John brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry

John brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry

As if to confirm everything that states’ rights politicians had said during the

1850s, the fanatical abolitionist John Brown launched his famous raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Though unsuccessful, Brown’s attempt to capture a federal arsenal and provoke a slave rebellion struck fear in the hearts of whites throughout the south.

Many in the north condemned the violence, but many others lauded Brown’s efforts as the notion of a vast abolitionist conspiracy became believable in the minds of many southerners. For months after the raid radical southern politicians and the newspapers that supported them exploited the fears of the electorate by printing account after account of rumored slave atrocities that were supposedly taking place around the south. 

Whether threats to their safety were real or imagined, southern whites, especially those involved in state government, took them seriously. In 1860 the south fortified itself for whatever trials might lay in the future.

State legislatures appropriated funds for arming and reorganization state militias, and throughout the region many communities began recruiting new volunteer Home Guard units.

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., the nation was unraveling in part because the national Democratic Party was fracturing. During the spring of 1860 the slavery issue irreparably divided the Democrats, thus ensuring a Republican victory in the presidential election the following fall.

The Democratic National Convention met in Charleston, South Carolina, in April and there northern Democrats passed resolutions endorsing the concept of popular sovereignty, with the people of a given territory or state deciding the issue, as a solution to the slavery debate. Democratic delegates from the south condemned popular sovereignty and any other form of compromise on the slavery issue, insisting on blanket federal protection of the institution in all states and territories.

The convention as a whole eventually voted to endorse popular sovereignty.

In response the states of the lower south walked out on the proceedings.

Eventually the two wings of the Democratic Party met separately to nominate candidates for president. Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas of Illinois while the southern states’ rights advocates chose the vice-president of the United States, Kentuckian John C. Breckinridge, as their candidate.

Along with Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln, a fourth candidate rounded out the field in the general election. John Bell of Tennessee represented the Constitutional Union Party, an upstart organization that hoped to become an effective agent for compromise. Bell and his followers argued that southerners should fight for their rights within the Union, and did their best to side-step any inflammatory political discussions of slavery.

This moderate strategy would garner significant support in some parts of the south, but the Constitutional Union Party was not destined to carry the day in a region still haunted by the ghost of John Brown. Lincoln emerged victorious, though he only garnered around 40 percent of the popular vote.