Since you asked.
Republican senators Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and William
Seward (Republican front-runner for president in 1860) knew about John Brown's
plans to commit an act of terror at Harper's Ferry 17 months before it
happened, yet they told no one. Seward did not object to the plan, he only
“expressed regret that he had been told.” (New York Herald, October 27, 1859).
Barclay Coppoc, one of John Brown's raiders, escaped from
Harper's Ferry in October 1859. His brother Edwin was captured and gave his
brother up, telling his captors that Barclay was probably back home in Iowa.
When Virginia asked for his arrest and extradition to Virginia for trial for
murder, treason and insurrection, the Republican governor of Iowa refused, and
even sent a messenger to Coppoc warning his that Virginia was seeking his
arrest and extradition. The
Staunton (Va.) Vindicator condemned Kirkwood’s entire
handling of this case. “The conduct of the Governor of Iowa … is remarkable for
its duplicity, and shows to us of the South, what we have to expect from
northern officials, elevated to power by the sectional party of the day.” (Staunton, Va. Vindicator, February 17, 1860.) In other words, this is what a
Republican in executive office means: Republicans will use their office to
protect from prosecution criminals as long as they are antislavery criminals,
which does not bode well for states with lots a slaves, whoever owns them.
The very next week, the Alabama legislature issued a
declaration. "anti-slavery agitation persistently continued in the
non-slaveholding States of this Union, for more than a third of a century,
marked at every stage of its progress by contempt for the obligations of law
and the sanctity of compacts [such as the provision of the return of fugitives
from justice who have escaped into neighboring states of the Union], evincing a
deadly hostility to the rights and institutions of the Southern people, and a
settled purpose to effect their overthrow even by the subversion of the
Constitution, and at the hazard of violence and bloodshed." (Smith, History and Debates of the
Convention of the People of Alabama, p. 9). Alabama did not
issue secession declaration in January 1861, but it did lay out its grievances
in February 1860.
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