e impelling her? This tries my faith. It is
like an undesigned coincidence in holy writ, which used so to stagger my
unbelief. Possibly, however,--for I must maintain my previous
convictions if I can,--possibly her father is such as our anti-slavery
lecturers and writers declare a slave-holder naturally to be, and his
daughter, herself a mother, is seeking to touch his heart and turn him
from his cruelties as a slave-holder by showing him, in this indirect,
beautiful manner, that slave-mothers have the feelings of human beings.
Perhaps I may therefore compromise this matter by allowing, on one hand,
that the daughter is all that she appears to be, and claiming, on the
other, that the father is all that a slave-holder ought to be to verify
our Northern theories. But she herself is a slave-holder, and therefore
by our theory she ought to be imbruted. I beg her pardon, and that of
her father; but they must consider how hard it is for us at the North to
conquer all our prejudices even under the influence of such a
demonstration as her letter. I ask one simple question: Is not this
slave-babe, (and her mother,) of "the down-trodden," and is not this
lady one of the down-treading? And yet she weeps,--not because, as I
would have supposed, she had lost one hundred and fifty dollars in the
child, but as though she loved it like the sick and dying child of a
fellow-creature, of a mother like herself. Now, who at the North ever
hears of such a thing in slavery? The old New York Tabernacle could have
said, It is not in me;--the modern Boston Music Hall says, It is not in
me. None of the antislavery papers, political or religious, say, We have
heard the fame thereof with our ears. Our Northern instructors on the
subject of slavery, the orators, the Uncle Tom's Cabins, "The Scholar an
Agitator," have never taught us to believe this. The South, we are
instructed to think, is a Golgotha, a valley of Hinnom; compacts with it
are covenants with hell. But here is one holy angel with its music; a
ministering spirit; but is she a Lot in Sodom? Abdiel in the revolted
principality? a desolate, mourning Rizpah on that rock which overlooks
four millions of slaves and their tortures?

In a less instructed state of mind on this subject, I should once have
said, on reading this letter,--This is slavery. Here is a view of life
at the South. As a traveller accidentally catches a sight of a family
around their table, and domestic life gleams upon him