on
manual labor as fit only for slaves and low-class whites. His ideal of
society was a pyramid, the lower courses representing the physical
toilers, the intermediate strata supplying a higher quality of social
service, while the crown was a class refined by leisure and cultivation
and free to give themselves to generous and hospitable private life,
with public affairs for their serious pursuit. He regarded the
prominence of the laboring class in Northern communities as marking the
inferiority of their society, and in the absorption of the wealthier
class in trade he read a further disadvantage. The virtues he most
honored were courage, courtesy, magnanimity,--all that he delighted to
characterize as "chivalry." He was inclined to consider the North as
materialistic and mercenary, and even its virtues as based largely on
"honesty is the best policy."

This low opinion was heartily reciprocated by the Northerner. He
believed the very foundation of Southern society to be injustice,--the
unpaid labor of the slave,--and the superstructure to correspond. He
looked on the slave-holders as cruel to their slaves and arrogant
toward the world at large, especially toward himself. The popular
opinion of slavery fastened on its abuses and ignored its mitigations.
On the average reader of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, Legree made a deeper
impression than St. Clare or Mrs. Shelby.

Even the religious and intellectual life of the two sections had grown
unsympathetic and often antagonistic. The South held tenaciously to the
traditional orthodox theology. In the North there was free discussion
and movement of thought. Even the conservative Presbyterian church had
its New School and Old School; and in New England the Congregational
body was divided by the birth and growth of Unitarianism. At all this
turmoil the South looked askance, and was genuinely shocked by the
disintegration of the old creed. The North in turn looked with something
like suspicion, if not scorn, on a Christianity which used the Bible as
an arsenal to fortify slavery. The Northern brood of reforms and
isms,--wise, unwise, or fantastic,--moved the South to a hostility which
made little discrimination between the idealism of Emerson, the
iconoclasm of Parker, and the vagaries of "free love." The group of
literary lights,--Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, and
their compeers,--won Southern dislike by their hostility to slavery. The
South itself, singularly barren