y
correspondents and in the sensation items of the newspapers, to regard
them as little short of demons in female shape. All this is naturally
working a corresponding dislike and ill-feeling among the masses North.
To such I would say: These Southern sisters are not demons, but made of
the same flesh and blood, and passions and affections as yourselves. The
difference between you is purely one of circumstances and training, of
locality--above all, of education and institutions. It is as true that
_institutions are second nature_ as that _habit_ is.

The peculiar faults of Southern women they share with their Northern
sisters, only in a vastly enhanced degree; and besides these, they have
others, born of and nurtured by that terrible slavery system under whose
black shadow they live and die. Their idleness, their lack of neatness
and order, their dependence, their quick and sometimes cruel passions,
their unreason, their contempt of inferiors, their vanity and arrogance,
their ignorance, their lightness and superficiality, are all the
outgrowth of its diabolical influences. They are, in fact, no more idle,
thriftless, passionate, or supercilious, than Northern women would be in
similar circumstances. It is too much the habit among the unreflecting,
in judging of the Southern masses in their hostile attitude toward their
lawful Government, to give less weight than it deserves to the necessary
and inevitable tendency upon the mind and character of such an
institution as African slavery; and to let the blame be of a personal
and revengeful nature, which should fall most heavily on the sin itself,
the dire crime against God and society, against himself and his fellow
man, which the individual is all his life taught is no crime but a
positive good. This slavery is woman's peculiar curse, bearing almost
equally with its deadly, hideous weight on the white woman of the
dominant class as upon the black slave woman. And yet how deluded they
are! If that curse does come to an utter end in the South, as it surely
will, I shall hail, as one of the grandest results of its extinction,
next to the justice due the oppressed people of color, the emancipation
of the white women of that fair land, all of them, slaveholders and
non-slaveholders, from an influence too withering and deadly for
language to depict. Oh, when shall that scapegoat, slavery, with its
failures and losses and shortcomings, its frauds and sins and woes, be
sent off in