During the three decades before the war, a remarkable outbreak of heresy occurred all over the East and middle West.

Every convention of American life was questioned, except those unconscious conventions of feeling and thought which pervaded the intellectual and moral atmosphere.

The Abolitionist agitation was the one practical political result of this ferment, but many of these free-thinkers wished to emancipate the whites as well as the blacks.

They fearlessly challenged substantially all the established institutions of society.

The institutions of marriage and the state fared frequently as ill as did property and the church.