Suddenly, in the autumn of 1859, through the lurid light was thrust a gaunt, resolute, earnest-looking form, with a face calm with long excitement, over whose lines ran the savage history of Kansas murders and house-burnings, fatal shots from border rifles at well-loved sons, midnight escapes from Lecompton riders, and years of hunted violence and wrong. From the close-shut jaws,—seldom opened now except for food, for brief prayer before some new raid, or for an imprecation wrenched out by some cruel recollection,—come no sounds. Across the bridge at Harper’s Ferry, through the scared streets of that little garrisoned place, and next into the jail it stalks. Then it flits into court, calmer than the personated Justice, and then, marched between files of soldiers, to fence off a phantom invasion, it mounts the scaffold. An old man, with a grim smile stranded on the iron rim of his lips, swings in Virginia air, and—John Brown’s soul goes marching on. On the Southern heart this Quixotic invasion by a mistaken, personally injured father, maddened by the losses of his sons, and unjustifiably wreaking his individual injuries on a community innocent of any wrong to him, laid a live, inflaming coal. In April, 1860, the Democratic Convention met at Charleston. Some gentlemen asked that body to declare its belief that the Union, having been got up principally to hold Africans in an unpaid condition, any uncolored owner could, by virtue of the laws of his own State, take these bronze-colored bipeds,—always diffusing a bad odor unless to their proprietors,—to any Territory. Not holding such a notion, the Convention declined to make the declaration, but, on the contrary, asserted that each Territory was competent to deal with the matter as it saw fit. The question, thus resolved, was not of course to the minority satisfactorily solved. Following a convenient practice, deemed by some persons, unschooled in such things, a little uncommon among gentlemen, of getting, if possible, a decision favorable to their views which shall bind the minority, and if unsuccessful repudiating the adverse decision as affecting them, the delegates of six bronze-statued States left the unreasonable party, carrying a banner with a dimly seen inscription, “Heads I win, tails you lose, or, tails I win, heads you lose.” The convention, thus treated to Breckinridge principles, adjourned to meet in June at Baltimore. Meanwhile, in May, the missionary party, reinforced by numerous converts, assembled and chose the Anak of Illinois as their leader. In June the widowed Democratic Convention reassembled; but only to split up into two family divisions, the one nominating the dike-breaker, the other John C. Breckenridge, then Vice-President, and destined in a few years to take, not the Presidency, but the very first prize for a character which total depravity is occasionally permitted to offer, lest fiction may invent a combination that shall outstrip reality.