The Sable Cloud | Page 7

involuntary wandering
from them how full our hearts are of your colored people, and how
self-forgetful we are in our desires and efforts to do them good. And
yet some of your Southern people can find it in their hearts to set at
nought these our most sacred Northern antipathies and commiserations!
But I constantly hear some of your words in your letter striking their
gentle, sad chimes in my ears. "It is not the parting alone, but the
helplessness that looked to you for protection which you could not
give;" "the emptiness of the home to which you return when the child is
gone."
Now, for such words, I solemnly declare that, in my opinion, you, dear
madam, never had a helpless slave look to you for protection which
you could give and which you refused; you, surely, never made a

slave's home desolate by taking her child from her. No, such words as
those which I have just quoted from your letter, are a perfect assurance
that neither you nor your kindred, within your knowledge, are guilty of
ruthless violations of domestic ties among your colored people.
Otherwise, you could not write as you do about "desolate homes" and
"the child gone." While I read your letter and think of you, I am
reminded of those words: "Is not this he whom they seek to kill?" Why,
if the insurgents' pikes were aimed at you and your child, I would
almost be willing to rush in and receive them in my own body. Yet I
would not be known at the North to have spoken so strongly as this. O
my dear madam, if there were only fifty righteous people (counting you)
in the South, people who knew what "desolate homes" and "the child
gone" mean, I should almost begin to hope that our Southern Gomorrah
might be spared.
But I fear that I am trespassing too far away from my sworn fealty to
Northern opinions and feelings. I begin to fear that I may be tempted to
be recreant to my inborn, inbred notions of liberty, while holding
converse with you, for there is something extremely seductive to a
Northerner in slavery; it is like the apple and the serpent to the woman;
so that whoever goes to the South, or has anything to do with
slave-holders, is apt to lose his integrity; there is a Circean influence
there for Northern people; thousands of once good, anti-slavery men
now lie dead and buried as to their reputations here at the North, in
consequence of having to do with the seductive slave-power; they
would fill Bonaventura Cemetery, in Savannah; the Spanish moss,
swaying on the limbs of its trees, would be, in number, fit signals of
their subjection to what you call right views on the subject of slavery.
Though I fear almost to hold converse with you, yet, conscious of my
innate love of liberty, I venture to do so. Bunker Hill is within twenty
miles of my home. When I go to that sacred memorial of liberty, I
strive to fortify my soul afresh against the slave-power. After hearing
favorable things said, in Boston, about the South, I can go to Faneuil
Hall, and there, the doors being carefully shut, walk enthusiastically
about the room, almost shouting, "Sam. Adams!" "James Otis!"
"Seventy-Six!" "Shade of Warren!" "No chains on the Bay State!"

"Massachusetts in the van!" "Give me liberty or give me death!" I can
enjoy the privilege of looking frequently on certain majestic figures in
our American Apocalypse, under the present vial,--but I need not name
them. I meet in our book-stores with "Lays of Freedom," never sung by
such as you. I see in the shop-windows the inspiring faces, in medallion,
of those masterpieces of human nature, "the champions of freedom,"
our chief abolitionists;--and shall I, can I, ever succumb to the
slave-power, even though it approach me through the holy,
all-subduing charms of woman's influence? No! dear madam, ten
thousand times, No! "Slave-power!" to borrow Milton's figure when
speaking of Ithuriel and Satan, the word is as the touch of fire to
powder, to our brave anti-slavery souls. You have, perhaps, seen a bull
stopping in the street, pawing the ground, throwing the dust over him
and covering himself with a cloud of it, his nose close to the earth, and
a low, bellowing sound issuing from his nostrils. Your heart has died
within you at the sight. You have been made to feel how slight a
defence is fan, or sunshade, against such an antagonist, though you
should make them to fly suddenly open in his face. No enemy of his
was in sight, so far as you could perceive; you wondered what had
excited his belligerent spirit; but he saw at a very great