During the canvass preceding the election, the conspirators, and the politicians in their train, employed all the means in their power to excite intensely every blinding passion of the slaveholders and the masses of the people. They appealed to their fears, their prejudices, their local patriotism, and their greed. They asserted, with all the solemn seeming of sober truth, that the people of the Free-labor States, grown rich and powerful through robbery of the people of the Slave-labor States, by means of tariff laws and other governmental measures, and by immigration from foreign lands, had elected a sectional President for the purpose of carrying out a long-cherished scheme of ambition, namely, the political and social subjugation of the inhabitants of the Slave-labor States; the subversion of their system of labor; the elevation of the negro to social equality with the white man; and the destruction of Slavery, upon which, they alleged, had rested in the past, and must forever rest in the future, all substantial prosperity in the cotton-growing States. They held the Republican party responsible for John Brown's acts at Harper's Ferry,1 and declared that his raid was the forerunner of a general and destructive invasion of the Slavelabor States by “the fanatical hordes of the North.” They cited the publications and speeches of the Abolitionists of the North during the past thirty years; the legislation in the same section unfriendly to slavery; and the more recent utterances of leading members of the Republican party, in which it had been declared that “there is an irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery” --“the Republic cannot exist half slave and half free” --“freedom is the normal condition of all territory,” &c.; they cited these with force, as proofs of long and earnest preparation for a now impending war upon “the South” and its institutions. They pictured, in high coloring, the dreadful paralysis of all the industry and commerce of “the South,” and the utter extinguishment of all hopes of future advancement in art, science, literature, and the development of the yet hidden resources in the region below the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and the Ohio, as a consequence of the domination in the National Government of their “bitter enemies,” as they unjustly termed the people of the Free-labor States.2
In this unholy work, the press and the pulpit became powerful auxiliaries.
