Where shall we place the blame? Each side saw the other in utter distortion, each twisted to its own understanding the acts and utterances of the other, and each was justly incensed according to its own view. In her ignorance of the certain results of the attempt whose failure she deplored, the Northern woman saw in the rejoicing of Southern womanhood over the failure and fate of John Brown only a savage and unwomanly exultation over the martyrdom of one who had sacrificed himself that others might live in freedom, the heritage of every American, and who, in pursuit of his noble ideal, had of necessity attacked the wealth of the South, which wealth was ill-gotten and ill-held. The Southern woman looked upon the attempt to give power over her honor to a lower race, civilized only in certain aspects and with all the worst of barbarism sleeping like a tiger within it, and occasionally displaying itself in aspect of terror, as the expression of the feeling of the North, the ultimate goal of the fanaticism which was rising higher and higher as the Abolitionists grew in power. To both, John Brown represented the dominant spirit of the North; but each translated his aspect in different ways. Each was bitterly unjust; each was utterly in the wrong; and each was convinced with a perfect conviction of the righteousness of her own stand and of her thought of the other. When such position is taken, peace is doomed.
Society was disrupted. It had maintained a certain cohesion where the sections mingled; it had been shaken, but not overthrown. But the hanging of John Brown gave American society, as comprising all parts of the country and devoid of sectional aspects, its death-blow. Another society of like aspects was later to arise, perhaps never again to be overthrown, so that we can again talk of American society in the larger sense; but this which we know is not that which held its chief fortalice in Washington before the capital was yielded to the perils of the centre of strife. The daughters of even such closely contiguous States as Pennsylvania and Virginia could not meet in social function when each believed the other to be the representative of the most evil of civilizations, when every interest which either most cherished was inimical to every interest most dear to the other. Rapidly the representatives of Southern society forsook the capital, going to their own country, where they hoped soon to form another and yet more brilliant circle than that which had given to the centre of our republicanism much of the glitter and all the _prestige_ of a royal court. The result of the presidential campaign would decide the future of the South; but that there would be separation of the sections, for a time or permanently, few doubted. The chief question that remained to be decided was whether the separation would be peaceful or won at the point of the bayonet.