The Sable Cloud: A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861)

by Nehemiah Adams

CHAPTER VI.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.

"The sages say dame Truth delights to dwell,
Strange mansion! in the bottom of a well.
Questions are, then, the windlass and the rope
That pull the grave old gentlewoman up."

PETER PINDAR.

My friend, Mr. North, having read the foregoing letters, wrote me a note requesting me to come and spend an evening with him and his wife, and answer some questions occasioned by these letters. The lady was earnest that I should do so.

After being seated before a cheerful fire in my friend's house, while it was raining violently, so that we felt defended from all interruption, my friend said,—

"Here, first of all, is the Southern lady's letter to her father, which,
I suppose, belongs to him, and which you may wish to send back."

"I do," said I.

"But, please," said Mrs. North, "let it be published. Add to it the incident of the Southern lady nursing the sick babe of a slave."

"O my dear," said her husband, "that would create a false impression. It would be a pro-slavery tract. It would abate Northern zeal against the 'sum of all villanies.' Something should go forth with such representations to correct their influence in the Free States. What would become of the cause of freedom should such stories make their impression upon the minds of our people?"

"You might," said I, "make a heading of an auction-block, or slave-coffle; add the last pattern of a slave-driver's whip; picture a panting fugitive on his way to the North; give us a ship's hold, with a black boy just detected among the stowage. You would thus, perhaps, keep these beautiful, touching illustrations of loving-kindness in slave-holders from having the least effect."

"It is very important," said he, seriously, "to keep up a just abhorrence of slavery here at the North, because"—

"Excuse me," said I, "but what do you mean by an abhorrence of slavery?"

"Why," said he, "is not the Christian world agreed that 'slavery is the sum of all villanies'?"

"By no means, in the United States," said I; "you might with as real truth say that here slavery is the sum of all the loving-kindnesses."

"Is not that letter of the Southern lady to her father," said he, "as rare a thing almost as a white crow?"

"O husband," said Mrs. North, "what an opinion you must have of Southern society!"

"Is not Gustavus," said I, "a perfect representative of the North, on the subject of slavery? Does not ultra anti-slavery find or make everybody, as the Aunt says, either fierce or flat?"

"You do not believe so," said he.

"Neither do you believe," said I, "that where Christianity has exerted the same influence on the hearts of men and women as on yours, and all the humanizing and elevating influences of society prevail, that letter is a rare product."

"I cannot believe," said he, "that one can own a fellow-creature, hold God's image as property, and be a true Christian. This lady is an exception which does not destroy the general rule."

"My dear sir," said I, "you are an abstractionist. You make the best possible condition under the sun your standard, to which you would make all men and things conform, instead of allowing for the vast inequalities, the necessities, the mutual dependence, the long historical conditions of men, as individuals and races. A race or class of human beings may be in such a condition, that being 'owned' by a superior race will be, in their circumstances, a real mercy and a great blessing."

"O my dear sir," said he, "I weep over the degradation of your moral sense. 'Owning a fellow-creature!' I would not hold property in a human being 'for all the wealth that sinews bought and sold have ever earned.'"

"Thousands of men and women," I replied, "as good in the sight of God as you or I, think otherwise. There is nothing in the relation of ownership to a human being which in itself is sinful, or wrong."

"If it is your purpose," said he, "to argue in favor of oppression, perhaps we had better not pursue the conversation."

"Uncharitableness, false judgments, self-righteousness," said I, "condemning a whole people for the sins of a few, are as truly 'oppression' as anything can be. I plead for no wrongs; I justify no selfishness in the relation of master and servant; I regard the golden rule of Christ as the law by which slave-holding should be regulated in every instance."

"I never expected," said he, "to live long enough to hear of the golden rule being applied to slavery! It would be like applying light to darkness, truth to falsehood, holiness to sin."

"By what rule," I inquired, "do you think the lady is habitually governed who wrote the letter which has interested you so much?"

"Why," said he, "there are good people under every iniquitous system. These exceptional cases are not the rule of judgment with regard to the nature and effect of a system."

"Can you not imagine one man owning another," said I, "under circumstances, and with motives, and in a temper and spirit which will make the relation most desirable?"

"I go further back," said he, "and I deny that it is right for one human being to own another."

"Has not God a right," said I, "to place one human being over another as his owner?"

"Has God a right," said he, "to countenance theft and oppression?"

I said to him: "I might follow your example, and answer you by asking, Has God a right to countenance war? But I will relieve all your disagreeable apprehensions as to our conversation at once, by saying that I am not to argue in favor of oppression. If holding a slave is oppression, it is a sin. And if it be inconsistent with the golden rule, it is a sin."

"If that be your doctrine," said he, "we shall soon agree. Now apply the golden rule to slavery. Are there any circumstances in which you would yourself be willing to be 'owned'?"

"Certainly," I replied.

He rose, and put some lumps of coal upon the fire with the tongs, and said, "I presume you mean what you say, and that you do not wish to trifle with the subject."

"Mr. North," said I, "would you be willing that any one should make you head-cook in a hotel, engineer in a steamboat, or keeper of a floating light?"

"No, Sir," said he.

"You would, Mr. North," said I, "under given circumstances. You would petition for such places, get recommendations for them, and count yourself perfectly happy, if you succeeded in obtaining them.

"Now look at the slaves. They are a foreign race, we are their civil superiors, and unless we amalgamate, we intend to remain so. While we are in this relation, it is a privilege to the blacks to have owners, but they must use their ownership according to the golden rule. When this is done, the condition of the blacks, in their present relation to us, is happy."

"How often," said he, "do you suppose that it is done?"

"That," said I, "is another and a very interesting question, which we will consider soon. You took the ground, as I understood you, that the law of love would prevent any one from holding a fellow-creature as a slave. I reply that it would be in perfect accordance with it, as the blacks at the South are now situated, for the whites to be their humane owners. But pray what do you mean by 'owning' a human being?"

"I mean," said he, "having the right to abuse them, domineer over them, work them as cattle, sell them, and—"

"Did this Southern lady," said I, while he paused for more words, "ever acquire a right with her ownership to treat Kate so?"

"Her laws," said he, "give her a right to punish her; and such irresponsible power is fearful. She could whip her to death and"—

"And be punished for it," said I, "as surely as you would be for whipping a servant to death."

"She is at liberty to punish more severely than the case warrants," said he, "and then she can shield herself under the laws."

"I presume," said I, "a Northern parent never gives a hasty box on the ear, never strikes one passionate blow in the chastisement, never shakes a child a single trill beyond the due harmony of parental affection, never scourges it with the tongue to momentary madness! What a dreadful thing parental authority is! Would it not be well to abolish the authority of parents over children! Indeed, would it not be well to go further, and interdict the public lands of the United States from being settled; for as surely as men live there, every form of wickedness will, in its turn, be perpetrated. How much better the calm and holy silence of the woods and fields, than if the tumultuous passions of men should roll over them!"

"But, my dear sir," said he, "I maintain that oppression is inseparable from the holding of a slave. I insist that this Southern lady, if all her feelings and conduct toward her servants are like her letter, is an exception among her people."

"No, Sir," said I, "she is the general rule among all decent people, and there is as much sense of decency and propriety there as with us, as many good people, kind, humane, generous, and it is as rare a thing for a servant to be ill-used there, as for our apprentices, and servants, and even our children. How kind and good you would be, Sir, if Providence should place a human being under you as his owner, for the mutual good of both of you."

"Dear me," said he, "I should try to feel and act just as I suppose those Southerners do who, you say, are fairly represented by this lady's letter about the slave-babe."

"Mr. North," said I, "suppose that the State should make you the absolute owner of some of those boys who set fire to the Westboro' and Deer Island institutions. In consideration of your personal responsibility for them, there is ceded to you all right and title to their services, and absolute control over them, subject, of course, to the laws against misdemeanors and crimes against the person. My only point is this: Where would be the sinfulness of that relation? All that would be sinful about it would be in your neglect or violation of your duty as a master."

"How glad all this makes me feel," said he, "that I am not troubled with slaves. If we do not like our servants or apprentices, we can get rid of them."

"Then," said I, "you surely ought to pity those who are bound to their slaves and have to put up with a thousand things which you say we can escape by changing our help."

"But," said he, "can they not sell off their slaves when they please?"

"Suppose, however," said I, "that they happen to be humane, as Mr. North is, and as we all are in the Free States! and that they are unwilling to turn off a poor helpless creature for her faults, to be sold, and to go they know not where!"

"Slavery," said Mr. North, "is surely a great curse. I am so glad that I live under free institutions."

"Who made us to differ from the South in this respect? How came those blacks there? Whose ships, whose money, imported them? You remember that it was by the votes of Free States, that the importation of slaves was continued for eight years beyond the time when the Southern States had voted in the Convention that it should cease. And now what would you have the South do with the slaves, to-day?"

"Set them all free," said he, "'break every yoke; proclaim liberty to the captives, the opening of the prison-doors to them that are bound.'"

"Allow me," said I, "to smile at your simplicity, for you are very child-like, not to say childish, in your feelings. You would have the colored people universally go free. Do you really think that Kate is worse off in being what you call a slave, than that young, free black woman who keeps a stall and sells verses and knives near our Park?"

"O dear sir," said he, "liberty is a priceless boon; liberty"—

"Liberty to what?" said I.

"Why," said he, "liberty not to be sold, nor to be beaten, nor to be subject to the wicked passions of a master."

"Would you rather," said I, "have your daughter a servant in a Southern family, brought up as a playmate with the children, a sharer in many of their gifts, a partner with their parents, as the children grew up, in the pride and joy of the parents, an honored member of the wedding party when a daughter is married, one of the principal mourners when the bride departs, identified with the history of the family, provided for in the will, a support guaranteed to her by law in sickness and old age, and that, too, not in a pauper establishment, but in her owner's home, and when the parents die, if she survives, taken by some branch of the family or neighbor from regard to her and to them; her moral and religious character improved under their training, a respectable standing in society conferred upon her by her connection with them, her religious privileges sacredly secured to her, any insult redressed as though it were the family's personal affair; she a partaker of their food and of all their comforts, and followed to her grave with respect and love; or, for the sake of 'priceless liberty,' 'heaven's best gift to man,' would you prefer to see her seated under the iron fence of a park, an old umbrella tied to the pickets for her shelter, and she, in rain and sunshine, selling 'Old Dan Tucker,' 'Jim Crow, Illustrated,' and pea-nuts, and sleeping you know not where? Which lot would you choose for a child? Which is best for this world and the next? In one case, she is 'owned,' she is 'a slave;' and in the other, she is a free woman."

"You have no right," said he, with some warmth, "to take the best condition in slavery, and the very worst in freedom, and compel me to choose."

"'Best condition in slavery!'" said I; "is there any 'best' in being a slave, in not being free? Does it admit of degrees? Is not being 'owned' such a curse, such an unmixed iniquity in its essence, that to compare its best estate with the worst in freedom, is like comparing the best devil with the most inferior saint? Is not a devil's nature incapable of comparison as good, better, best, with anything which is not, in its nature, devilish? According to your conversation just now, it seemed as though being 'owned' always implied an unmitigated transgression; and now when I inquire whether you would prefer degradation to the iniquity of being 'owned' in comfort and usefulness, respectability and happiness, you shrink from the question. If freedom in the abstract is the best thing under the sun, of course you will prefer it to everything else. No happy condition, no happy prospect for this life, and the life to come can, in your view, make being 'a slave,' as you call it, capable of being compared with this abstract privilege of being free. In this you and your friends labor under a huge mistake, and it poisons all your views and feelings about slavery. When you denounce slave-holders and slavery, and depict the condition of the slave in your awful colors, they at the South know that in hundreds of thousands of instances, as it regards masters and slaves, all that you say is practically false; you are carried away by your zeal against a theoretical wrong.

"Now suppose that instead of starting with the theoretical wrong and getting only such facts as illustrate it, you should travel through the South to pick up such letters as you consider this, respecting Kate, to be;—what a pleasing view might be presented of the slaves' condition in cases without number!"

"But," said he, "there are terrible evils underlying these fair features of slavery."

"True," said I, "but why, in the name of truth and love do you never hear such a letter as this read on the platforms of Northern abolition societies? What mingled groans and hisses and shrieks for freedom, and then what an emptying of the demoniacal epithets there would be, if such a letter should be offered. One case of whipping would have more effect than a thousand such letters, in your assemblies and newspapers. No one from the continent of Europe would infer from those meetings that such beings as Kate and her little babe, and this lady and her husband and father, existed even in fiction, but that slave-holders are Legrees, and the slaves their victims. What a beautiful effect it would have on us and on the South, if touching tales of loving-kindness between masters and slaves, instances of perfect happiness in that relation, should be cited, and then you should enter your candid, but decided opposition to the system, to its extension, to its evils where it exists. How soon we should all be found working together, so far as we might, for the amelioration of the colored race here, with a view to the extinction of slavery in every form of it in which it is an evil, or a greater evil than anything which might properly be substituted."

"Well," said Mrs. North, "husband, what do you say to that?"

"I like it," said he.

"But now," said I, "the language of the place of despair is exhausted in describing and denouncing the South. If a man among us lifts up his voice to say good things about Southerners, one universal hiss goes up from all your conventions and anti-slavery prints. He may be seeking the same end with you, namely, the peaceful removal of slavery, with due regard to the highest good of all concerned; but let him utter a word in arrest of your unqualified condemnation of slavery as it actually is, and there are no persecutors, nor scourges, nor intolerance on the earth, more fierce and cruel than you and your denunciations."

"Take it patiently, husband," said Mrs. North, "you know that you deserve it."

"I know from this," said I, "if from nothing else, that your theory is wrong. The truth does not excite such passions in those who love and seek to promote it. We see that, in cases without number, the present condition of the slaves is a blessing for both worlds, and that if all who possess slaves were, as many are, slavery would cease to be any more of a curse than any dependent condition in this world. There must always be those who will do every sort of menial work. The great Father of all, who himself says that he has 'deprived' the ostrich 'of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding,' so arranges the capacities of some that their happiness consists in leaning upon superior intelligence and capability.

"The serving people, in some districts of country, are volunteers from all races; at the South, they consist of one inferior, dependent race, who for ages have been slaves in their own country, and would be such even now, if they were there. We will not shut the door of hope forever upon any part of the human family, as to their elevation among the tribes of men, but this race has, for a long period of its history, evidently been undergoing a tutelage and discipline at the hand of Providence. There is some marvellous arrangement of Providence, it seems to me, designing that this black race shall lean upon us. Let the same number of any other immigrant race have gone from us to Canada as of this colored race, and the world would have heard a better report from them ere this. They thrive best in connection with us as their masters, whether it be right or wrong for us to be in such relation to them."

"But now," said he,—in a persuasive tone, and evidently wishing to turn the drift of the remarks,—"just set them free, and hire them; we shall agree then. The slaves will be as well off, and so will their masters."

"Mr. North," said I, "being owned is, in itself, irrespective of the character of the master, a means of protection to the negro. Somebody then is responsible for him as his guardian and provider, and is amenable to the State for his sustenance. You can easily see that, let the colored people come to be a hireling class, and their interests and those of their masters are disjoined. There would be conflicts and oppressions among themselves; they would fall into a degraded, serf-like condition; but now each of them partakes of his master's interests, and rises with him. I am not here pleading for slavery in the abstract, but, the blacks being on the soil, it is far better for them to be owned than to be free. Why are the Southwestern States, one after another, passing laws, or framing their constitutions, to shut out from their borders free negroes,—people in the very condition into which you would reduce by wholesale all the blacks in the South? I pray you look and see that you are an abstractionist, setting what you deem a theoretical wrong against a practical good, and under the circumstances, a real mercy."

"But," said Mr. North, "slavery impoverishes the soil, makes the whites shun labor, feeling it to be degrading, and it keeps the white children from industrial pursuits, and"—

"Please stop," said I, "my dear Sir, and think of what you are saying, and be not carried away by that popular flood of cant phrases. Now you know that God has given our Southern friends a south country, nearer than ours to the tropics. Out-of-door labor there is injurious to the white people, as you know. They are not to be blamed for this. God has not given them strength to endure exposure to the sun. Had they a northern climate, in which the labor required by the mechanic arts could be performed with safety and comfort, do you not suppose that they would have the same aptitude and relish as we for handicraft? Their children cannot be brought up to manual labor to the extent that ours are, because the God of heaven has ordained their lot in a land less favorable than ours to toil. His providence, making use of the sins of men, has placed the blacks here; you and the rest of the world, who depend upon their cotton, are willing enough to use it in its countless forms, while you reproach your Maker, as I think, for having caused it to be raised as he has seen fit to do."

"But Oh," said Mr. North, "free labor is more profitable than slave labor. You well know how it affects the soil, and that the great price of slaves will in time make the system oppressive to the masters, especially if they are all as considerate as you say they are about selling."

"The good Aunt has replied to you as to the soil, and we need not distress ourselves about the price of slaves; that will regulate itself. You well understand," said I, "that I am not arguing in favor of slavery per se, nor for the slave-trade, nor for the extension of slavery; but I contend that where slavery now exists, no one has yet proposed a scheme which is better than the continuance of ownership, the blacks remaining on the same soil with their present masters. Nor do I mean to say that the present system must inevitably continue forever. We must leave future developments in other hands. Of course there are difficult problems on such a subject as this. Intelligent Christian gentlemen at the South say that the best schemes which have been proposed by Europeans for the substitution of apprenticed negroes for slaves would make the condition of the negro as far worse than our slavery as the condition of a degraded negro here is below that of his master. Who will care for him when he is old, or sick? Granting this apprentice scheme to be arranged without oppression or sin of any kind, I hold that the condition of our slaves owned by masters and mistresses, is better than such a hireling condition, though it have the appearance of liberty."

"Why so?" inquired Mr. North.

"The slaves are not treated as hired horses are liable to be treated," I replied. "We know how a man is likely to treat his own horse, compared with the horse which he hires. Men nurse their slaves when they are sick; they provide for them when they are old. By their care and responsibility for them, and in relieving them from responsibility, they pay them wages whose market-value, if it could be reckoned in dollars, would be higher wages than are paid to the same class of laborers in the land. There are not four millions of the lower class of the laboring people in any one district of the earth whose condition is to be compared with that of the Southern slaves for comfort and happiness."

"I presume," said Mrs. North, "that you would not regard exemption from responsibility as in itself a blessing. You know how it educates us, how it sharpens the faculties, how it makes a man more of a man; therefore is it, after all, any kindness to the slaves, that they are relieved from responsibility?"

"I thank you," said I, "for that question. Does it concern us that our domestic servants are relieved, for the time, of all responsibility for house-rent, taxes, political duties?

"Every condition of poverty and toil has its peculiar hardships and sorrows. But putting together, respectively, all the advantages and the disadvantages of our slaves, he who looks upon a population with enlarged views of liabilities and of the inevitable results in the working of different schemes of labor, and is not so weak or morbid as to dwell inordinately on real and imaginary wrongs and miseries, which, after all, if real, are compensated for by advantages or surpassed by aggregated smaller evils in other conditions, must admit that, the colored people being here, their being owned is the very best possible thing for their protection, and the surest guarantee against all their liabilities to want in hard times, sickness, and old age.

"Speaking of hard times leads me to say, that if you could put four millions of laboring people in the Free States, for a winter or during commercial distresses and the stagnation of every kind of business, in a position where, while they were still active and useful, a single thought or care about their sustenance would not visit them, you would be deemed a philanthropist and public benefactor. There will not be the same number of people in the laboring class throughout our land next winter, in any one section, whose comfort and happiness will exceed that of our slaves."

"Oh, well," said Mr. North, "all this may be true, but this does not reconcile me to slavery. Our horses here at the North will all be comfortably provided for, notwithstanding any money pressure. But I would rather be a human being and fail, every winter, than be a horse."

"Husband," said Mrs. North, "do you consider that a parallel case? Mr. C. is not arguing, as I understand him, that slavery is better than freedom. He is not persuading us to be slaves rather than free. He takes these four millions of blacks as he finds them, in bondage, and he asks, What shall we do with them? You say, Set them free. He says, They are better off, as a race, in their present bondage, than they would be if made free, to remain here. Not that they are better off than four millions of colored people, who had never been slaves, would be in a commonwealth by themselves."

"I thank you, Mrs. North," said I, "for your clear and correct statement of my position. And now I will take up Mr. North's parable about the horses, and apply it justly. Let hay and grass be exceedingly scarce, and I had rather take my chance with an owner and be a horse, in a stable, and at work, than a horse roaming in search of food, chased away everywhere. The comparison is between horse and horse, and man and man."

"You make me think," said Mrs. North, "of an interesting passage in a late magazine, written by a lady. She was on a voyage to Cuba. She arrived at Nassau. She says, 'There were many negroes, together with whites of every grade; and some of our number, leaning over the side, saw for the first time the raw material out of which Northern Humanitarians have spun so fine a skein of compassion and sympathy. You must allow me one heretical whisper,—very small and low. Nassau, and all we saw of it, suggested to us the unwelcome question whether compulsory labor be not better than none.'"[3]

[Footnote 3: Atlantic Monthly, May, 1859, p. 604.]

"There is," said I, "this great question of right, with some, as to slavery: As the State has a right to interpose and send vagrant children to school, has the world a right to interpose, in certain cases, and send certain races to labor for the good of mankind? This was the question which broke upon the lady's mind. It is very interesting to see the question thus stated, and to notice the graceful touch of apology, and of playfulness, in the manner of stating it. There was risk, and even peril, in making the suggestion, but, withal, some moral courage. Still a lady may sometimes venture where it might not be safe for a gentleman to go.

"But the question between us is not, 'Freedom or slavery,' in the abstract, nor, Whether it is right, in any case, to reduce a people to slavery; but, What is best for our slaves? All your proofs that freedom is better than slavery in the abstract, are nothing to the point."

"It is the foulest blot on our nation in the eyes of the world," said
Mr. North, "that we have four millions of human beings in bondage."

"Have you read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin?'" I inquired.

"Ask me," said he, pleasantly, "if I know how to read. Every lover of liberty and hater of oppression has read 'Uncle Tom.'"

"That is very far from being true," said I; "but still, you like Uncle
Tom as a character, do you?"

"You astonish me," said he, "by making a question about it. He is the most perfect specimen of Christianity that I ever heard of."

"Among the martyrs," said I, "have you ever found his superior?"

"No, Sir!" was his energetic answer.

"Now," said I, "what made Uncle Tom the paragon of perfection?"

"What made him?" said he.

"Yes," said I, "what made him the model Christian? You do not reply, and I will tell you. SLAVERY MADE UNCLE TOM. Had it not been for slavery, he would have been a savage in Africa, a brutish slave to his fetishes, living in a jungle, perhaps; and had you stumbled upon him he would very likely have roasted you and picked your bones. A system which makes Uncle Toms out of African savages is not an unmixed evil."

"But," said he, "it makes Legrees also."

"I beg your pardon, Sir," said I, "it does not make Legrees. There are as many Legrees at the North as at the South, especially if we include all the very particular 'friends of the slave.' Legree would be Legree in Wall Street, or Fifth Avenue; Uncle Tom would not be Uncle Tom in the wilds of Africa."

"And so," said he, "it is right to fit out ships, burn villages in Africa, steal the flying people, bestow them in slave-ships, and sell them into hopeless bondage!"

"So you all love to reason," said I, "or seek to force that conclusion upon us. No such thing. If God overrules the evil doings of men, this is no reason for repeating the wrong. I am insisting that slavery as it exists in the South has been a blessing to the African. This does not warrant you in perpetrating outrages on those who are still in Africa.

"But the result has been, through the mercy of God as though we had taken millions of degraded savages out of Africa, and had made them contribute greatly to the industrial interests of mankind.

"We have raised them from heathenish ignorance and barbarism to the condition of intelligent beings. Look at them in their churches and Sabbath-schools. Slavery has done this. See the colored population of Charleston, S.C., voluntarily contributing, as they do, on an average, three dollars apiece, annually, for the propagation of the Gospel at home and abroad. See the meeting-house of the African Church at Richmond, Va., a place selected for public speakers from the North to deliver their addresses in it to the citizens of Richmond, because it is more commodious than any other public building in the city. Think of the membership of slaves in Christian Churches; of the multitudes of them who have died in the faith and hope of the Gospel. Slavery has done this. The question is whether slavery has been, or is, such a curse, on the whole, to the African race, that we must now set free the whole colored population? Please let us keep to the point. The reopening of the slave-trade is a question by itself.

"It seems that God had chosen to redeem and save large numbers of the African race by having them transported to this Christian land. Philanthropists would not be at the cost and trouble of all this. God has, therefore, used the cupidity of men to accomplish his purposes, and he punishes the wicked agents of his own benevolent schemes. His curse has for ages rested on the African race, and the laws of nature have, to a great degree, interposed to prevent Christian efforts in their behalf. God saw fit to change the prison-house, and prison yards and shops of this race from one continent to another, and New England merchantmen, in part, have been allowed to be the conveyers. In the process of transferring these future subjects of civilization and Christianity, vast misery is endured, as in opening a way by the sword for the execution of his decrees, great slaughter is the inevitable attendant. I look at the whole subject of slavery in the light of God's providence. And I do not see that his providence yet indicates any way for its termination consistent with the interests of the colored people.

"As to the extension of slavery, in this land, if the Most High has any further purposes of mercy for the African race in connection with us, he will not consult you nor me. He will open districts of our country for them; if my political party refuses to be the instrument in doing this, from benevolent motives, or from any other cause, He will make that party to be defeated, it may be by a party below us in moral principle, as we view it. This question of slavery, its extension and continuance, is therefore among the great problems of God's providence. I shall do all that I properly can to prevent it, and to encourage, and, if called upon, to aid my brethren now in immediate charge of the slaves, to fulfil their solemn trust; but anything like impatience and passion at the existence of slavery, I hold to be a sin against God. I pity those good men whose minds are so inflamed by the consideration of individual cases of suffering as not to perceive the great and steadfast march of the divine administration. Politicians and others who get their places, or their bread, by easy appeals to sympathy for individual cases of suffering, are the causes of much misplaced commiseration and of a low, uninstructed view of the great interests involved in slavery. Yet these very men who, for selfish purposes, stir up the passions of our people, by dwelling on cases of hardship in slavery, are greatly disappointed when Napoleon III., at Villafranca, prematurely terminates a war of unparalleled slaughter. They would have preferred, for the cause of constitutional liberty and for its possible influence against the Pope, that the fighting had continued a month longer; we hear no pathetic remonstrances from them on the score of the killed and maimed, the widows and orphans and the childless, of homes made desolate, by this additional month of battle. Such is man, so inconsistent, so blinded by party prejudice, so ready to maintain that which, in a change of persons and places, he will denounce. He will be wholly blinded by individual acts of suffering to all that is good in a system; and again, the good to be effected by a war will blind him to the hundreds of thousands of dead or mutilated soldiers, with five times that number of bleeding hearts, rifled by the sword of their precious treasures."

I saw that I had prolonged my remarks to an undue length. We sat in silence for a little while, looking into the fire, and listening to the rain against the windows, when Judith called Mrs. North to the door; and, after some whispering between them, Mrs. North said to her,

"Oh, bring them in; our company will excuse it."

The cranberries, it seems, were not doing well over the fire in Judith's department, and she had hesitatingly proposed that they should be promoted to the parlor grate, where, after due apologies, they were placed. They soon began to simmer; then one would burst, and then another, we pausing unconsciously to hear them surrendering themselves to their fate, while one mouth, at least, watered at the thought of the delicious dish which they were to furnish; the rich, ruby color of their juice in the best cut-glass tureen, and the added spoonful, as a reward for not spilling a drop on the table-cloth the last time they were served, coming to mind, with thoughts of early days. And here I was discussing slavery. Now, while the cranberries were over the fire, making one feel domestic and also bringing back young days, it was impossible to be disputatious, had we been so inclined. The Northern cranberry-meadow and the Southern sugar-plantation seemed mixed up in my feelings on this subject, qualifying and rectifying each other. Perhaps the soothing presence of the cranberry saucepan was timely; for, without any design, a phase of our subject next presented itself which was not the most agreeable. I broke the silence, and said,—

"Mr. North, what do you think is the mission of the abolitionists as a party, and of all who sympathize with them?"

"Why," said he, "to abolish slavery, to be sure. What else can it be?"

"You are mistaken," said I. "The real mission of the abolitionists, thus far, is, To perpetuate slavery till Providence has accomplished its plan. You know what Southern synods, and general assemblies, and many of the ablest men at the South have said about slavery; how they deplored it, and called upon Christians to seek its extinction. The South would probably have tried to abolish slavery ere this, if left to themselves. But they would have failed; and Providence prevented the useless effort. The influence of those sentiments which prevailed in the General Assembly of 1818 would have been to remove all the objectionable features of slavery, at least, preparatory to its final extinction, if that could be reached. It looked as though Churches generally would, in obedience to the General Assembly, have made it, in certain cases, the subject of discipline. Abolitionism, however, began about that time. It had the effect to make the South defend themselves and slavery too. Providence saw that the South was weary of the system, and wished to throw it off. But the years of the captivity appointed of God had not come to an end. Purposes of mercy for the African race had not been accomplished; the South must be made willing to hold these poor people for the 'time, times, and half a time,' ordained of God. To encourage them, the God of Nature makes the great Southern staple, cotton, to be in greater demand for the supply of the world; the cotton-gin is invented, and immediately the slaves are thereby assisted to retain that hold upon the South which was about to be broken off. All this seems to me designed, as it certainly has the effect, to perpetuate slavery until Providence shall indicate measures for the removal of the colored people among us. This may be delayed for centuries to come. In the mean time, we at the North, by keeping up our agitation of the subject, have impressed the South with the importance of being united against us; but if any of our schemes of emancipation had divided them, it would not have been for the good of the slaves. So the abolitionists have been fulfilling their destiny by fighting against Providence to help perpetuate slavery till the Most High shall disclose his will concerning it."

"And helped the South," said Mr. North, "perpetuate violations of the marriage relation, and to separate families, and to countenance all the sins in slavery!"

"Yes, to some degree," said I; "for should we treat them with common candor and truthfulness, make them feel that we appreciate the perplexities of the subject, admit for once, and act upon it, that they are better and more competent 'friends of the slave' than we, it would be the surest way to put a stop to every evil in slavery. Now they have little power over a certain class of men among them, who, when measures are proposed for the relief of the slaves, raise the cry that they are abolitionists, and excite an odium which deters them from doing many things which would otherwise be attempted."

"They might all certainly join," said Mr. North, "one would think, to prevent the violation of the marriage contract by the slaves, and the sundering of the marriage tie by the auctioneer."

"Now," said I, "there are two allegations, and I will answer them. As to the violation of the marriage covenant by the slaves, are you aware how many divorces for the same cause are granted in your own state yearly? You will find, on inquiry, that 'freedom' has nothing to boast of in this respect. As to the auctioneer, and the separation of the marriage tie by him, how often do you think that an honest black man, for no crime, is taken from his wife and sold, or she from him? How often, do you suppose, are families divided and scattered at the auction-block? If you will inquire, you will find that the cases are extremely rare; that in some large districts it has not occurred for several years; and that in other cases, where it has occurred, regard has been had to the neighborhood of the purchasers, so that members of the same families have been within reach of one another. You seem to think that a great feature, and the most common effect, of slavery is to separate families. Such is the general belief at the North. Let me remind you that there is no form or condition of service in the world which has more effect than slavery to keep families together."

"Well," said Mrs. North, dropping her work in her lap, "I never thought of that before."

"Why," said I, "where will you find in the Free States husband and wife and children living together as servants in the same family?"

Said Mrs. North, "It is rather uncommon with us to find two sisters living together as help in a family. At least, it is always spoken of and noted as pleasant and desirable."

"What would Northerners think," said I, "of gathering the old parents and all the brothers and sisters of their domestics together, in small tenements near their own dwellings? He who should do this would be regarded as a very great saint. So that you may as well say that slavery is a system by which a serving class is kept together in families, as to say that its purpose and effect is to break up families."

"Just think," said Mrs. North, "of the serving class in our families here at the North,—how they are separated by states, by oceans, from one another!"

"Be careful, Mrs. North," said I, "how you even hint at such mitigations in slavery, for you will be denounced as a 'friend of oppression' if you discern anything in the system but 'villanies.' You never hear such a feature of slavery, as that of which we have just spoken, recognized here at the North by our zealous anti-slavery people."

"Do you not think," said she, "that if we were candid and less passionate, and viewed the subject as anti-slavery men at the South do, we should exert far more influence against slavery?"

"If we exerted any," I replied, "it would be 'far more' than we do now. If we would only cease to 'exert influence' in that direction, and begin to learn that the people of the South are as Christian, benevolent, and good in every respect as we, this first, great lesson, which we all need to learn, would do us all great good. Self-righteousness is the great characteristic of the Northern people with regard to the South. Fifteen States declare that they are justified before God in continuing the system of slavery. The other States would be ashamed to condemn those fifteen States for immorality in the discussion of any other subject; but here they assume that one half of the American nation is convicted of crime. I take the ground that, if the Churches and the ministry of those fifteen States say, With all the evils of slavery, it is right and best that we should maintain it, I will so far yield my convictions as not to feel that they are less righteous than I."

"Oh," said Mr. North, "but they have been born and educated under the system. Of course they must be blinded by it, and their moral sense perverted."

"There," said I, "Mr. North, is the 'Northern Evil' again. Oh, what a shame it is for intelligent people to decry Southern Christians in this way, and to erect their own moral sense into such self-complacent superiority!

"You will see in your church one excellent brother, whose heart is filled with anguish at the thought of the 'poor slave.' One sits by him who knows full as much on this and on all subjects as he, who feels that the people at the South are perfectly qualified to manage this subject, and that we have no need to interpose. He thinks that if one wishes to be excited with compassion at the sorrows and woes of men, a short walk will bring him to certain abodes such as no Southern slave would be allowed by any human master to inhabit. If he would benefit men as a class, our own sailors need all his philanthropy. But the good anti-slavery brother is possessed with the idea that the Southern slave is the impersonation of injustice and misery, and that those who stand in the relation of masters are guilty of crimes, daily, which ought to shut them out of the Church.

"I have often thought that the most appropriate prayers in our public assemblies, with regard to slavery, would be petitions against Northern ignorance and passion with respect to Southern Christians. It is we who most need to be prayed for. When I think of those assemblies of Christians of all denominations in the South, with a clergy at their head who have no superiors in the world, and then hear a Northern preacher indicting them before God in his prayers, what shall I say? The verdict of a coroner's inquest, if it were held over some of his hearers at such a time, might almost be, Died of disgust."

"Now I desire to know," said Mr. North, "if we are never to pray in public about slavery? Is it not the great subject before the country, and are not all our interests in Church and State deeply involved in it?"

"While we believe," said I, "that holding slaves is a sin, I take the ground that praying for the Southerners is a false impeachment. When we are rid of this error, we do not feel their need of being prayed for any more than 'all men,' for whom Paul says, 'I will that men pray everywhere,'—'lifting up holy hands without wrath or doubting.' Our 'hands' must be 'holy' when we lift them up for 'all men,' including Southerners; there must be no 'wrath' in our prayers,—which I am sorry to say is too easily discerned in prayers against the South; and there must be no 'doubting' in the petitioners whether their feelings and motives are right before God. There is as much in the relation of officers and crews in our merchant vessels, to say the least, to enlist the prayers of ministers, as in slavery. But this relates to ourselves, and has not the enchantment of a distant sin.

"You must bring yourself to believe, Mr. North, that Southern hearts are in general as humane and cultivated as ours. This, it is true, is a great demand upon a Northerner."

"But oh," said he, (we happening to be alone just then,) "the cruelty of compelling virtuous people, members of Churches, to commit sin, under pain of being sold."

"Mr. North," said I, "how do you dare to open your lips on that subject,—you, with myself, a member of a denomination in which men, eminent in our pulpits, have—so many of them of late years—fallen. One would think that we would never cast a stone at the South on that subject.

"Some among us seem to think that the power and the opportunity to commit sin must necessarily be followed by criminal indulgence. They do themselves no credit in this supposition. They also leave out of view a natural antipathy which must be overcome, sense of degradation, probability of detection, loss of character, conscience, and all the moral restraints which are common to men everywhere; and they only judge that all who exercise authority over an abject race must, as a general thing, be polluted.

"As to opportunities for evil-doing at the South compared with the North, no one who walks the streets of a Northern city, by day or night, with the ordinary discernment of one who sets himself to examine the moral condition of a place, will fail to see that we need not go to the South to find humiliating proofs of baseness and shame. There is less solicitation at the South; here it is a nightly trade, without disguise. At the South the young must go in search of opportunity; here it confronts them. The small number of yellow children in the interior of the Cotton States, on 'lone plantations,' is positive proof against the ready suspicions and accusations of Northern people. Let all be true which is said of 'yellow women,' 'slave-breeders,' and every form of lechery, he is simple who does not believe that the statistics of a certain wickedness at the North would, if made as public as difference of color makes the same statistics at the South, leave no room for us to arraign and condemn the South in this particular. Their clergy, their husbands, their young men, if they are no better, are no worse than we. But there is nothing in which the self-righteousness created by anti-slavery views and feelings is more conspicuous than in the way in which the South is judged and condemned by us with regard to this one sin. Had the pulpits of the South afforded such dreadful instances of frailty, for the last ten or fifteen years, as we have had at the North, what confirmation would we have found for our invectives against the corrupting and 'barbarous' influence of slavery!

"How the morbid fancy of a Northerner loves to gloat over occasional instances of violence at the South, and is never employed in depicting scenes of betrayal and cruelty which our policemen in large cities could recount by scores."

"I saw," said Mr. North, "in a recent paper, that a slave in Washington County, N.C., was hanged by the sheriff in the presence of three thousand spectators, for the murder of a white man, whom he shot with a pistol because he suspected him of undue familiarity with the wife of the black man. Poor fellow! no doubt he swung for it because he was a slave. He must let his marriage rights be invaded by the whites, and bear it in silence, or die."

Said I, "What a perfect specimen of Northern anti-slavery feeling and logic have we in what you now say. If a man, on suspicion of you, takes the law into his hands and shoots you with a pistol, does he not deserve to die? He does, if he is a white man; perhaps, if he be a slave, that excuses him! Even where a man is known to be guilty of the crime referred to, and the husband shoots him, he is apt to have a narrow escape from being punished. As to bearing such violations of one's rights in silence under intimidation, there is no more power in intimidation to save a villain at the South from disgrace and abhorrence in his community, than at the North."

"But he can evade prosecution under the statute," said Mr. North, "more easily at the South than here."

"When you have served on the grand jury a few terms," said I, "you will be more charitable toward Southerners. Human nature is the same everywhere. It makes, where it does not find, occasion for sin.

"Now you will not understand, in all that I have said, that I am pleading for slavery, that I desire to have this abject race among us, that Southerners are purer and better than we. We are both under sin. We all have our temptations and trials; each form of society has its own kind of facilities for evil; but the grace of God and all the influences which bear on the formation and the preservation of character, are the same wherever Christianity prevails."

"Well, after all," said he, "it must be a semi-barbarous state of society, where such a system is maintained."

"I shall have to send you," said I, "to the 'Hotel des Incurables.' I think that your judgments are more than semi-barbarous. If you please to term even the Southern negroes 'semi-barbarous,' you may do so; but you are bearing false witness against your neighbor.

"My dear friend," said I, "sum up all the evils of the laboring classes, of foreigners and the lower orders of society. Take their miseries, vices, crimes, with all the blessings of freedom and everything else. Get the proportion of evil to the good. Remember that these classes will continue to exist among us. Then take the slaves, the lower order at the South, as foreigners are with us, and say if, on the whole, the proportion of evil among the slaves is any greater than among the corresponding classes elsewhere. Do not be an optimist. Acknowledge that society, in this fallen world, must have elements of evil, by reason at least of imbecility, want of thrift, misfortune, and other things. You will not fail to see that slavery with all its evils is, under the circumstances, by no means, the worst possible condition for the colored people."

"Well," said he, "I will think of all you have said. I do not wish to be an ultraist, nor to shut my eyes against truth. You will wish to go to bed; there are some further points on which I would know your views, and we will, if you please, resume the subject to-morrow."