The New York Evening Post, thus replies to the incendiary ravings of the Douglass organ at Washington, which basely attempts to make political capital by charging that the Republicans are accountable for the late outbreak at Harper's Ferry, and makes the silly assertion that the Demonstration by Brown and his handfull of deluded followers is "the most alarming and daring insurrection --dry demonstration that has ever been made the United States." Says the Post:
It is altogether an error to represent this as the most daring insurrection that has taken place in the United States. The Southampton movement in 1831, which originated with Nat Turner, a slave preacher, which was concerted among the slaves themselves, and which was only suppressed after the murder in cold blood, or some fifty or sixty white persons, was a far more formidable manifestation of discontent and ability. Again the revolt in Tennessee in 1857, the ringleaders of which evinced so much determination, and the ramifications of whose plots were supposed to extend not only over that State, but into Arkansas and Louisiana, assumed more fearful proportions than this Virginia stampede. Those outbreaks were spontaneous movements, of the serville class, but this one was chiefly stimulated from the outside, by a few frenzied men who conceived they could best wreak their vengeance on the slaveholders in that way.
When the State proceeds to ascribe the agitation to the prevalence of Republicanism, it suffers its passion to betray it into silliness. --The Republicans have never counseled or countenanced violence, either in respect to Slavery or any other subject, but they have resisted it and rebuked it on all occasions, and with all their might. Those lawless schemes and deeds which have disgraced the nation for some years past have not been their work. It was not they who invited the Missouri marauders into Kansas to outrage and butcher innocent settlers. It was not they who perpetrated the sack of Lawrence, burning the hotels, destroying the printing presses, and shooting the women and children. Nor have the Republicans sustained the plans of the filibuster Walker in hist attempts to land bodies of armed cut-throats upon the shores of a peaceful and unoffending nation to plunder its property, murder its citizens and overturn its political government. --Neither have they endeavored to produce an invasion of the territory of Mexico by United States troops in order to stir up civil war in a sister Republic and seize her provinces. Much less have they recommended forcible seizure of the island of Cuba as a justifiable and necessary part of our public policy.
The States is a journal that has throughout supported these proceedings, and Ossawatomic Brown is only a disciple of its own school. --He has thought it just as right and proper to invade Virginia as it was for the States and its party to invade Kansas, Nicaragua, Mexico, or or Cuba. His reasonings have been probably the same. A great evil, in his opinion, exists in Virginia; it is his "manifest destiny" to abate it; and, following the examples that have been set him, he undertakes to abate it with fire and sword. Mad as the act was, and deplorable as the consequences of it might have been, it proceeded from the same atrocious principles which dictate Kansas forays, Central American filibusterism and Cuba invasions. We defy the champions of those schemes to show the least difference in several cases. We call upon them to allege a single reason in justification of their measures which Brown might not with equal propriety allege in behalf of his. If he is an incendiary, so are they; if his plot was diabolical, so were their plots; and the more atrocious they make his conduct appear, the more they expose the atrcity o their own conduct.
Delaware (OH) Gazette, October 28, 1859