But the broad-wasting flood, poured out from the cleft dike, soon sent an alarm throughout the North, and inspired terror among even the conscientious of the South. To protect slavery—however repugnant—where it existed in the old States was felt very universally in the North to be a duty imposed by law, equity, and good neighborhood; but to batter down a barrier which had been erected by both North and South, every timber in which had been paid for by a price given and accepted, shook nearly all consciences into sad action. Wherever the waters swept there were land-slides from Democratic grounds. The shield against agitation now crumbled like the stricken dike. Kansas became another Flanders, where pikes, knives, and pistols were carried at the plough, into private houses, through villages, and into conventions. They were ever-present adjectives to the noun “man.” As in the tropics, whirlwinds rush in towards the sun’s hot path, so towards Kansas from Missouri swept advocates of slavery with bullets for the settler and brands for his dwelling; from New England long-haired men and short-haired women, ready all, some anxious, to be offered up for the cause of freedom; from the Middle and Western States sharp, bayonet-faced, earnest crusaders to rescue the threatened sacred ground and to throw down the bronze statues and statutes. On the path of these hot streams backward soon lay the scorched and burnt relics of slavery in Kansas. To slavery in the United States a moral blow was dealt by the cane of Preston S. Brooks, aimed May 22, 1856, at the undefended head of Senator Sumner, which had a few days before opened to express in emphatic words its owner’s ideas about African barbarism in America. This appropriate practical illustration of the argument was visible everywhere, and became more potent than any books from or in behalf of the running Brooks. The cane given to the chivalrous Carolinian was a poor straw which did not show the way the winds blew. Still another blow was given by the Dred Scott opinion of a majority of the Supreme Court, which advised the people in choice legal terms that the dike was rightfully cut; that men with dark skins had no rights which those with light ones need pay any attention to; and that uncolored owners might take ebony bipeds along with their quadrupeds into any State in any part of the Union without getting them out of an unpaid state. This Africanization brought out a new party,—called the Republican,—for keeping the Territories free. Several political missionaries, benevolently inclined towards our continent, started on trips into the interior of America, bent, like Dr. Livingstone, on exploring regions almost surrendered, like Africa, to the descendants of Ham. The result was the discovery of a race, deemed almost extinct, who actually believed that colored men might live unowned, and that Territories, where slavery did not exist, would get along better without than with it.