Excerpt from The Mission of South Carolina to Virginia
There lay the ashes of Patrick Henry and of Jefferson, and of Madison, and of a host of others, whose names had given lustre to our country"s glory, and the fruit of whose labors was the common inheritance of North and South; and yet all this could not preserve her from the invasion of her soil, the murder of her citizens, and the attempt to involve her in the horrors of servile and civil war. That very North, to whom she had surrendered a territorial empire - who had grown great through her generous confidence - sent forth the assassins, furnished them with arms and money, and would fain rescue them from the infamy and punishment due to crimes so atrocious.
To estimate aright the character of the outrage at Harper"s Ferry, we must realize the intentions of those who planned it. They expected the slaves to rise in mass as soon as the banner of abolitionism should be unfurled. Knowing nothing of the kindly feeling which exists throughout the South between the master and his slaves, they judged of that feeling by their own hatred, and expected that the tocsin which they sounded would at once arouse to rebellion every slave who heard it. Accordingly they prepared such arms as an infuriated and untrained peasantry could most readily use.
They also expected aid from another element of revolution. They did not believe in the loyalty to the government of Virginia of that part of her population which owned no slaves. They seized upon the armory, and they expected help from its operatives, and from the farming population; and to gain time for combining all these elements of mischief, as they conceived them to be, they seized upon a pass in the mountains, well adapted to their purpose. For months had they worked with fiendish and unweared diligence, and it is hazarding little to conjecture, that the banditti who had been trained in Kansas, were in readiness to obey the summons to new scenes of rapine and murder, as soon as a lodgment were effected.
Is it at all surprising that a peaceful village, where no sound of war had been heard for half a century, should be overcome for the moment, at midnight, by so unexpected an inroad? The confusion which ensued was a necessity; and it can only be inscribed to the superintendence of a kind Providence, that so few innocent lives were sacrificed.
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