some of the mud stuck to him, his jests were sometimes broad. But if coarse in speech he was pure in life, and neither the rancor of political hate nor the research of unsparing biographers ever charged him with an unchaste act.

Along with this rollicking fun he had a vein of deepest melancholy. In part it was temperamental. The malarial country sometimes bred a strain of habitual depression. His mother was the natural daughter of a Virginia planter, and had the sadness sometimes wrought by such pre-natal conditions; it was said she was never seen to smile. Lincoln's early years had hardships and trials, over many of which he triumphed, and triumphed laughing; but there were others for which there was neither victory nor mirth. Some of his early letters of intimate friendship (as given in Hay and Nicolay's biography), show a singular capacity for romantic affection, and gleams of hope of supreme happiness. But death frustrated this hope, and the disappointment brought him to the verge of insanity. In his domestic life,-it was an open secret, he had some of the experience which disciplined Socrates. Perhaps we go to the root of his sadness if we say that in his deepest heart he was a passionate idealist, and by circumstances he was long shut out from the natural satisfaction of ideality. His partner Herndon said of him, "His melancholy dripped from him as he walked."

Out of these experiences he brought a great power of patience and a great power of sympathy. These armed him for his work. He became invincible against the perversities and follies of men, and the blows of fate. He ripened into a tenderness such as prompted him, when bur