He
does not think less than we of liberty where an occasion makes that name
and idea appropriate; but that the condition of his slaves should
reconsecrate for us all the old battle-cries of freedom, seems to him
pitiably weak. It shows him how incompetent we are to deal with the
acknowledged evils of slavery; and there are those at the South who are
stirred up by us to take extreme views of an opposite kind, which good
people there very generally deplore.
A Southern lady here tells me that some time since, being on a visit at
the North, she received through the post-office anonymous letters with
extracts from newspapers containing little items of woe, declared to
have been experienced at the South, with here and there delirious abuse
of slave-holders and frenzied words about freedom. She could have
matched every one of them, she said, with wife-murders at the North,
during her visit. In dealing with people like the slaves, of course men
of brutal passions, provoked by their stupidity and negligence, or
exasperated by their crimes, and, in cases of ungovernable anger,
venting their displeasure upon their negroes under slight or merely
imaginary affronts, give occasion to tales of distress which are nowhere
mourned over more deeply than at the South.
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