on to this show
of prowess. That fearful combatant on the highway, dear madam, is the
North, and you are the distant foe. You may affect to smile, perhaps, at
the valorous attitudes, the show of mettle in the bull, but you have no
idea, as I had the honor to say before, how sturdy is our hatred of the
slave-power and how ready we are to do battle with it. We paw in the
valley, and are not afraid.

Never think to delude us, my dear lady, with the thought that slavery in
our Territories means such ladies as you owning Kates and their little
babes, and having such hearts toward them as you seem to have; for that
would take away a large part of the evil in slavery. Nor must you expect
us, in thinking of slavery as extending into our Territories, to picture
to ourselves an accomplished gentleman and lady searching a cemetery for
a spot to be the grave of a little slave-babe, and behaving themselves
as though they had feelings toward it and its mother irrespective of the
market-price of slaves. "Border Ruffians" are the archetypes of our
ideas respecting all who wish to extend slavery into our Territories. On
the score of humanity, madam, we have no objection to you and your
husband taking Kate and living in Kansas; how perfectly harmless that
might seem to many! for, no doubt, you and Kate are perfectly happy as
mistress and servant; you would need domestics there, and how could they
and you be better pleased than if they and you were just as Kate and you
now are to each other? but, O dear madam, that would be slavery, and we
are under sworn obligations here at the North to oppose the owning of a
human being with indiscriminate hatred. Say not it seems hard that if
you wish to live in Kansas, for example, you cannot have liberty to go
there with Kate, who is as much attached to you, I make no doubt, as any
Northern or English servant is to a household. Perhaps it does seem
perfectly natural and harmless, and no doubt Kate's relation to you is
as gentle and pleasant, almost, as that of an adopted member of a
family, who is half attendant, and half companion; this we understand.
You see nothing terrible in such a relation. O dear madam, you have the
misfortune to have been born under the blinding, blighting influence of
slavery, and cannot see things in the true, just light in which they
appear to us, whose minds are unprejudiced and clear, and whose moral
sentiments on this great subject are more correct and elevated. What is