The year of Joe Brown's second nomination, as we have seen, was the year that witnessed John Brown's ridiculous raid into Virginia. The people of the South, however, thought it was a very serious matter, and the people of Georgia were not different from those of the rest of the South. Some very wise men allowed themselves to be led away by their passions. Even Joe Brown, as Alexander Stephens once said, "tucked his judgment under the bed" for the time being. Back of the indignation created by the John Brown raid was the unconfessed and half-formed fear that the Northern abolitionists would send their agents to the South and organize a negro insurrection. Many of the Southern people remembered the horrors of San Domingo, and there was a vague and an undefined but constant dread that such a rising of the blacks would take place in the South. But there never was any such danger in Georgia. The relations between the slaves and their masters were too friendly and familiar to make such an uprising possible. The abolitionists did send agents to the South to stir the negroes to rebellion, and some of them came to Georgia, but in every instance their mission became known to the whites through the friendliness of the blacks. There was always some negro ready to tell his master's family when the abolition agents made their appearance. Still the people resented to the utmost the spirit that moved certain so-called philanthropists of the North to endeavor to secure the freedom of the negroes by means of the torch and midnight murder. Consequently in 1859, when Joe Brown was nominated for governor the second time, the people were greatly stirred. Sectional feeling ran high. In that year began the active movement that led to secession and the civil war. If all our statesmen had been as wise as Mr. Stephens and Mr. Hill, war would have been averted. Slavery itself, in the very nature of things, was doomed. It had accomplished its providential mission. It had civilized and christianized millions of savages who had been redeemed from slavery in their own land. It had justified its own ends, and would have passed away in good time, no matter what compromise may have been made. Mr. Stephens and Mr. Hill were opposed to secession. They were for fighting, if there must be a fight, in the Union, and this was the true policy. For a while the people of Georgia were earnestly in favor of this; but the efforts of the abolitionists to stir the negroes to insurrection, and the inflammatory appeals of some of the leading men, led them to oppose a policy which was at once just, wise, and considerate. Even Joseph E. Brown, cool, calculating, placid, and not easily-swayed by emotion, became a disunionist, demonstrating once again that beneath the somber and calm exterior of the Puritan is to be found a nature as combative and as unyielding as that which marks the Cavalier.