We might note as well that many southerners in the antebellum period had an exaggerated view of the popularity in the North of various radical notions with which leading abolitionists were associated–among them women’s suffrage, health food, free love, a critical approach to/rejection of the Bible, rejection of the Constitution, etc. In this context, the attack on slavery as immoral, retrograde, a retarding economic influence, and so on looked like just another ingredient in a very unsavory stew of Yankee craziness.
