age."

The Southern people, in the majority of instances, had no hatred of the
blacks. In the main they led their free, spirited, and gracious life,
convinced that the maintenance of slavery was but making the best of
circumstances which were beyond their control. It was these Southern
people who were to hear from afar the horrible indictment of all
their motives by the Abolitionists and who were to react in a growing
bitterness and distrust toward everything Northern.

But of these Southern people the average Northerner knew nothing.
He knew the South only on its least attractive side of professional
politics. For there was a group of powerful magnates, rich planters or
"slave barons," who easily made their way into Congress, and who played
into the hands of the Northern capitalists, for a purpose similar to
theirs. It was these men who forced the issue upon slavery; they warned
the common people of the North to mind their own business; and for doing
so they were warmly applauded by the Northern capitalist class. It was
therefore in opposition to the whole American world of organized capital
that the Northern masses demanded the use of "the Northern hammer"--as
Sumner put it, in one of his most furious speeches--in their aim to
destroy a section where, intuitively, they felt their democratic ideal
could not be realized.

And what was that ideal? Merely to answer democracy is to dodge the
fundamental question. The North was too complex in its social structure
and too multitudinous in its interests to confine itself to one type
of life. It included all sorts and conditions of men--from the most
gracious of scholars who lived in romantic ease among his German and
Spanish books, and whose lovely house in Cambridge is forever associated
with the noble presence of Washington, to the hardy frontiersman,
breaking the new soil of his Western claim, whose wife at sunset shaded
her tired eyes, under a hand rough with labor, as she stood on the
threshold of her log cabin, watching for the return of her man across
the weedy fields which he had not yet fully subdued. Far apart as were
Longfellow and this toiler of the West, they yet felt themselves to be
one in purpose.

They were democrats, but not after the simple, elementary manner of the
democrats at the opening of the century. In the North, there had come
to life a peculiar phase of idealism that had touched democracy with
mysticism and had added to it a vague but genuine r