CHAPTER V NOMINATION OF LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS FOR THE PRESIDENCY 1859 and 1860
Returning to the period preceding the Civil War, we observe that the whole nation was stirred by the conduct of a man whom most people believed to be crazy, but who in my judgment was not. He was an enthusiast, fired by an abnormal zeal, perhaps; but he filled a most important place in the development leading to the Civil War. I refer to old John Brown.
With a score of followers he seized the arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October, 1859. The nation was then on the very verge of civil war. There was tremendous excitement even in far-off Springfield when the news came over the wires that John Brown had opened war almost single-handed and alone. Under orders from General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, Colonel Robert E. Lee with a battalion of soldiers marched on Harpers Ferry, and, after a series of siege operations, summoned John Brown to surrender, the demand being borne to the besieged by J. E. B. Stuart, a young lieutenant, afterwards distinguished as the foremost cavalry leader of the Confederacy.
The story of John Brown is too familiar to be repeated here; but how strange that in so short a time his captor, Robert E. Lee, should become famous as one of the greatest leaders of force in rebellion against the government he then served.
John Brown was captured and hanged. He had but few sympathizers in the North, but his attempt to incite the slaves to rebellion greatly stirred up the entire South, and hastened secession.
Very soon the second National Republican Convention was held at Chicago. At this convention, which nominated Lincoln for the Presidency, the resolutions declared for "the maintenance inviolate of the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively," and condemned the attempt to enforce the extreme pretensions of a purely local interest (meaning the slave interest), through the intervention of Congress and the courts, by the Democratic administration. They derided the new dogma that the Constitution of its own force carried slavery into the Territories, and denied the authority of Congress, or of a Territorial Legislature, or of any individual to give leave of existence to slavery in any Territory of the United States.