But the living soul and integrating idea of the party was new, the rigid confinement of slavery and the slave power to their narrowest constitutional limits. It denounced the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In the election of this year, 1856, eleven States chose Republican electors, viz.: all New England, also New York, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Evidently the Democracy had at last found a foe at which it were best not to sneer. The Dred Scott decision immensely aided the growth of this new political power, as it was now quite generally believed in the North that the whole policy of the South was a greedy, selfish grasping for the extension of slavery. [1858] Out of this conviction, apparently, grew the John Brown raid into Virginia in 1858. John Brown was an enthusiast, whom sufferings from the Border Ruffians in Kansas, where one of his sons had been atrociously murdered and another driven to insanity by cruel treatment as a prisoner, had frenzied in his opposition to slavery. He had dedicated himself to its extirpation. The intrepid old man formed the purpose of invading Virginia, and of placing himself with a few white allies at the head of a slave insurrection that should sweep the State. Friends in the North had contributed money for the purchase of arms, and on October 16th, Brown, with fourteen white men and four negroes, seized the United States Armory at Harper's Ferry. He stopped the railway trains, freed some slaves, and assumed to rule the town. United States troops were at once despatched to the scene, when the misguided hero, with his devoted band, fortified themselves in the engine house, surrendering only after thirteen of them, including two of Brown's sons, were killed or mortally wounded. Brown and the other survivors were soon tried, convicted, and hung. This insane attempt was deprecated by nearly all of all parties; but the fate of Brown, with his resolute bravery, begot him large sympathy, and the false assumption of the South that he really represented northern feeling made his deed helpful to the anti-slavery movement, of which the Republican Party was now the centre. [Illustration: Portrait.] John Brown. [1860]