r
the influence of London or Boston or New York. I do not mean by this that
it should continue to attract attention by peculiarities of dialect-which
is only an incidental, temporary phenomenon, that speedily becomes
wearisome, whether "cracker" or negro or Yankee--but by being true to the
essential spirit and temperament of Southern life.

During this period there was at the North, and especially in the East,
great intellectual activity and agitation, and agitation ethical and
moral as well as intellectual. There was awakening, investigation,
questioning, doubt. There was a great deal of froth thrown to the
surface. In the free action of individual thought and expression grew
eccentricities of belief and of practice, and a crop of so-called "isms,"
more or less temporary, unprofitable, and pernicious. Public opinion
attained an astonishing degree of freedom,--I never heard of any
community that was altogether free of its tyranny. At least extraordinary
latitude was permitted in the development of extreme ideas, new,
fantastic, radical, or conservative. For instance, slavery was attacked
and slavery was defended on the same platform, with almost equal freedom.
Indeed, for many years, if there was any exception to the general
toleration it was in the social ostracism of those who held and expressed
extreme opinions in regard to immediate emancipation, and were
stigmatized as abolitionists. There was a general ferment of new ideas,
not always fruitful in the direction taken, but hopeful in view of the
fact that growth and movement are better than stagnation and decay. You
can do something with a ship that has headway; it will drift upon the
rocks if it has not. With much foam and froth, sure to attend agitation,
there was immense vital energy, intense life.

Out of this stir and agitation came the aggressive, conquering spirit
that carried civilization straight across the continent, that built up
cities and States, that developed wealth, and by invention, ingenuity,
and energy performed miracles in the way of the subjugation of nature and
the assimilation of societies. Out of this free agitation sprang a
literary product, great in quantity and to some degree distinguished in
quality, groups of historians, poets, novelists, essayists, biographers,
scientific writers. A conspicuous agency of the period was the lecture
platform, which did something in the spread and popularization of
information, but much more in the stimul