The result of the agitation consequent on the theoretic extension of slavery to Kansas and Nebraska, and of the troubles in Kansas, was the appearance of John C. Fremont as the Republican free-soil candidate for the presidency in 1856. He was beaten, but his vote showed the existence of a formidable sectional party, in all of the free states, based on a solitary idea. The strength of this party was still further increased by an attempt to secure the admission of Kansas into the Union, under a Constitution liberating slavery and adopted by a convention held during the prevalence of the bitter feud there, but the most important result of the Kansas troubles was the development of the character of John Brown, a bold, desperate and fanatical Northern man, who made his appearance on the scene of action, and participated largely in the outrages committed by the free-soilers and abolitionists. What gave the crowning stroke to the already over-heated animosity between the two sections, was the appearance of John Brown on a new theatre of action. The political parsons and the agitators of the North did not confine themselves to the denunciation of the Southern people and of slavery, but they lavished their anathemas upon the Constitution which tolerated slavery and the Union which gave it, as they alleged, protection. Nor were the denunciations confined to Northern pulpits and abolition or free-soil papers, but were heard in the Senate Chamber and on the floor of the House of Representatives, and were accompanied with the most atrocious libels on the Southern people, in which they were represented as barbarians who delighted in inflicting upon their slaves the most revolting cruelties, and who engaged in the most debasing immoralities. Encouraged by these open denunciations of the Constitution and the Union, and stimulated by the picture of Southern wrongs and cruelty to the slaves, which were constantly placed before his eyes, John Brown gave way to the wild conceptions of a fanatical mind and undertook to subvert the government of the United States and to redress the wrongs of the slaves by deluging the Southern states in blood.