I am ashamed to say that I am exceedingly sleepy. I have been riding sixteen miles over these charming hills. The day is bright and breezy, and full of shifting lights and shadows, playing over a landscape that combines every variety of beauty,—valleys, in the hollows of which lie small lakes glittering like sapphires; uplands, clothed with grain-fields and orchards, and studded with farm-houses, each the centre of its own free domain; hills clothed from base to brow with every variety of forest tree; and woods, some wild, tangled, and all but impenetrable, others clear of underbrush, shady, moss-carpeted and sun-checkered; noble masses of granite rock, great slabs of marble (of which there are fine quarries in the neighborhood), clear mountain brooks and a full, free-flowing, sparkling river;—all this, under a cloud-varied sky, such as generally canopies mountain districts, the sunset glories of which are often magnificent. I have good friends, and my precious children, an easy, cheerful, cultivated society, my capital horse, and, in short, most good things that I call mine—on this side of the water—with one heavy exception....
My dearest Harriet, my drowsiness grows upon me, so that my eyelids are gradually drawing together as I look out at the sweet prospect, and the blue shimmer of the little lake and sunny waving of the trees are fading all away into a dream before me. Good-bye.
Your sleepy and affectionate
F. A. B.
[When I was in London, some time after the date of this letter, I received an earnest request from one of the most devoted of the New England abolitionists, to allow the journal I kept while at the South to be published, and so give the authority of my experience to the aid of the cause of freedom. This application occasioned me great trouble and distress, as it was most painful to me to refuse my testimony on the subject on which I felt so deeply; but it was impossible for me then to feel at liberty to publish my journal.
MRS. BEECHER STOWE. When the address, drawn up at Stafford House, under the impulse of Mrs. Beecher Stowe's powerful novel, and the auspices of Lord Shaftesbury and the Duchess of Sutherland (by Thackeray denominated the "Womanifesto against Slavery"), was brought to me for my signature, I was obliged to decline putting my name to it, though I felt very sure no other signer of that document knew more of the facts of American slavery, or abhorred it more, than I did; but also, no other of its signers knew, as I did, the indignant sense of offense which it would be sure to excite in those to whom it was addressed; its absolute futility as to the accomplishment of any good purpose, and the bitter feeling it could not fail to arouse, even in the women of the Northern States, by the assumed moral superiority which it would be thought to imply.
I would then gladly have published my journal, had I been at liberty to do so, and thus shown my sympathy with the spirit, though not the letter, of the Stafford House appeal to the women of America.
It was not, however, until after the War of Secession broke out, while residing in England, and hearing daily and hourly the condition of the slaves discussed, in a spirit of entire sympathy with their owners, that nothing but the most absolute ignorance could excuse, that I determined to publish my record of my own observations on a Southern plantation.
At the time of my doing so, party feeling on the subject of the American war was extremely violent in England, and the people among whom I lived were all Southern sympathizers. I believe I was suspected of being employed to "advocate" the Northern cause (an honor of which I was as little worthy as their cause was in need of such an advocate); and my friend, Lady ——, told me she had repeatedly heard it asserted that my journal was not a genuine record of my own experiences and observation, but "cooked up" (to use the expression applied to it) to serve the purpose of party special pleading. This, as she said, she was able to contradict upon her own authority, having heard me read the manuscripts many years before at her grandmother's, Lady Dacre's, at the Hoo.
This accusation of having "cooked up" my journal for a particular end may perhaps have originated from the fact that I refused to place the whole of it in the hands of the printers, giving out to be printed merely such portions as I chose to submit to their inspection, which, as the book was my personal diary, and contained matter of the most strictly private nature, was not perhaps unreasonable. The republication of this book in America had not been contemplated by me; my purpose and my desire being to make the facts it contained known in England. In the United States, by the year 1862, abundant miserable testimony of the same nature needed no confirmation of mine. My friend, Mr. John Forbes, of Boston, however, requested me to let him have it republished in America, and I very gladly consented to do so.[4]