o through the opening scene of "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
coaxing up the fellow's price; and finally, would he not sell little
Cygnet while her mother was out of sight, push poor little Susan into a
room alone to cry her eyes out, and you and your husband pocket the
money? Many of us at the North, dear madam, if you will take my
unworthy self as a specimen, and I am a very moderate anti-slavery man
and no fanatic, are quite as ready to believe such things of you as the
contrary. We have read "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Nothing could exceed the disgust and ridicule which your letter would
meet with at the hands of some of our best anti-slavery men. I am
thinking of it, just now, as in the hands of Rev. Mr. Blank. The other
day I saw a cambric muslin handkerchief, richly embroidered, blow past
me out of a child's carriage. As I turned to get it, a dog seized it,
shook it, put both his paws on it, rent it, made rags of it, threw it
down, snatched it up, and seemed vexed that there was no more of it to
tear. So will our abolitionists serve your letter, should they ever see
it. And, my dear madam, though I disapprove their temper and language,
yet I must confess that I sympathize with them in their principles, the
only difference between them and me being that of social position and
manners. I must tell you that, after all, you are probably unaware of
the deception which you are practising on yourself, in supposing that
you are really as loving and gentle toward a slave-mother and her child
as some might infer. Let but a good sale tempt you! I wait to know
whether you would then write such a letter. We have a ready answer to
all the kind and good things which are said about you, in this, which
you will see and hear in all our speeches and essays, namely, "Slavery
is the sum of all villanies." That is to all our thoughts and reasonings
about slavery what the longitude of Greenwich is to navigation. All your
clergy, all your physicians, all your judges and lawyers, all your
fathers and mothers, your gentlemen and ladies, all your children, are
heaped together by us in one name, to us an awful name,--"Slave-power."
We think about you as we do of Egypt, with Israel in bondage.

And now that allusion furnishes me with an argument against your letter,
which I must, in conclusion, and sorely against many of my feelings, let
fall, like a stone, upon it, and crush it forever. Pharaoh's daughter
was touched with the cry of the little slave-babe,