Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 18: More from 1861 anti-slavery report

John Brown 1859

The report I previously quoted, The Anti-Slavery History of the John-Brown Year (27th Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society), 1861 [Reprint edition 1969], gives the following description of the panic and ensuing repression against not only blacks but whites, as well, which followed John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry (pp. 166-7):

The fright which JOHN BROWN gave the whole Slave-region, exacerbated suddenly, to an acute, inflammatory type, the chronic malady of lawless barbarism, so long notoriously prevailing there. In every stranger, especially if known to be from the North, was seen a possible, if not a certain enemy; and even southern birth, or, in the case of northern origin, long, quiet residence at the South, in the pursuit of lawful business, was not always a sure guarantee against suspicion and its terrible consequences. The lightest word implying doubt of the consummate excellence of the "peculiar" system [slavery], the slightest act which could be construed into a leaning toward the doctrine of equal human rights, gave ground sufficient for the charge of Abolitionism, and the prompt execution of Judge Lynch's code. Nay, even silence was suspicious, for it might be but a cover of some deep design. Innocent book-peddlers, who cared no more for Slavery or Anti-Slavery than for the politics of Patagonia [Argentina]; harmless venders of patent and unpatented "Yankee notions," without which scarce the outward show of civilized life could be kept up among the "patriarchs;" school-teachers, thinking only of their spelling-books and grammars and the quarter's bills; "drummers" [salesmen] of northern mercantile establishments, untainted with an "ism;" mechanics, who had never voted any but the Democratic ticket; clergymen, well known in northern parishes as stanch assertors of a Bible warrant for Slave-holding; and many others, no more dangerous than these, were at once transformed, by excited imaginations, into Abolition emissaries, and hunted down with all the keen vindictiveness of fear. The mob was legislator, prosecutor, jury, judge, and executioner. Arrests and summary examinations before self-constituted tribunals, followed by speedy execution of the seldom-failing doom, — brutal abuse, imprisonment, banishment,or death, — became so frequent that hardly could the daily press find room to chronicle the cases. Sometimes, by way of rare variety, the sovereign mob would condescend to leave a victim to the regular enforcement of some tyrannical statute by the established courts. But where no statute could be found to meet the case, that is, where no unlawful act could bo alleged,— no act which even the despotic legislation of a Slave State had forbidden, — the edict of a "Vigilance Committee," or vote of a tumultuous assembly was law enough; and the absurdest tale of malice, or the most unreasonable suspicion of blind terror, was sufficient evidence.

Recurring panics at the rumor of an impending slave revolt had become a chronic feature of life in the slave states.

And even though John Brown's raid in Harper's Ferry didn't incite any immediate slave revolts, the panic following that event was more intense and more widespread than most.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, john brown, slavery