The True Lesson

It is a very careless use of words to describe the Harper’s Ferry outbreak as a “negro insurrection,” or “slave insurrection,” as is frequently done by presses, which are really disposed to speak of it in the proper tone of indignation at the outrage, the actors, and their prompters. But these epithets give a false impression, which is well calculated to do mischief, by spreading perversions of the nature of the transaction in its Southern bearings. It was not a negro insurrection at all -- a slave insurrection at all; scarcely an insurrection at all, inasmuch as insurrection implies a rising of revolters against their own Government. There were no Virginians, bond or free, engaged in it; there were no slaves at all, except one or two, who were seized and held under terror; not one negro or mulatto, except some intruding free negroes, loafing vagabonds from other States, and no whites but such as came over the line from various points in the free States, to stir up a dissaffection which they did not find. Instead of a Virginia insurrection, or a slave rebellion in Virginia, it should be more properly described as an invasion of Virginia by a gang of abolitionists, dupes or emissaries of a treasonable fanaticism, going into a peaceful country to scatter “firebrands, arrows and death.”