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Of course Margaret sympathized with this “small minority”—the “Transcendental party,” she called them—who were the first “since the Revolution” to experience a “violent reaction” against the established “mode of culture,” recognizing a half-century after the birth of American democracy that “political freedom does not necessarily produce liberality of mind, nor freedom in church institutions.” New England was finally “old enough,” Margaret understood, and “some there have leisure enough,” she wrote to William in Cincinnati, to look around and decry the “vulgarity of a commercial aristocracy,” to “quarrel with all that is, because it is not spiritual enough.
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