Puritanism. The alarmists of the South, in their most fervid pictures of
the evils to be apprehended from the prevalence of anti-slavery doctrines
in their midst, have drawn nothing more fearful than the visions of such

"Prophets of war and harbingers of ill"

as Fisher Ames in the forum and Parish in the desk, when contemplating
the inroads of Jeffersonian democracy upon the politics, religion, and
property of the North.

But great numbers of the free laborers of the Northern States, the
mechanics and small farmers, took a very different view of the matter.
The doctrines of Jefferson were received as their political gospel. It
was in vain that federalism denounced with indignation the impertinent
inconsistency of slave-holding interference in behalf of liberty in the
free states. Come the doctrine from whom it might, the people felt it to
be true. State after state revolted from the ranks of federalism, and
enrolled itself on the side of democracy. The old order of things was
broken up; equality before the law was established, religious tests and
restrictions of the right of suffrage were abrogated. Take
Massachusetts, for example. There the resistance to democratic
principles was the most strenuous and longest continued. Yet, at this
time, there is no state in the Union more thorough in its practical
adoption of them. No property qualifications or religious tests prevail;
all distinctions of sect, birth, or color, are repudiated, and suffrage
is universal. The democracy, which in the South has only been held in a
state of gaseous abstraction, hardened into concrete reality in the cold
air of the North. The ideal became practical, for it had found lodgment
among men who were accustomed to act out their convictions and test all
their theories by actual experience.