and as established by the war of the Revolution for the people of the States respectively. The South accepted the contest thus —forced upon her, with the eager and resolute courage characteristic of her proud-spirited people."
But I propose to show further that this war did not really begin with the sailing of that Northern fleet, and certainly not at Fort Sumter; and that the first blow was actually struck by John Brown and his followers, as the representatives of the abolitionists of the North, in October, 1859, at Harper's Ferry, Va.
THE JOHN BROWN RAID.
A Northern writer says of the "John Brown Raid":
"Of course, a transaction so flagitious, with its attendant circumstances, affording such unmistakable proof of the spirit by which no small portion of the Northern population was actuated, could not but produce the profoundest impression upon the people of the South. Here was an open and armed aggression, whether clearly understood and encouraged beforehand, certainly exulted in afterwards, by persons of a very different standing from that of the chief actor in this bloody incursion into a peaceful State."
John Brown and his associates did attempt insurrection, and did commit murder in that attempt, upon the peaceful, harmless citizens of Virginia, and he expiated these, among the highest crimes known to the law, upon a felon's gallows. How was that execution received at the North? And in what way did the representatives of the Republican party endorse and adopt as their own the conduct of this felon in his outrages, his "first blow" struck against the South? We will let the same Northern writer tell.
He says:
"In the tolling of bells and the firing of minute guns upon the occasion of Brown's funeral; the meeting-houses were draped in mourning as for a hero; the prayers offered; the sermons and discourses pronounced in his honor as for a saint."
Two of Brown's accomplices were fugitives from Justice, one in the State of Ohio, and the other in that of Iowa. Requisitions were
