Lee,
the famous Confederate general of subsequent years; the undignified
haste of his trial and condemnation by the Virginia authorities; the
interviews of Governor Wise, Senator Mason, and Representative
Vallandigham with the prisoner; his sentence, and execution on the
gallows on December 2; and the hysterical laudations of his acts by a
few prominent and extreme abolitionists in the East, kept public
opinion, both North and South, in an inflamed and feverish state for
nearly six weeks.
Mr. Lincoln's habitual freedom from passion, and the steady and
common-sense judgment he applied to this exciting event, which threw
almost everybody into an extreme of feeling or utterance, are well
illustrated by the temperate criticism he made of it a few months later:
"John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It
was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which
the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the
slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not
succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many
attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and
emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he
fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them.
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