Nicely done, Marc, but I have to say that I’m rather puzzled by this: “… many northern Whigs—who prized stability over chaos and uncertainty— simply couldn’t abide the anarchy caused by John Brown and his fellow abolitionists.”

John Brown was virtually unknown to anybody other than his neighbors and a few abolitionists until his Kansas campaigns in 1856; Harper’s Ferry was in 1859. Given that the Whigs had more or less completely disintegrated already by 1856, I have trouble taking seriously the suggestion that John Brown or the guerilla tactics associated with him had very much bearing on anti-abolitionist Northern Whigs’ thought…