The Self-Righteous Fanaticism of Northern Abolitionism

The origin of the spirit of coercion was not at Fort Sumter. Its origin was in the bitter zeal of righteous men. These men commonly belonged to a well-known type. With them, everything is idealized as good or bad. Their happiness, their sense of their own significance, is in identifying the good with their own ideas and convictions, and in destroying whatever fails to conform thereto. To them, slavery was bad in some unique and Satannic sense.... They were denied the spiritual exaltation of earlier men of their type in burning witches and heretics. But men of this type in every generation must have some means of self-expression, and that generation found a furious pleasure in assailing distant slave-holders. In their delusion of unselfish devotion to the good, men of the type persist in serving at all costs their own sense of identity with the good, their own sense of superiority and significance. It never occurs to them that the method of destroying what they assume to be bad may have more badness in it than the thing destroyed. Nor do they readily realize that the attainment of desirable ends may be retarded rather than promoted by stigmatizing opponents with evil motives and by antagonizing them with threats of coercion.

— Witt Bowden, The Industrial History of the United States (New York: Adelphi Company, 1930), page 252.

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