Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

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[70] being purposely clouded; and his friends, with an ingenious sophistry that had imposed upon the South for thirty years with success, insisted that the support of Stephen A. Douglas was a support of the party in the North which had stood by the South amid persecution and defamation.

But it was evident to reflecting minds that, either by the policy of the Black Republican party, or the shorter device of the Douglas Democracy for the government of the Territories, the sectional equilibrium of the Union was lost. A disposition was shown to calculate the real value of a Union which, by its mere name and the paraphrases of demagogues, had long governed the affections of the people, but in which, it was now seen, the South must constantly descend in political power; in which she paid a tribute to the North in unequal taxations and in the courses of trade, estimated by a Northern writer at two hundred millions of dollars a year; and in which she was constantly enduring insult, occupied the position of an inferiour, and was designated as the spotted and degraded part of America.

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The John Brown raid.

Other events were to repeat and enlarge the shock given to the Union by the Kansas controversy. In October, 1859, occurred the famous John Brown raid into Virginia, ill which an old man, who had obtained in Kansas the notoriety of a horse-thief and an assassin, invaded the State of Virginia at Harper's Ferry with a band of outlaws, declared his purpose to free the slaves, and commenced with a work of blood the first acts of sectional rebellion against the authority of the United States. It seems that this man, who had the singular combination of narrow sagacity, or cunning with visionary recklessness that is often observed in fanatics, had, in 1858, summoned a convention in West Canada, in which he proposed to substitute a plan of action entitled “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances” for all other governments then in existence in the United States.

This fanatical instrument has a very curious interest from its general similitude to that “plan of action” which was afterwards adopted by the Government at Washington in its great war upon the South, and its subsequent programme of subjugation.

The main point of the preamble of John Brown's Constitution was to announce the fact that the new government especially contemplated the accession of “the proscribed, oppressed, and enslaved” people of the United States. And this, and the qualification for membership in a following article, intimated that not sex, colour, age, political or social condition would be at all considered against any one.