The popular agitation at this fresh and alarming evidence of the purpose and power of the South upset the machinations of the schemers, swelled the numerical strength of the new Northern party opposed to the Territorial aggressions and pretensions of the slave section.  So rapid was the growth of the Republican party that the slave leaders anticipated its accession to power at the then next Presidential election.  So certain were they in their forebodings of defeat that they set about in dead earnest to put their side of the divided house in order for the impending struggle for Southern independence.  Military preparations went forward with a vengeance, arms and munitions of war which were the property of the General Government began to move southward, to Southern military depots and posts for the defence of the United States South, when at last the word “DISUNION” should be pronounced over the Republic.  The Lincoln-Douglass debate augmented everywhere the excitement, fed the already mighty numbers of the new party.  More and more the public consciousness and conviction were squaring with Mr. Lincoln’s oracular words in respect that the Union could not “endure permanently half slave and half free.”

The darkness and tumult of the rising tempest were advancing apace, when suddenly there burst from the national firmament the first warning peal of thunder, and over Virginia there sped the first bolt of the storm.  John Brown with his brave little band, at Harper’s Ferry, had struck for the freedom of the slave.  Tired of words, the believer in blood and iron as a deliverer, had crossed from Pennsylvania into Virginia on the evening of October 16, 1859, and seized the United States Armory at Harper’s Ferry.  Although soon overpowered, captured, tried, and hanged for his pains by the slave-power, the martyr had builded better than he knew.  For the blow struck by him then and there ended almost abruptly the period of argument and ushered in the period of arms.  The jar from that battle-ax at the roots of the slave system hurled together in a death struggle right and wrong, freedom and slavery, in the republic.

This attempt on the part of John Brown to liberate the slaves seemed to Garrison “misguided, wild, and apparently insane, though disinterested and well-intended.”  On non-resistant grounds he deplored this use of the sword to effect emancipation, and condemned the leader.  But, judging him according to the standard of Bunker Hill and the men of 1776, he did not doubt that Brown deserved “to be held in grateful and honorable remembrance to the latest posterity, by all those who glory in the deeds of a Wallace or Tell, a Washington or Warren.”