“Many worried that the public was increasingly confusing freedom with debauched egoism. “A new competitiveness was abroad in the land,” Wood says, “and people seemed to be almost at war with one another.”4 It was a season of “inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for,” as the theologian William Ellery Channing described his times.5.”
