The negroes in New York and Brooklyn were not the only people in theNorth falling under the influence of the strange man who answered to thename of John Brown. There was something magnetic about him that drew allsorts and conditions of men.
The statesmen who still used reason as the guiding principle of life hadno use for him. Henry Wilson, the new Senator from Massachusetts, methim and was repelled by the something that drew others. Governor Andrewwas puzzled by his strange personality.
The secret of his power lay in a mystic appeal to the Puritanconscience. He had been from childhood afflicted with this conscience inits most malignant form. He knew instinctively its process of action.
The Puritan had settled New England and fixed the principles both ofeconomic and political life. The civilization he set up was compact andcommercial. He organized it in towns and townships. The Meeting Housewas the center, the source of all power and authority. No dwelling couldbe built further than two miles from a church and attendance on worshipwas made compulsory by law.
The South, against whose life Brown was organizing his militant crusade,was agricultural, scattered, individual. Individualism was a passionwith the Southerner, liberty his battle cry. He scorned the "authority"of the church and worshipped God according to the dictates of his ownconscience. The Court House, not the Meeting House, was his forum,and he rode there through miles of virgin forests to dispute with hisneighbor.
The mental processes of the Puritan, therefore, were distinctlydifferent from that of the Southerner. The Puritan mind was given tohours of grim repression which he called "Conviction of Sin." Resistancebecame the prime law of life. The world was a thing of evil. A morass ofSin to be attacked, to be reformed, to be "abolished." The Southernerperceived the evils of Slavery long before the Puritan, but he made apoor Abolitionist. The Puritan was born an Abolitionist. He should notonly resist and attack the world; he should _hate_ it. He early learnedto love the pleasure of hating. He hated himself if no more promisingvictim loomed on the horizon. He early became the foremost Persecutorand Vice-Crusader of the new world. He made witch-hunting one of thesports of New England.
When not busy with some form of the witch hunt, the Puritan found anoutlet for his repressed instincts in the ferocity with which he foughtthe Indians or worked to achieve the conquest of Nature and lay upworldly goods for himself and his children. Prosperity, therefore,became the second principle of his religion, next to vice crusading.
When he succeeded in business, he praised God for his tender mercies.
His goods and chattels became the visible evidence of His love. The onlyholiday he established or permitted was the day on which he publiclythanked God for the goods which He had delivered. Through him the NewEngland Puritan Thanksgiving Day became a national festival and throughhim a religious reverence for worldly success has become a nationalideal.
The inner life of the Puritan was soul-fear. Driven by fear andrepression he attacked his rock-ribbed country, its thin soil, itssavage enemies and his own fellow competitors with fury.
And he succeeded.
The odds against him sharpened his powers, made keen his mind, toughenedhis muscles.
The Southern planter, on the other hand, represented the sharpestcontrast to this mental and physical attitude toward life. He came ofthe stock of the English Squire. And if he came from Scotland he foundthis English ideal already established and accepted it as his own.
The joy of living, not the horror of life, was the mainspring of hisaction and the secret of his character. The Puritan hated play. TheSoutherner loved to play. He dreamed of a life rich and full ofspiritual and physical leisure. He enjoyed his religion. He did notagonize over it. His character was genial. He hated fear and drove itfrom his soul. He loved a fiddle and a banjo. He was brave. He was loyalto his friends. He loved his home and his kin. He despised trade. Hedisliked hard work.
To this hour in the country\'s life his ideal had dominated the nation.
The Puritan Abolitionists now challenged this ideal for a fight to thefinish. Slavery was protected by the Constitution. All right, they burnthe Constitution and denounce it as a Covenant with Death, an agreementwith Hell. They begin a propaganda to incite servile insurrection inthe South. They denounce the Southern Slave owner as a fiend. Eventhe greatest writers of the North caught the contagion of this mania.
Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier and Emerson used their pens to blacken thename of the Southern people. From platform, pulpit and forum, throughpamphlet, magazine, weekly and daily newspapers the stream of abusepoured forth in ever-increasing volume.
That the proud Southerner would resent the injustice of this wholesaleindictment was inevitable. Their habit of mind, their born instinct ofleadership, their love of independence, their hatred of dictation, theirsense of historic achievement in the building of the republic wouldresent it. Their critics had not only been Slave holders themselves aslong as it paid commercially, but their skippers were now sailing theseas in violation of Southern laws prohibiting the slave trade. Ourearly Slave traders were nearly all Puritans. When one of their shipscame into port, the minister met her at the wharf, knelt in prayer andthanked Almighty God for one more cargo of heathen saved from hell.
Brown\'s whole plan of attack was based on the certainty of resentmentfrom the South. He set out to provoke his opponents. This purpose wasnow the inspiration of every act of his life.
A group of six typical Northern minds had fallen completely under hispower: Dr. Samuel G. Howe, Rev. Theodore Parker, Rev. Thomas WentworthHigginson,............