Where the Responsibility Belongs.Chicago, Illinois, Press and Tribune [Republican](20 October 1859)
The attempt of the Chicago Times to place
the responsibility of the Harper's Ferry affair
upon the Republican party, is a resort to the
rogue's trick of crying "stop thief, stop thief,"
for the purpose of diverting attention from the
really guilty party. Holding to the doctrines
of the Revolutionary fathers and the earlier
statesmen of this country on the subject of
slavery -- that it is a moral, social and political
evil; that it is a creature of local law, to be
controlled exclusively by the States, in which
it exists, and that its area ought not to
be extended, for its accompanying evils be
fastened upon our new frontier communities --
the Republican party depreciates, no less than
these worthies would have done, everything
looking towards violent measures for the
enfranchisement of the slaves of the South. The
opposition to slavery is based upon moral and
economic considerations, and the only action
it proposes or that it would countenance, with
respect to the institution, is to confine it to its
present limits, leaving the problem of "what
will they do with it?" to the solution of the
people of the slaveholding States.
The Democratic party, however proposes to
increase the chances for insurrection, bloodshed
and all the horrors of servile war, by
extending the area of slavery indefinitely and by
re-opening the African slave trade. It would
have the bloody scenes of Harper's Ferry
re-enacted in the new States to be carved out of
our territories, and it would transmit to
generations yet unborn the unspeakable dread
arising from constant exposure to midnight
carnage and the accompanying nameless
horrors of insurrection.
As respects the attempt of an insane old
man and his handful of confederates to excite
a negro insurrection in Virginia and Maryland,
it is easy to determine where the responsibility
really belongs. That act is but a part of the
legitimate fruit of the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise. In another part of this paper,
in a sketch of the life of the leader of the
attempted insurrection, will be found a statement
of some of the wrongs heaped upon old Brown
by the minions of that power at whose command
and for whose benefit the compromise
was broken down -- wrongs which entered his
soul and made him what he is -- a monomaniac
who believes himself to be a God-appointed
agent to set the enslaved free. Upon the
heads of those who repealed that compromise
and who sanctioned the lawless violence and
bloodshed which grew out of it on the plains
of Kansas, rests the blood of those who fell at
Harper's Ferry. Through a chain of events, the
one inseparably connected with the other, the
last-named tragedy goes back to the first-named
violation of plighted faith as its cause,
including among its intermediate steps a
series of outrages and wrongs which taken
together, make up the blackest page of our
National history. No one has a clearer
appreciation of this fact than the Chicago Times;
no one understands more clearly that the
popular verdict will accord with the historical
statement. Hence, in its zeal to save
itself, its master, and its party from
the consequence of their own acts, it falsely
lays the blame upon those whose policy it is
to diminish the chances of the recurrence of
such tragedies, who deplore the crime whenever
it is committed as a sore calamity, and
who have no sympathy for the criminal by
whom it is instigated.. The public intelligence
will not be imposed upon by the effort of the
Times to shirk a responsibility which belongs
to itself and its political associates.
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