Slidells and the Masons of the South received no less flattering
attentions from their European economic and social kinsmen. One of
Bismarck's most intimate friends was John L. Motley, and the friendship
had been contracted long before Motley had won fame as a historian.
American heiresses had already found suitors among the British nobility.
The kinship of Eastern social life with that of Europe was recognized,
and the relations of the well-to-do at the North with the wealthy of the
South were many and intimate. Thus in America as elsewhere talent,
birth, and money produced social strata, and before 1860 the
distinctions of class were only less sharply drawn here than in the
older countries of the world.

But, next to the very necessaries of life, religion was the most
important subject to Americans of 1860. The Puritan spirit, while losing
some of its hold in New England, had captured the people of the rest of
the country. Except as to the Catholics and the Episcopalians, all
Americans were born, or thought themselves born, utterly depraved and
weighted down with the sin of Adam and Eve, their "first parents," from
which burden the only way of escape was through prayer and agony of
soul. Even this prospect was denied to many, for some influential
religious teachers urged that God could not hear the supplications of
sinners. These must await the call of Heaven, and if this failed, they
were bound for the "lake of fire," whence there was no return. The
intelligent and well-informed spoke with all seriousness of "getting
religion," and in the vast country districts the most suitable season
for this was the hot July and August days. Revivals among nearly all the
leading denominations were held at this time in the churches or under
widespread arbors made from the branches of trees. The preaching and the
singing were not unlike that which brought the Germans of the eighth
century to the Roman communion. The other worlds were just two: one the
city of the golden gates and pearly streets, the other the bottomless
pit of liquid fire into which Satan would surely plunge all who failed
to make their peace with God in this life. The old Puritan lines
formerly learned by every child--

"God's vengeance feeds the flame
With piles of wood and brimstone flood,
That none can quench the same"--

represented to most people of the decade just preceding the Civil War
all they said. Both old men and young