"That is the defect in your policy. It is the existence of your system of slavery that makes you all this trouble." "As I told you of Miss Chandler, so it is with you, because you never lived in a slave State, and know nothing of their contented and happy condition. They have no care; if they are sick the doctor is sent for, and they are as tenderly cared for as our own children, and their doctor's bills are paid. I know if you would live here a few months you'd see these things very differently. You would see our slaves marching out to their work, singing their songs and hymns as merrily as if they'd never had a troubled thought in their heads. Here's my wife, born and raised in Massachusetts, and now she thinks as much of our institution of slavery as any of us who are raised here."
"If your slaves are so happy and contented, why do they make you so much trouble in their effort to reach Canada?"
"O, there's free niggers enough to be stirring up the devil in their heads; for their notions are not fit to mingle with our servants. And there's the good the colonization of these free negroes is doing. I know of one man that manumitted two of his slaves on purpose to have them go to Africa as missionaries; and there is the design of Providence in bringing those heathen negroes here to learn the Gospel plan by Christ, to save the dark and benighted heathen of their own country. We have reports from the two missionaries that I told you were set free for that object, and their master sent them off to school a year or more to fit them for their work."
"But why not give them all an opportunity of educacation, to enable them to read the Bible and books and papers. That would improve the race at home; and instead of sending them off, as you say, they would be preachers here among their people."
"I tell you that wouldn't amount to any thing, as there are but few that can learn any thing but work, and that they are made for. Their thick skulls show that they can't learn books; and if you knew as much about them as I do you'd see it too, but you are such an abolitioner you won't see it."
I told him I had seen colored people in the North who were well educated and intelligent.
"O yes, there are a few who can learn, but I speak of the race. They are different from us, you know. Not only their skin is black and hair curled and noses flat, but they stink so."
"But here is your house-servant, Mary, preparing your meals, setting in order your parlor and private rooms, and waiting on the persons of your wife and daughter—and her hair is as short and skin as black and nose as flat as any you'll find; and yet this disagreeable smell only troubles you in connection with the principle of freedom and liberty."
"You are such an abolitioner there's no doing any thing with you," he rejoined, and left the room.
He soon returned, and said: