The Sun.
London, England, 1859-11-09 00:00:00

OUTBREAK AT HARPER'S FERRY.

(From a Corrcsponu'ent of ae Daily News)
NE W YORK, OCT. 26.
At the date of my last letter the news of the negro
insurrection at Harper's Ferry had just reached us,
and I gave you what was then my inipressicn, that
the accounts we bad received were grossly exagge-

rated, and that a good many of the details were pro-
bably manufactured to influence the approaching
elections. We now know all about it, and though it

appears to have been a bona fide insurrection, fwas
not far wrong in the estimate of its importance. An
elderly man named John Brown, or as he is more
commonly called " Old Brown of Ossowatomie," a
native of New England, and a settler and leading
combatant on the free soil side in Kansas during the

troubles there, appears to have contrived and car-
ried it out, as far as it went. Brown is a New Eng-
land puritan of the old school, and went to the
west with a family of six sons, to better his for-
tune by farming. He was in Kansas when it was
invaded by the border ruffians, and though he has
always been an abolitionist he never displayed
any fanaticism in the cause until his house had
been burned, two or three of his sons killed under
circumstances of peculiar atrocity, and numbers
of his neighbours murdered and driven from
their homes before his eyes. _The loss of his sons
seems to have deranged his mind, and he took the
field with as many men as he could muster, and
at once became the terror of the pro-slavery men.
He defeated an immensely superior force of them at
Ossowatomie, and did summary execution upon large
number of single individuals, and all in a spirit of
the most exalted religious enthusiasm. 11e finally
got it into his head that ho was commissioned by
God to wage war upon slaveholders and liberate
negroes, and seems to have inspired his followers
with a portion of his own frenzy. No man per-
formed half so many daring exploits in the course
of the war; More than once ho seized upon Mis-
sourians in their own homes, in the dead of the
night, and hanged them on the nearest tree, for
having participated in outrages on the free-state
men in Kansas; and he at last became the bugbear
and terror of all the border ruffians. Whenever
" Old Brown" was reported to be in the neighbour-
hood they instantly disappeared. When the war
was over a return to his old mode of life was of
course impossible. The loss of his sons had mad-
dened him, and he devoted himself entirely to
carrying off slaves to Canada. That he was coun-
tenanced and encouraged in this by many leading
abolitionists there seems to be no reason to doubt ;
but that any of them went any further has yet to be
proved. For the last year or more the public has
not heard much of him., but during this interval he
seems to have been busily engaged in organising an
insurrection of the slaves. With this view he went
to Virginia, hired a farm in the neighbourhood of
Harper's Ferry and having quietly, and as it ap-
pears without exciting any observation, collected a
considerable quantity of arms and ammunition, and
been joined by fifteen of his most devoted followers,
including his two surviving sons, on the evening of,
the 13th inst. he seized. upon the United States'
armoury in the village, arrested and imprisoned the
einployes and many of the principal inhabitants in
the neighbourhood, blocked up the railroad, cut the
join
him. wires, and called on the negroes to
him. The negroes did not join him, however, and
in a skirmish with some of the railroal men he re-
mained master of the field, but was finally driven
hack into the armoury, which he loopholed and
barricaded. He defended the armoury successfully
until the arrival of militia from all parts of the coun-
try, and of marines from Washington. He was
then summoned to surrender, refused to do so, and
the door being burst open, he and his surviving fol-
lowers—only two out of seventeen—wero captured,
Brown himself being badly wounded. One or two
of his adherents, who did not succeed iu entering
the armoury with him, made their escape, and are
still at large.
The affair has excited profound sensation, and, let
me add, profound consternation in the South. The
secrecy with which the plot was brough to maturity,
the large quantity of arms and ammunition whitl
Brown had collected, the facility with which he
surprised the village and seized the armoury, the
desperate tenacity with which he held it, the reEo
lotion displayed by all his followers from first to
last, and more than all, Brown's dauntless bearing
since his capture, the lofty tone of moral superiority
which he assumes over his captors, have made a
profound impression on the Southern people. They
have long been in the habit of accusing the obeli-
tioni•ts of t impering with the negroes, and instigat-
ing them to flight or revolt, but it was always sup-
posed to be in an underhand sneaking way. Ti.e
popular notion of an abolitionist made him above all
things a coward. But here is at least a small taste of

rterthifrit ar avowedly begun by this dete rew, and 1
who anner of men do they find them P 127); I;‘`4l fif en of them suffice to raise the w o Sta 4tgi'
Virginia into wild affright, to call out a its mil4krrive,:"4l
to bring federal troops from the capital,loseizklik;
an armoury, and defend it for two days, and *lea it 3
was at last stormed by an overwhelming force, thir-
teen of these poltroons are found to have died at
their posts, rifle in hand ; two only came out alive
these desperately wounded and glorying in their
crime. It is no wonder if the South feels than-an
abyss has opened at their feet. They first resorted
to physical force as a means of extending slavery in
Kansas, counting confidently on Northern pusilla-
nimity. But the fighting- had not gone on very long,
till the crust of peaceful habits wore off the Yankees,
and the old whining, praying, unconquerable puritan
burst out. The South, as we know, finding they
had raised a legion of devils, quitted the field and
called for peace ; but, when Yankees once begid to
fight, it grows on them, and they were not now dis-
posed to cry quits so easily. So the war has' pen
carried into the enemy's territory. The damage
done is to be sure very trifling. Only half-a-dozen
negroes joined Brown's enterprise, but it is acknow-
ledged that this is mainly to be ascribed to his having
chosen a bad scene of action. In that part of Vir-
ginia the negroes are few in number, and a large
number of them house servants, and the farms sAILII
paratively small. Had he thrown himself into the
cotton States, amongst the great plantations, where
a thousand blacks often toil for a single owner—
tan talised by hard work, exposure, and the oversetiest
lash—and offered them arms and bid them follow
him, no man dare to say he would have been crushed
without untold horrors. The panic his mad effort
has spread proves in what horrible insecurity men
dwell south of Mason. and Dixon's line, what a
flaming sword hangs suspended over the whole
slave region, and how deeply the white population
feels its dan e'er.
I do not defend, and no one can defend, Brown's
conduct. His attempt, hvd it even half succeeded,
could only have bred massacre and desolation. -If
the 'Southerners had themselves failed to restore
order—and my firm belief is that if a general negro
insurrection ever does take place, they will fail—
the North would be compelled, it' only for:hu-
manity's sake, to step in and quell the revolt. , If
the condition of the blacks is ever to be really im-
proved, it must be peacefully and gradually. But
in spite of all this, no one can see a greyheaded
man, who has lost five sons in the cause of freedom,
step in, with the last survivor of his family by his
side, between the slave and his master, and with
his thirteen other companions bid defiance to a
whole State in the name of the Lord of Hosts, with-
out more or less admiration. There is something
grand in the old fellow's madness, and those here
at the North who most condemn him, acknowledge
him to be well worthy, if not of a better, of a more
hopeful cause, and of a happier fate than that
which now awaits him.

The Virginians, and their blustering governor, as
well as the whole South, are, of course, anxious to
make as much of the affair as possible, for two rea-
sons—one :s to make their panic seem less ridiculous
that it has really been ; and the other to in-
fluence - the canvass for the presidential elec-
tion. Every newspaper in the slave states
now devotes one or two columns a day
to showing the complicity of the repub-
licans in Brown's plot, and the natural and logical
connection which exists between the republican doc-
trines and slave insurrections. They repreaent
Brown as having been sent out to reconnoitre, in
anticipation of the grand coup which will assuredly
be made whenever a republican President finds his
way to the White House. Senator Seward, as I
have already mentioned in a former letter, gave
utterance a year ago, at Rochester, to the senti-
ment that the conflict between free and slave labour
was "an irrepressible conflict," and would -never
cease until one or other was master of the whole con-
tinent. Upon this the democrats have never since
ceased to ring changes, bUt it has never been made
to do so much service as since the Harper's Ferry
outbreak. Although the very same thing has been
said over and over byJeffersor,Maddison, and all the
fathers of the republic, and in later times by the
great "expounder and defender of the constitution."
Daniel -Webster himself, in Seward's mouth it is
denounced as the rankest treason, and, to mak: it
worse, it. is regularly distorted into "irrepressible
conflict between North and South." Moreover, it
is now declared that Brown's attempt is the legiti-
mate consequence of this doctrine, and that if Se-
ward be elected similar attempts will be made on a
much larger scale, and, as far as the federal execu-

Live is concerned, with perfect impunity. I despair
of giving you any adequate idea of the eager-
ness with which this point is made, and the
pertinacity with which it is urged. The whole
pro•slavery press is devoting its attention to it,
almost to the exclusion of everything else. 'that
it will for the moment do the republicans
some injury I have no doubt ; but luckily most of
the State elections are over, and they have secured
a triumph nearly in them all. The presidential
election will not come on until next Aar, and by

that time the excitement will be over, and the rich-
culous side of the matter be uppermost. I feel sa-
tisfied also that the absurd antics which the Vir-
ginians are playing, marked as they are by as
much cruelty as terror, will create a reaction
throughout the country in favour of the aboli-
tionists. They brought the old man into court the
other day badly wounded in three places, scarcely
able to stand, and yet manacled! The whole State
remains under arms during his trial, to prevent a
rescue, and the proceed!ngs are being hurried on to
release the State from keeping watch and ward.
Such is the fear the criminal inspires even in his
present condition ; and this amongst a people who
pride themselves above all upon their military qua-
lities, and still aver, as Governor Wise said the
other day, that " their slaves are held by patriarchal
tenure." _ _

We have nothing important from San Juan. The
affair does not attract very much attention just at
present, tanks to " Old Brown." But I confess I
very much doubt if the administration will recede
from the position taken by Harney. As matters
stand at present, the burden of taking the initiative
rests on you, and I think it likely Cass will rely on
your reluctance to begin to get him out of the
scrape. About the rights of the American side of
the question he has, I believe, made up his mind,
or says he has, and the election is too near and the
position of the democracy too perilous to admit of
anything iike " backing down." It is vory unfortu-
nate that you should have to fire the first shot.