“These good people bid me forgive my enemies.  Easy enough for them, who have no enemies to forgive.  Forgive?  Forgive injustice, oppression, baseness, cruelty?  Forgive the devil, and bid him go in peace, and work his wicked will?  Why have they put into my hands, these last three years, books worthy of a free nation?—­books which call patriotism divine; which tell me how in every age and clime men have been called heroes who rose against their conquerors; women martyrs who stabbed their tyrants, and then died?  Hypocrites!  Did their grandfathers meekly turn the other cheek when your English taxed them somewhat too heavily?  Do they not now teach every school-child to glory in their own revolution, their own declaration of independence, and to flatter themselves into the conceit that they are the lords of creation, and the examples of the world, because they asserted that sacred right of resistance which is discovered to be unchristian in the African?  They will free us, forsooth, in good time (is it to be in God’s good time, or in their own?) if we will but be patient, and endure the rice-swamp, the scourge, the slave-market, and shame unspeakable, a few years more, till all is ready and safe,—­for them.  Dreamers as well as hypocrites!  What nation was ever freed by others’ help?  I have been reading history to see,—­you do not know how much I have been reading,—­and I find that freemen have always freed themselves, as we must do; and as they will never let us do, because they know that with freedom must come retribution; that our Southern tyrants have an account to render, which the cold Northerner has no heart to see him pay.  For, after all, he loves the Southerner better than the slave; and fears him more also.  What if the Southern aristocrat, who lords it over him as the panther does over the ox, should transfer (as he has threatened many a time) the cowhide from the negro’s loins to his?  No; we must free ourselves!  And there lives one woman, at least, who, having gained her freedom, knows how to use it in eternal war against all tyrants.  Oh, I could go down, I think at moments, down to New Orleans itself, with a brain and lips of fire, and speak words—­you know how I could speak them—­which would bring me in a week to the scourge, perhaps to the stake.  The scourge I could endure.  Have I not felt it already?  Do I not bear its scars even now, and glory in them; for they were won by speaking as a woman should speak?  And even the fire?—­Have not women been martyrs already? and could not I be one?  Might not my torments madden a people into manhood, and my name become a war-cry in the sacred fight?  And yet, oh my friend, life is sweet!—­and my little day has been so dark and gloomy!—­may I not have one hour’s sunshine, ere youth and vigour are gone, and my swift-vanishing Southern womanhood wrinkles itself up into despised old age?  Oh, counsel me,—­help me, my friend, my preserver, my true master now, so brave, so wise, so all-knowing; under whose mask of cynicism lies hid (have I not cause to know it?) the heart of a hero.