The Sable Cloud | Page 6

thing. Neither Paul nor James, however, had felt the tonic,
bracing effect of good anti-slavery principles, or they would not have
written, the one such a letter to a slave-holder, and the other such a
back-oar argument against "faith alone." However, I am disposed to
think well of Paul and James, notwithstanding these the great errors of
their lives. Indeed I can almost forgive them, when I am reading other
things which they said and did. You will please acknowledge, therefore,

my dear madam, that in giving you credit for kind feelings toward a
poor slave and its mother, we are disposed to be just; yet I beg of you
not to think that I abate one jot or tittle of my belief that, in theory,
slavery is "the sum of all villanies," "an enormous wrong," "a
stupendous injustice."
I have just been reading your letter once more, and the foolish tears
pester me so that I can scarce see out of my eyes. I find, dear madam,
that you have known a bitter sorrow which so many parents are
carrying with them to the grave. Your words make me think so of little
graves elsewhere, that I forget for the time that you are a slave-holder.
Nor can I hardly believe that your touching words are suggested by the
death of a slave's babe, when you speak of "the heavy earth piled on the
tender little breast." O my dear lady! has a slave's babe "a tender little
breast"? Then you really think so! And you a slave-holder! "Border
Ruffianism," perhaps, has not yet reached your heart; and yet I
suppose--forgive me if I do you wrong--that slave-holders' hearts
generally need only to be removed to the "borders," to manifest all their
native "ruffianism." Can you tell me whether there are any mothers in
Missouri (near Kansas) who feel toward their slaves who are mothers,
as you do? There are so many people from the North in Kansas (near
Missouri) who have gone thither to prevent you and your brethren and
sisters from owning a fellow-creature there, that I trust their influence
will in time extend through all Missouri, and that white mothers in that
State will everywhere have such humane feelings toward the blacks as
we and you possess.
All that I ask of you now, is, that you give Kate her liberty at once. Oh,
do not say, as I fancy you will, There is not a happier being than Kate
in all the land of freedom. "Fiat justitia," dear madam, "ruat coelum." I
cannot conceive how being "owned" is anything but a curse. Really, we
forget the miseries of the Five Points, and of the dens in New York,
Boston, Buffalo, and other places at the North, the hordes in the city
and State institutions in New York Harbor, Deer Island, Boston, and all
such things, in our extreme pity for poor slave-mothers, like Kate,
whose children, when they get to be about nine or ten years old, are
liable to be sold. Honest Mrs. Striker came to work in our family, not

long since, leaving her young child at home in the care of a young
woman who watched it for ten cents a day. I said to her, Dear Mrs.
Striker, are you not glad that you live in a free state, and not where,
when you return like a bird to its nest at night, you may find your little
one carried off, you know not where, by some man-stealer, you know
not whom?--We honor your kind feelings, madam, but you are not
aware, probably, what overflowing love and tender pity there is among
us Northerners, toward your slaves and their children. We are
disinterested, too; for we nearly forget our own black people here at the
North, and more especially in Canada, to care for you and your people.
And though hundreds of innocent young people are decoyed into our
Northern cities yearly from the country and are made the victims of
unhallowed passions, yet the thought that some of your young people
on those remote, solitary plantations, can be compelled by their masters
to do wrong on pain of being sold, fills us with such unaffected distress
that we think but little of voluntary or compulsory debauchery in our
own cities; but we think of dissolving the Union to rid ourselves of
seeming complicity with such wickedness as we see to be inherent in
the relation of master and slave. We at the North should all be wicked if
we had such opportunities; we know, therefore, that you must be.
Because you will not let us reprove you for it, we cut off our
correspondence with your Southern ecclesiastical bodies. But I began
to speak of little graves. You will see by my