Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [148]
Rapidly becoming a national spokesman for the fledgling Republican Party, Lincoln sought to preserve the unity of the still-fragile coalition. He wished, he wrote Schuyler Colfax, “to hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks.” An anti-immigrant movement in Massachusetts “failed to see that tilting against foreigners would ruin us in the whole North-West,” while attempts in both Ohio and New Hampshire to thwart enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law might “utterly overwhelm us in Illinois with the charge of enmity to the constitution itself…. In a word, in every locality we should look beyond our noses; and at least say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree.”
Colfax appreciated Lincoln’s “kind & timely note,” which underscored the need to enlist in the Republican cause “men of all shades & gradations of opinion from the Conservative…to the bold radical.” To be victorious in 1860, he wrote, “we must either win this Conservative sentiment, with its kindred sympathizers, represented under the title of North Americans, Old Line Whigs &c, to our banners” without alienating the radicals, “or by repelling them must go into the contest looking for defeat.” In this cause of unity, Colfax assured Lincoln, “your counsel carries great weight…there is no political letter that falls from your pen, which is not copied throughout the Union.” Lincoln’s ability to bridge these divisions would prove of vital importance to his campaign.
On October 16, 1859, as Lincoln prepared for a trip to Kansas, the remaining bonds of union were strained almost to the point of rupture when the white abolitionist John Brown came to Virginia, in the words of Stephen Vincent Benét, “with foolish pikes/And a pack of desperate boys to shadow the sun.” Brown and his band of thirteen white men and five blacks seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry with a bold but ill-conceived plan of provoking a slave insurrection. The arsenal was swiftly recaptured and Brown taken prisoner by a federal force under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, accompanied by Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart.
Brown was tried and sentenced to death. “I am waiting the hour of my public murder with great composure of mind, & cheerfulness,” Brown wrote his family, “feeling the strongest assurance that in no other possible way could I be used to so much advance the cause of God; & of humanity.” In the month between the sentence and his hanging, the dignity and courage of his conduct and the eloquence of his statements and letters made John Brown a martyr/hero to many in the antislavery North. His death, when it came, was mourned by public assemblies throughout the Northern states. “Church bells tolled,” the historian David Potter writes, “black bunting was hung out, minute guns were fired, prayer meetings assembled, and memorial resolutions were adopted.”
Brown’s motivations, psychological profile, and strategy would be probed by historians, poets, and novelists for generations. The immediate impact of the intrepid raid, which “sent a shiver of fear to the inmost fiber of every white man, woman, and child” in the South, was unmistakable. While antislavery fervor in the North was intensified, Southern solidarity and rhetoric reached a new level of zealotry. “Harper’s Ferry,” wrote the Richmond Enquirer, “coupled with the expression of Northern sentiment in support…have shaken and disrupted all regard for the Union; and there are but few men who do not look to a certain and not distant day when dissolution must ensue.” The raid at Harpers Ferry, one historian notes, was “like a great meteor disclosing in its lurid flash the