Frémont's religion brought it ludicrously to mind again. Col. Frémont is and always has been as sound a Protestant as John Knox ever was. He was bred in the Protestant faith and has never changed.

But the Express, like Noble, has opened on this hole in the wall and can never be done barking at it. Day after day it resorts to this empty hole. When everything else fails this resource remains. There they are indefatigably, the Express and Noble, a Church without a Frémont, and a hole without a squirrel in it! We never read the Express nowadays without thinking involuntarily, 'Goodness, the dog is letting off at that hole again.''

CHAPTER XXII.

TRUTH ON THE SCAFFOld, wrong ON THE THRONE.

FREMONT was defeated, and never rose again, except for a brief period in the war, to national prominence. James Buchanan, the tool of slavery, was placed in the White House. But the Republican party had won its first great victory. Frémont had received over a million three hundred thousand votes. "The Republicans, far from being discouraged, felt and acted as men who had won the battle. Indeed the moral triumph was theirs, and they believed that the actual victory at the polls was only postponed. The Democrats were mortified and astounded by the large popular vote against them. The loss of New York and Ohio, the narrow escape from defeat in Pennsylvania, the rebuke of Michigan to their veteran leader, General Cass, intensified by the choice of Chandler, his successor in the Senate, the absolute consolidation of New England against them, all tended to humiliate and discourage the party. They had lost ten States which General Pierce had carried in 1852, and they had a watchful, determined foe in the field, eager for another trial of strength. The issue was made, the lines in battle were drawn. Freedom or slavery in the Territories,

all was to be fought to the end, without flinching, and without compromise."1

After the election of Buchanan, the next great, portentous event in the anti-slavery struggle was Capt. John Brown's sudden attack on Harper's Ferry, made on the 17th of October, 1858. This startling event had more momentous consequences than even the Southern or the anti-slavery leaders then clearly saw. It roused to the highest pitch the feelings and deepened the convictions on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line, and doubtless hastened the outbreak of the Civil War.

On the 30th of October, while the imprisoned John Brown was awaiting his trial, Mr. Beecher preached a notable sermon on "The Nation's Duty to Slavery," in which, while maintaining with great eloquence the principles of freedom, he manifested a spirit of kindness and forbearance toward the South which contrasted with some of the fiercer utterances of the hour. Utilizing the Harper's Ferry incident and the national excitement over it, he made some very practical and sensible observations on the present state of the country. After portraying the amazement and fear of Virginia occasioned by the falling and exploding of the burning aerolite at Harper's Ferry, after commenting on the excitement caused by the seventeen white men who attacked the great State, and held two thousand citizens in duress till the whole commonwealth was alarmed, he gave a description of the courageous fanatic who had terrified a great people, telling how Brown, the kind-hearted,

'Blaine's "Twenty Years of Congress," Vol. I., p. 130.

industrious, peace-loving man, with a large family of children, had sought a free man's home in Kansas. "That infant colony held thousands of souls as noble as liberty ever inspired or religion enriched. A great scowling slave State, its nearest neighbor, sought to tread down this liberty-loving colony, and to dragoon slavery into it by force of arms."

"It was in this field that Brown received his impulse. A tender father, whose life was in his son's life, he saw his first-born seized like a felon, chained, driven across the country, crazed by suffering and heat, beaten like a dog by the officer in charge, and long lying at death's door! Another noble boy, without warning, without offense, unarmed, in open. day, in the midst of the city, was shot dead! No justice sought out the murderers; no United States attorney was despatched in hot haste; no marines or soldiers aided the wronged and weak!

"The shot that struck the child's heart crazed the father's brain. Revolving his wrongs, and nursing his hatred of that deadly system that breathed such contempt at justice and humanity, at length his phantoms assume a slender reality, and organized such an enterprise as one might expect from a man whom grief had bereft of good judgment."1

After praising his boldness, honesty, freedom from deceit, and general manliness, Mr. Beecher said: "I deplore his misfortunes. I sympathize with his sorrows. I mourn the hiding or obscuration of his reason. I disapprove of his mad and feeble scheme. I shrink from the folly of the bloody foray, and

1" Patriotic Addresses," p. 206.

I shrink likewise from all the anticipation of that judicial bloodshed, which doubtless ere long will follow-for when was cowardice ever magnanimous ?

Let no man pray that Brown be spared; let Virginia make him a martyr. Now, he has only blundered. His soul was noble; his work miserable. But a cord and a gibbet would redeem all that and round up Brown's failure with a heroic success."'

1

The prophecy was more than fulfilled, though Mr. Beecher little dreamed that the giant wrong which the old man attacked would in a few years be trampled out in blood to the sublime music of the old man's name.

Mr. Beecher showed the insecurity of those States that "carried powder as their chief cargo." Without expressing at large his well-known opinions on the great evil of slavery, he wisely urged that one's views on this subject might be right and yet his views of duty toward it might be wrong. There were unjustifiable ways of attacking even slavery. As four millions of colored slaves dwelt in the midst of the population of ten millions of whites in fifteen different States, and as these States were bound up with other States in a common national life, he held that the question of duty was not simply what was duty towards blacks, and not what is duty toward the whites, but what is duty to each and to both united. "I am bound by the great law of love to consider my duties toward the slave, and I am bound by the great law of love also to consider my duties toward the white man who is his master. Both are to

1" Patriotic Addresses," p. 207.