The Montgomery advertiser., 1907-12-05

That Browns mind must have been affected appears evident when we con slider his beliefs and his acts. for we cannot well attribue his acts to nat ural ignorance. That any intelligent man. with a mind in ncrrnal state. should have believed that he could free the Southern slaves seems incred- file. yet that was his conception. He believed that nothing was needed but a little encouragement from the outside to cause all the slaves to rise against their masters and liberate themselves. When he invaded Virginia with a small band of fanatics like himself he seems to have firmly believed that an insur rection would at once be started which would spread over the entire South and in which all the slaves would join and freedom would be the result. Or the misery, bloodshed and. ruin that would follow if his plans were successful he seems not to have thought UT CiS6 IO CdIS UObilAnE IOE COhDcAuCh~ ses If he had been a well-balanced man he must have known that such 3 revolution as he proposed would en- tail such horrors as the civilized world has rarely witnessed; that thousands of lives would be lost, millions of prop erty be destroyed and a large section of the country be ruined. If he could not foresee all this his mind must have been unhinged. If he foresaw it, but
 one of the bloodiest villains the world has known. Either way we look ct it the fact remained that he was badly deceived. Though few negroes join ee him when he reached Harper's Fer ry there was no insurreetion or gen
 eral uprising and his bloody inten- ter's end. Criminal or fanatic his ca reer was short and the result inevit- able. The four dozen years that have passed since his execution have not settled the questions Involved in or with his acts.
 Thinking of Brown and his acts and
 intentions brings up the question of what might have been if he, had never existed, and if no such object as he had in view had ever been attempted. Would secession, war and en,ancipa- tion have come to the country just the same if there had been no John Brown? There are many who think not. It is true that there was already much bitterness of feeling between the South
 and the extreme abolitionists of the North, and that feelings was much in- tensifed by Browns raid. Many of the hot headed people of the South beltev ed and charged that Browns acts were Instigated and endorsed by the North generally. or. at least by those who belonged to the abolition party. They believed that the spirit which contrcll- ed Brown was dominant in the North. ard that if the abolitionists, or Black Republicans, as they were called suc- taiuing control of the Government, such resultu C 5 Brown tried to bring ch1ut
 would inevitably follow. But for Brown and nis acts this feeling of animosi " toward the North at large might have iain dormant for T time. and that even iC an abolitionist were elected President there might be such compro- misses agreed on as would prevent an outbreak.
 There are many who yet believe that there would have been no war and no interference with slavery had it not
 been for Brown. They hold that if the
 South had acquiesced In the election of Lincoln and given his administra ton a fair trial all matters of diff ference would have been arranged and no war would have visited us. They may be right, for we never can tell what might have been. What seems beyond dispute is that the man who
 
 who was executed at Harper's Ferry on December 2. 1859. precipitated bloody war with it's disastrous results. What would have happened if he had never been born is only to be conjec- tured.
 It may be that the feeling of antago- nism had reached such a degree of intensity that nothing but war and car mage and rivers of blood could settle it, for 1t is not to he denied that there was an element in the North which hated the South with an intensity that nothing but blood could appease. IT
 the South had made no move toward an- tagonising MT. Lincoln It is stin pos sible that the radicals of his party would have dominated him and forced measures that would have brought on
 secession and war just the same. John Browns fanatlcism may have been