Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [149]
Throughout the South, heightened fear of slave insurrection led to severe restrictions on the expression of antislavery sentiments. “I do not exaggerate in designating the present state of affairs in the Southern country as a reign of terror,” the British consul in Charleston wrote. “Persons are torn away from their residences and pursuits…letters are opened at the Post Offices; discussion upon slavery is entirely prohibited under penalty of expulsion…. The Northern merchants and Travellers are leaving in great numbers.” In Norfolk, Virginia, the St. Louis News reported, a grand jury indicted a merchant “for seditious language, because he declared that John Brown was a good man, fighting in a good cause.”
Leading Southern politicians were quick to indict the Republican Party and, by extension, the entire North. The Tennessee legislature resolved that the raiders at Harpers Ferry were “the natural fruits of this treasonable ‘irrepressible conflict’ doctrine, put forth by the great head of the Black Republican party, and echoed by his subordinates.” A man representing “one hundred gentlemen” published a circular that offered a $50,000 reward “for the head of William H. Seward,” along with the considerably smaller sum of $25 for the heads of a long list of “traitors,” including Sumner, Greeley, Giddings, and Colfax. Lincoln was not included in the list of enemies.
Democratic papers in the North joined in, targeting Seward for special condemnation. “The first overt act in the great drama of national disruption which has been plotted by that demagogue, Wm. H. Seward, has just closed at Harper’s Ferry,” the New York Herald charged. “No reasoning mind can fail to trace cause and effect between the bloody and brutal manifesto of William H. Seward [the “irrepressible conflict” speech a year earlier]…and the terrible scenes of violence, rapine and death, that have been enacted at the confluence of the Potomac and the Shenandoah.”
Republicans, naturally, countered Democratic attempts to implicate their party. Seward himself stated that although Brown was a sympathetic figure, his execution was “necessary and just.” Weed’s Albany Evening Journal also took a decided stance against the futile raid, deeming Brown’s men guilty of treason for “seeking to plunge a peaceful community into the horrors of a servile insurrection.” They “justly deserve, universal condemnation.”
In Missouri, Bates concluded that “the wild extravagance and utter futility of his plan” proved that Brown was “a madman.” He discussed the incident at length with his young friend Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, who had come to stay at Grape Hill for several days with his wife, Flora, his child, and two free black servants. “He tells me a good deal about ‘Old Brown,’” Bates wrote in his diary. “He was at his capture—and has his [dagger].”
For Chase, the situation presented particular problems. Though he publicly denounced Brown’s violation of law and order, his younger daughter, Nettie, later conceded that “for a household accustomed to revere as friends of the family such men as Sumner, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Whittier, and Longfellow,” it was impossible not to sympathize with “the truly good old man who was about to die for others.” She and her friends built a small fort in the conservatory and “raised a flag on which was painted…defiantly ‘Freedom forever; slavery never.’” When friends warned Chase that such open support of Brown could not be countenanced, he had to explain to his daughter that “a great wrong” could not be righted “in the way poor old John Brown had attempted to do.” The little fort was dismantled.
At the time of Brown’s execution on December 2, 1859, Lincoln was back on the campaign trail, telling an audience in Leavenworth, Kansas, that “the attempt to identify the Republican party with