ve _you_ also been deceived by these false assertions? Listen to me,
then, whilst I endeavor to wipe from the fair character of Abolitionism
such unfounded accusations. You know that _I_ am a Southerner: your know
that my dearest relatives are now in a slave State. Can you for a moment
believe I would prove so recreant to the feelings of a daughter and a
sister, as to join a society which seeking to overthrow slavery by
falsehood, bloodshed and murder? I appeal to you who have known and
loved me in days that are passed, can _you_ believe it? No! my friends.
As a Carolinian, I was peculiarly jealous of any movements on this
subject; and before I would join an Anti-Slavery Society, I took the
precaution of becoming acquainted with some of the leading
Abolitionists, of reading their publications and attending their
meetings, at which I heard addresses both from colored and white men;
and it was not until I was fully convinced that their principles were
_entirely pacific,_ and their efforts _only moral,_ that I gave my name
as a member to the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia. Since
that time, I have regularly taken the Liberator, and read many
Anti-Slavery pamphlets and papers and books, and can assure you I
_never_ have seen a single insurrectionary paragraph, and never read any
account of cruelty which I could not believe. Southerners may deny the
truth of these accounts, but why do they not _prove_ them to be false.
Their violent expressions of horror at such accounts being believed,
_may_ deceive some, but they cannot deceive _me,_ for I lived too long
in the midst of slavery, not to know what slavery is. Such declarations
remind me of an assertion made by a Catholic priest, who said that his
Church had never persecuted Protestants for their religion, when it is
well known that the pages of history are black with the crimes of the
Inquisition. Oh! if the slaves of the South could only write a book, it
would vie, I have no doubt, with the horrible details of Catholic
cruelty. When _I_ speak of this system, "I speak that I do know," and I
am not afraid to assert, that Anti-Slavery publications have _not_
overdrawn the monstrous features of slavery at all. And many a
Southerner _knows_ this as well as I do. A lady in North Carolina
remarked to a friend of mine, about eighteen months since, "Northerners
know nothing at all about slavery; they think it is perpetual bondage
only; but of the _depth of degradation_ tha