The causes which determined the early party affiliations of the naturalized sons of the Vikings, in the broad area of State and Federal affairs, are to be found in the character of the immigrants themselves and in the great questions agitating the country at the time they became citizens. Coming to the United States with an endowment of natural independence, with an innate respect for government, and with an inclination for public concerns, their interest was at once actively aroused in the great problem of slavery that vexed national life from the time of the Sloop Folk to the Civil War. As their information about the slave system grew more exact, and as the tremendous significance of the restriction of the slave area as a cardinal political issue was made clear to their minds, they became of one mind in the mighty agitation. Neither they nor their ancestors for hundreds of years had held slaves; few of them had ever seen a slave, for their numerous traders and sailors, with slight exceptions, had no smell of blood of the African slave trade on their hands.[391] It was not chance, therefore, which kept the stream of North European immigrants from flowing into the South and Southwest; no attractiveness of climate or soil could compensate for the presence of Negro slavery. A horror and hatred of slavery colored their thinking from their first month in the New World; it was first a moral, then a political, conviction, not the sentiment of individuals, but the well-reasoned opinion of the whole community. [391] Du Bois, _Suppression of the African Slave-Trade_, 90 n 5, 131, 143 n 1. Bound together on this great question, then so dominant, they naturally maintained unity on other political questions as well as on slavery; and when once their ideas were fixed, any change would be effected slowly and with difficulty. The newcomers, in their first months in the older settlements, were speedily indoctrinated with anti-slavery sentiment. Thus it came about that one party received and retained the vast majority of the Scandinavians down to 1884, simply because a bent that way was given in the early years of immigration from the Northern peninsulas, and because the question of the status of the Negro, in one form or another, continued to be a political issue.