“This mad attempt by a handful of vulgar cutthroats, and its condign punishment,” wrote the Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney, an important Presbyterian leader in the South and later chief of Jackson’s staff, “would have been a very trivial affair to the Southern people, but for the manner in which it was regarded by the people of the North. Their presses, pulpits, public meetings and conversations, disclosed such a hatred of the South and its institutions, as to lead them to justify the crime, involving though it did the most aggravated robbery, treason and murder; [and] to exalt the bloodthirsty
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