They were bad habits, which the dead past had imposed upon the
inhabitants of the Old World, and from which Americans could be
emancipated by virtue of their abundant faith in human nature and the
boundless natural opportunities of the new continent.
Thus the American national ideal of the Middle Period was essentially
geographical. The popular thinkers of that day were hypnotized by the
reiterated suggestion of a new American world. Their fellow-countrymen
had obtained and were apparently making good use of a wholly
unprecedented amount of political and economic freedom; and they jumped
to the conclusion that the different disciplinary methods which limited
both individual and social action in Europe were unnecessary. Just as
the Jacksonian Democracy had finally vindicated American political
independence by doing away with the remnants of our earlier political
colonialism, so American moral and intellectual independence demanded a
similar vindication. This geographical protestantism was in a measure
provoked, if not justified, by the habit of colonial dependence upon
Europe in matters of opinion, which so many well-educated Americans of
that period continued to cherish.
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