The evening reinforced Russell’s growing conviction that Northerners had little understanding of their brethren below the Mason-Dixon Line. Southerners, he noted, routinely traveled North, but Northerners were far less likely to go South, in part out of a concern, he realized, for safety. William Seward’s ignorance was particularly striking to Russell. The secretary dismissed Southerners as being “in every respect behind the age, with fashions, habits, level of thought, and modes of life, belonging to the worst part of the last century. But still he never has been there himself!”
