News having been sent to Washington, Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived Tuesday morning with a force of marines and land troops. The local militia of Virginia had also been called out. The situation of Brown was hopeless, but he refused to surrender. Colonel Lee managed matters with such skill that only one of his men was shot, while Brown was wounded several times, his two sons killed, and others slain. The door of the engine-house was battered in and the desperate men overpowered. The enraged citizens would have rended them to pieces, had they been allowed, but Colonel Lee protected and turned them over to the civil authorities. Brown and his six companions were placed on trial, found guilty of what was certainly an unpardonable crime, and hanged on the 2d of December, 1859. Many in the South believed that the act of Brown was planned and supported by leading Republicans, but such was not the fact, and they were as earnest in condemnation of the mad proceeding as the extreme slavery men, but John Brown's raid served to fan the spark of civil war that was already kindled and fast growing into a flame. [Illustration: HARPER'S FERRY] PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN OF 1860. The presidential campaigns that had been pressed heretofore with a certain philosophic good nature, now assumed a tragic character. The South saw the growing preponderance of the North. New States were continually forming out of the enormous territory in the West, the opposition to slavery was intensifying, and its overthrow was certain. Senator Seward had announced the "irrepressible conflict" between freedom and the institution, and the only remedy the South saw lay in secession from the Union, for they loved that less than slavery. They announced their unalterable intention of seceding in the event of the election of a president of Republican principles. The Republicans placed Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, in nomination. Jefferson Davis saw that the only way of defeating him was by uniting all the opposing parties into one. He urged such a union, but the elements would not fuse.