The emancipated idea was
usually defined by seeking the opposite of the conventional idea.
Individuality was considered to be a matter of being somehow and anyhow
different from other people. There was no authentic intellectual
discipline behind the agitation. The pioneer democrat with all his
limitations embodied the only living national body of opinion, and he
remained untainted by this outburst of heresy. He deprived it of all
vitality by depriving its separate explosions, Abolitionism excepted, of
all serious attention. He crushed it far more effectually by
indifference than he would have by persecution. When the shock of the
Civil War aroused Americans to a realization of the unpleasant political
realities sometimes associated with the neglect of a "noble national
theory," the ferment subsided without leaving behind so much as a loaf
of good white bread.
For practical political purposes it exhausted itself, as I have said, in
Abolitionism, and in that movement both its strength and weakness are
writ plain.
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