Professor John W. Burgess, of Columbia University, in his work, _The
Civil War and the Constitution_, has portrayed the disastrous effects
upon the sentiment in favor of emancipation in various parts of the
South, occasioned by the virulence of these agitators and above all by
the attempt of John Brown and his followers to precipitate servile
insurrection.
"If the whole thing," writes Professor Burgess, "both as to time,
methods, and results, had been planned by his Satanic Majesty
himself, it could not have succeeded better in setting the sound
conservative movements of the age at naught, and in creating a state
of feeling which offered the most capital opportunities for the
triumph of political insincerity, radicalism and rascality over
their opposites. No man who is acquainted with the change of feeling
which occurred in the South between the 16th of October 1859 and the
16th day of November of the same year can regard the Harper's Ferry
villainy as any other than one of the chiefest crimes of our
history. It established and re-established the control of the great
radical slaveholders over the non-slaveholders,—the little
slaveholders, and the more liberal of the large slaveholders, which
had already begun to _be_ loosened."[263]
Professor Burgess then proceeds to show the still more disastrous
effects upon conservative sentiment in Virginia and the South which
resulted from the demonstrations at the North on the day of John
Brown's execution.
"Brown and his band," says Professor Burgess, "had murdered five men
and wounded some eight or ten more in their criminal movement at
Harper's Ferry.... Add to this the consideration that Brown
certainly intended the wholesale massacre of the whites by the
blacks in case that should be found necessary to effect his purposes
and it was certainly natural that the tolling of the church bells,
the holding of prayer-meetings for the soul of John Brown, the
draping of houses, the half-masting of flags, &c., in many parts of
the North should appear to the people of the South to be evidences
of a wickedness which knew no bounds and which was bent upon the
destruction of the South by any means necessary to accomplish the
result.... Especially did terror and bitterness take possession of
the hearts of the women of the South, who saw in slave insurrection
not only destruction and death, but that which to feminine virtue is
a thousand times worse than the most terrible death.
"From the Harper's Ferry outrage onward the conviction grew among
all classes that the white men of the South must stand together and
must harmonize all internal differences in the presence of the
mortal peril with which as a race they believed themselves
threatened. Sound development in thought and feeling was arrested,
the follies and hatreds born of fear and resentment now assumed the
places born of common sense and common kindliness."[264]