It served a constructive democratic purpose only by the expensive and dubious means of instigating a Civil War.

If any of the other heresies of the period, as well as Abolitionism, had developed into an effective popular agitation, they could have obtained a similar success only by means of incurring a similar danger.

The intellectual ideals of the movement were not educational, and its declaration of intellectual independence issued in as sterile a programme for the Republic of American thought as did the Declaration of Political Independence for the American national democracy.
In truth all these mid-century American heretics were not heretics at all in relation to really stupefying and perverting American tradition.
They were sturdily rebellious against all manner of respectable methods, ideas, and institutions, but none of them dreamed of protesting against the real enemy of American intellectual independence.

They never dreamed of associating the moral and intellectual emancipation of the individual with the conscious fulfillment of the American national purpose and with the patient and open-eyed individual and social discipline thereby demanded.

They all shared the illusion of the pioneers that somehow a special Providential design was effective on behalf of the American people, which permitted them as individuals and as a society to achieve their purposes by virtue of good intentions, exuberant enthusiasm, and enlightened selfishness.