[84] feared to offend by naming them, so wherever the slave power was in the ascendant, people did not even dare to mention its name, for fear of touching upon too dangerous a subject. It was on this condition only that such an institution could maintain itself in a prosperous and intelligent community. It would have perished on the very day when the people should be at liberty to discuss it. Therefore, notwithstanding their boasted love of freedom, the people of the South did not hesitate to commit any violence in order to crush out, in its incipiency, any attempt to discuss the subject. Any one who had ventured to cast the slightest reflection upon the slavery system could not have continued to live in the South; it was sufficient to point the finger at any stranger and call him an abolitionist to consign him at once to the fury of the populace. One of the best citizens of the United States, Mr. Sumner, who had pleaded in behalf of emancipation with equal courage and eloquence on the floor of the Senate, was struck down with a loaded cane in the very midst of that assembly,1 by one of his Southern colleagues, and left half dead; and not only did this crime go unpunished, the tribunals of Washington being then occupied by slaveholders, but the assassin received a cane of honor from the ladies of the South as a reward for his exploit. In short, the mere fact that a simple Kansas farmer named John Brown, who had been ruined and persecuted by the slaveholders, sought to wreak his revenge upon them in Virginia, and had gathered together a dozen of fugitive slaves at Harper's Ferry, was sufficient to arouse a terrible sensation in the South. It was thought that a civil war had broken out, preparations were made for a great uprising, and it was found necessary to send regular troops from Washington to seize this man, who expiated upon the gallows the crime of having frightened the proud Virginians.
It was not enough, however, thus to protect slavery on its own domain; the acknowledgment of its supremacy had to be enforced in all the neighboring States in order to protect it from all outward attacks. The North, through an imprudent exercise of the spirit of conciliation, had allowed the Constitution to be violated
