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, Moses; but what does
that prove? that Egyptian bondage was not "an enormous wrong," a
"stupendous injustice," "the sum of all villanies"? or that a Red Sea
was not already waiting to swallow up the slave-holders, horse and foot?
You may write a thousand such letters, all over the South; but though
they delude me for a while, it is only until the moisture which they
raise to my eyes from my heart, by the pathos in them, dries up, and
leaves my vision clear of all the blinding though beautiful mists of
that error which has diffused itself over one half of this goodly land,
and, I grieve to add, which has fallen upon many even here in New
England, recreant sons of liberty, traitors to the memories of Faneuil
Hall and Bunker Hill.
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