"Uncle Tom's Cabin" contained overdrawn and highly colored pictures of the punishment of the Negroes by their masters. This was intended to inflame the minds of the Northern people. It also irritated the Southern people, for they knew its falsity, and this helped to widen the breach between the two sections.

Now, this invasion of Virginia, by John Brown, for the purpose of setting free her slaves, and those of the other slave States, as he himself said, did it not justify Virginia in enforcing her laws and protecting her property? Let us see. Of the sixteen States and territories holding slaves in 1860, Virginia held a commanding position. Of the 384,884 slave-holders in the United States, 52,128 lived in Virginia-about one-seventh. Georgia came next with 41,084; Kentucky, third with 38,654; Tennessee, fourth, with 36,844; now, these four States contained nearly half of all the slave-holders.

Of the 3,953,743 slaves in all the Southern States and territories, Virginia owned 490,865, or about one-eighth of the whole;. Georgia held second place with 462,198; Mississippi third, 436,631; South Carolina fourth, 402,406. These four States owned nearly one-half of all the slaves at the beginning of the war .

; The Southern States to a great extent, had bought this enormous property from the Northern people, and the money that they paid for these Negroes had been invested in the North, and as the compact of 1787 would never have been signed had it not guaranteed the protection of Negro slavery, Virginia would have been nothing less than a traitor to her people if she had done less than she did, viz: wipe John Brown and his band from the face of the earth.

If there had been an invasion of the North to destroy factories built by money that southern people paid for northern Negroes, a howl of distress would have gone up, that would have been greater than the rebel yell that went up at Chickamauga on the Sunday evening after Snodgrass Hill was taken.

While John Brown was carrying on his bloody work in Virginia ill 1859, which was approved by the abolitionists of the North, a book was written to be circulated in the campaign of 1860 called the,Impending Crisis", This book was to show that the free labor of the North was more profitable than the black labor of the South, therefore, the black labor ought to be abolished.

This book referred to slavery and the Southern people in very unbecoming terms. I will make a few quotations from it, in order that the reader may form his own opinion as to its feelings towards the South .

Page 149. "We are determined to abolish slavery at all hazards, in defiance of all opposition, of whatever nature, it is possible for the Slavocrats to bring against us; of this they may take due notice and govern themselves accordingly."

Page 156. "On our banner is inscribed, No cooperation with slave holders in politics, no fellowship with them in religion, no affiliation with them in society. In fact no recognition of pro- slavery men except as ruffians, outlaws, and criminals."

Page 158. " It is our honest conviction that all the pro- slavery slave-holders deserve to be at once reduced to a parallel with the basest criminals that lie fettered within our public prisons."

Page 162. "Three quarters of a century hence, if the South retains slavery, which God forbid, she will be to the North what Poland is to Russia, Cuba to Spain, and Ireland to England."

Page 163. "The black God of slavery which the South has worshipped for 237 years."

On page 168 it said, "Slavery is a great moral, social, civil, and political evil, to be rid of at the earliest practical period."

Page 180. "In any event, come what will, transpire what may, the institution of slavery must be abolished."

Page 187. "Our purpose is as firmly fixed as the eternal pillars of heaven, we have determined to abolish slavery; and help us God, abolish it we will."

Page 234. " We believe it is as it ought to be, the desire, the determination, and the destiny of the Republican party to give the death blow to slavery."

Page 329. ,"Shall we pat the blood-hound of slavery, shall we fee the curs of slavery, shall we pay the whelps of slavery ? No! Never."

Now these dark and bitter teachings must have been conceived in the brains of iniquity, written with a pen that had been dipped in the blackest and most poisonous of gall, driven by a hand of an infuriated and bloodthirsty demon, who was a stranger to God and justice, spreading its vile sentiments upon sheets soaked in wormwood for its unholy purpose.

The contents of this book, "The Impending Crisis", was endorsed by sixty-eight republican members of Congress. Now what was the South to do, when this was the sentiment that had elected a president in Nov. 1860? Must she sit. still and see her property taken from her without remuneration, or should she secede and try to protect it according to the com- pact of 1787?