Religion and morality were the primary influences that led the Northerners in their debate and beliefs against slavery. The Northern people religiously bashed the Southern slave culture. "Slavery was the root of all evil" (Nash, 495). Their beliefs were undoubtedly magnified when the Southerners response was that slavery is a "necessary evil." They attacked the morality of Southerners defenses, claiming that the practice is against all morals that religion preaches. A migrant traveling through Missouri into Kansas recalls, "the "morals" of the slaveholding Missourians moving into Kansas were of an "undesirably repulsive and undesirable character"" (Nash, 492). That was a pride that the North held amongst them selves. Without the utilization of slavery, the North "saw itself as a prosperous land of bustling commerce self-made free men" (Nash, 494). When the South countered their beliefs in slavery, it intensified the disgust the North had for the region and the practice they endorsed. The South had already been dependent upon slavery for 300 years, and couldn't understand the North's arguments. Magnified by the recent Second Great Awakening, Northerners religious and moral views were dependent upon religious principles set forth over 100 years before the Civil War, and thus, couldn't understand the South's arguments. The American Enlightenment, which took place in mid 18th Century, was now shedding its lingering ideals on slavery issues 100 years later. "A few individuals, mostly Quaker, had objected to slavery on moral grounds since the late seventeenth century. But the idea grew in the 1750s that slavery contradicted the Christian concept of brotherhood and the Enlightenment notion of the natural equality of all humans" (Nash, 148). Religion and morality may have been the chief complaint in slavery, but others simply didn't like the appearance that the practice bestowed on the nation.