Slave Power has—I can use the pen no longer. But I
can dictate. The negro must be my amanuensis.”
And then, in a different handwriting, the letter proceeded:—
“This Slave Power, which, for many weeks past, has been hunting down and hanging Union men, has at last laid its bloody hand on our innocent household. Should you meet Colonel A. J. Hamilton,[[34]] he will tell you something of what the pro-slavery butchers have been doing.
“Yesterday three men called on me. They brought forged letters from one I knew to be my friend. The trick succeeded. I admitted them to my confidence. They left and denounced me to the Confederate leaders. My only crime was a secret sympathy with the Union cause. Not a finger had I lifted or threatened to lift against the ruling powers of the State. But I did not love slavery,—that was the crime of crimes in the eyes of Jeff Davis’s immediate partisans and friends.
“To-day they came with ropes to hang us,—to hang us, remember, not for resistance to authority, however usurped, not for one imprudent act or threat against slavery, but simply because we were known at heart to disapprove of slavery, and consequently to love the old flag. And many hundreds have been hung here for no other offence. We knew we could expect no better fate than our neighbors had bravely encountered; and we resolved, men and women, to sell our lives dearly. Your brother fell wounded, and was hung; then your sister, resisting outrage, was slain; then your mother, striving to protect Emily, received a mortal blow. And I am lying here wounded, soon to be dragged forth and hung—for what?—for unbelief, not in a God, but in the Southern Confederacy and its corner-stone!
“And this is slavery! All these brutalities and wrongs spring from slavery as naturally as the fruit from the blossom. That which is inherently wrong must, by eternal laws, still produce and reproduce wrong. The right to hold one innocent man a slave, implies the right to enslave or murder any other man! There is no such right. It is a lie born in the inmost brain of hell. No laws can make it a right. No clamor of majorities can give it a sanction. In slavery, Satan once more scales the heavenly heights.
“Jeff Davis, I hear, has just joined the church. Would he be pardoned, and retain the offence? If so, not prayers nor sacraments can save his trembling and perjured soul from the guilt of such wrongs as I and mine, and hundreds of other true men and women, here in Texas have fallen under because of slavery. God is not to be cheated by any such flattering unction as Davis is laying to his heart. The more he seeks to cover profane with holy things, the deeper will be his damnation in that world where all shams and self-delusions are dissolved, and the true man stands revealed, to be judged by his fidelity to Christ’s golden rule,—to the cause of justice and humanity on earth.
“Our national agony is the old conflict of the Divine with the Satanic principle. Believe in God, my son, and you cannot doubt the result. Do you suppose Eternal Justice will be patient much longer? Think of the atrocities to which this American slave system has reconciled us! A free white man can, in any of the Slave States, go into a negro’s house and beat or kill any of the inmates, and not be prosecuted by law, except a free white man sees him do it; because a negro’s testimony is not taken against a white man. As for the marriage of slaves, you well know what a mere farce—what a subject for ribaldry and laughter—it is among the masters. No tie, whether of affection, of blood, or of form, is respected.[[35]]
“The originators of this rebellion saw that by inevitable laws of population slavery must go down under a republican form of government. Their fears and their jealousies of freedom grew intolerable. The very word free became hateful. They saw that their property in slaves depended for its duration on the action of political forces slumbering in the mass of their white population, which population, though now densely ignorant, would gradually learn that slavery is adverse to the interests of nine tenths of the whites. And so this war was originated even less to separate from the North than to crush into hopeless subjection, through that separation, the white masses at the South. The slave barons dreaded lest this drugged and stupefied giant should rouse from his ignoble slumber, and, learning his strength, and opening his eyes to the truth, should, Samson-like, seize the pillars of their system. To prevent this, a grand oligarchy of slaveholders must be created, and the liberties of the whites destroyed!