"'If American slavery,' says one, 'be the horrid system of cruelty, ignorance, and wickedness represented by some writers of fiction and paid defamers of our institutions, how happens it that those who have been reared in the midst of it, when freed and planted in Africa at once exhibit such capacity for self-government and self-education, and set such examples of good morals?
"'Have the negroes under British care at Sierra Leone made similar progress in improvement? Do the free colored subjects of Britain in the West Indies show the capacity, industry, and intelligence manifested by the Liberians, whose training was in the school of American servitude? Nor have the best specimens of this tutelage been sent out. Thousands and tens of thousands of colored servants in the Southern States are church-members, instructed in their duties by faithful Christian teachers, and the children are trained in the fear and love of God.'—I then observed,
"I have come to this conclusion: if Southern Christians say to us, as they do, Auction-blocks, separation of families, and similar features of slavery, in the limited and decreasing extent to which they prevail, are as odious to us as to you;—we tolerate these things as parts of a system which we all feel to be an evil, and which we are constantly striving to ameliorate;—I will leave the whole subject in their hands; I will trust them in this as I would in anything and everything; I feel absolved from all responsibility to God or to them with regard to the matter."
"Pray tell me," said Mrs. North, "what is all this discussion about 'the territories,' and keeping slavery out of them?"
"I told her that slavery, which fifteen States of the Union maintain as a part of their domestic life, is, by many of the people in the Free States, regarded as they regard the plague and death; they prescribe certain degrees of latitude as barriers to it, as though they enacted thus: 'North of 36° 30' whooping-cough is prohibited, measles are forbidden, cholera-morbus is forever interdicted.' They regard slave-holders as living in a moral pestilence, and seeking to carry it with them into new districts.
"But, practically," I said, "the thing will now regulate itself, and both sides are contending very much for an abstract right. It is a war of feeling, and no one knows where it will end. If the North would say, 'Free labor, which cannot thrive where slavery exists, requires an amicable division and allotment of the territorial regions; let us agree where our respective systems shall prevail,'—there would be no difficulty. But the effort has been to shut out slavery, as men use sanitary legislation and quarantine to keep out a pestilence. This is treating fifteen States of the Union as polluted and polluting. Hence they say, We cannot live together as one people, and we will not."
* * * * *
"What do you honestly think," said Mr. North, "is the true cause of our present national calamities?"
"They are owing," said I, "originally, to the peculiar state of feeling on the part of the North toward the South. This was not in consequence of injury experienced; for slavery had not inflicted injury upon the North; but, right or wrong, Northern disapprobation of slavery, and the ways of manifesting it, are the fountain-head of our present national trouble. Let great numbers in one section of such a nation as this conscientiously disapprove of their brethren in another section, and not only so, but hold them guilty of an immoral and an inhuman system, and deal with them in such ways as Conscience, that most merciless of inquisitors and persecutors, alone employs, and if the indicted section be not exasperated, it will be because the accusation is true,—that their system has destroyed their manhood."
"But my hope and belief," said he, "are, that all these changes are to result in the overthrow of slavery."