In that remote time, the chase after the almighty dollar had commenced, and especially in New England, where every sentiment was subordinate to this.  Patriotism was a secondary sentiment.  Hypocritical pretension to the purity of religion was used to cover the vilest practices, and to shield from public indignation men who, praying, pressed into their service the vilest means to make haste to be rich.  The sordid parsimony of ninety-hundredths of the population shut out every sentiment of generosity, and rooted from the heart every emotion honorable to human nature.  Neighborhood intercourse was poisoned with selfishness, and the effort to overreach, and make money out of, the ignorance or necessities of these, was universal.  These degrading practices crept into every business, and petty frauds soon became designated as Yankee tricks.  There was nothing ennobling in their pursuits.  The honorable profession of law dwindled into pettifogging tricks.  Commerce was degraded in their hands by fraud and chicanery.  The pernicious and grasping nature everywhere cultivated, soon fastened upon the features.  Their eyes were pale, their features lank and hard, and the stony nature was apparent in the icy coldness of manner, in the deceitful grin, and lip-laugh, which the eye never shared, and which was only affected, when interest prompted, or the started suspicions of an intended victim warned them to be wary.  The climate, and the inhospitable and ungenerous soil, seemed to impart to the people their own natures.

The men were all growing sharp, and the women, cold and passionless; the soul appeared to shrivel and sink into induration, and the whole people were growing into a nation of cheats and dastards.  Such was the promise for the people of New England, in 1820.  Has it not been realized in the years of the recent intestine war?  The incentive held out to her people to volunteer into her armies, was the plunder of the South.  The world has never witnessed such rapacity for gain as marked the armies of the United States in their march through the South.  Religion and humanity were lost sight of in the general scramble for the goods and the money of the Southern people.  Rings were snatched from the fingers of ladies and torn from their ears; their wardrobes plundered and forwarded to expectant families at home; graves were violated for the plates of gold and silver that might be found upon the coffins; the dead bodies of women and men were unshrouded after exhumation, to search in the coffins and shrouds to see if valuables were not here concealed; and, in numerous instances, the teeth were torn from the skeleton mouths of the dead for the gold plugs, or gold plates that might be found there.  Nor was this heathenish rapacity confined to the common soldier; the commanders and subalterns participated with acquisitive eagerness, sharing fully with their commands the hellish instincts of their race.