In general, these two regions of our national life were separated by a
geographical boundary. One was the spirit of the North, the other was
the spirit of the South. But the Southern nature was by no means all a
Southern thing. There it had an organized, established form, a certain
definite, established institution about which it clustered. Here,
lacking advantage, it lived in less expressive ways and so lived more
weakly. There, there was the horrible sacrament of slavery, the outward
and visible sign round which the inward and spiritual temper gathered
and kept itself alive. But who doubts that among us the spirit of
slavery lived and thrived? Its formal existence had been swept away from
one State after another, partly on conscientious, partly on economical
grounds, but its spirit was here, in every sympathy that Northern winds
carried to the listening ear of the Southern slave-holder, and in every
oppression of the weak by the strong, every proud assumption of idleness
over labor which echoed the music of Southern life back to us. Here in
our midst lived that worse and falser nature, side by side with the true
and better nature which God meant should be the nature of Americans, of
which he was shaping out the type and champion in his chosen David of
the sheepfold.
Here then we have the two. The history of our country for many years is
the history of how these two elements of American life approached
collision. They wrought their separate reactions on each other.
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