“It may be that this will be considered censorious, and the proverbial generosity and hospitality of the south will be appealed to as a full confutation of it.  The writer thinks he can appreciate southern kindness and hospitality.  Having been born in Virginia, raised and educated in South Carolina and Kentucky, he is altogether southern in his feelings, and habits, and modes of familiar conversation.  He can say of the south as Cowper said of England, ’With all thy faults I love thee still, my country.’  And nothing but the abominations of slavery could have induced him willingly to forsake a land endeared to him by all the associations of childhood and youth.

“Yet it is candid to admit that it is not all gold that glitters.  There is a fictitious kindness and hospitality.  The famous Robin Hood was kind and generous—­no man more hospitable—­he robbed the rich to supply the necessities of the poor.  Others rob the poor to bestow gifts and lavish kindness and hospitality on their rich friends and neighbors.  It is an easy matter for a man to appear kind and generous, when he bestows that which others have earned.

“I said, there is a fictitious kindness and hospitality.  I once knew a man who left his wife and children three days, without fire-wood, without bread-stuff and without shoes, while the ground was covered with snow—­that he might indulge in his cups.  And when I attempted to expostulate with him, he took the subject out of my hands, and expatiating on the evils of intemperance more eloquently than I could, concluded by warning me, with tears, to avoid the snares of the latter.  He had tender feelings, yet a hard heart.  I once knew a young lady of polished manners and accomplished education, who would weep with sympathy over the fictitious woes exhibited in a novel.  And waking from her reverie of grief, while her eye was yet wet with tears, would call her little waiter, and if she did not appear at the first call, would rap her head with her thimble till my head ached.

“I knew a man who was famed for kindly sympathies.  He once took off his shirt and gave it to a poor white man.  The same man hired a black man, and gave him for his daily task, through the winter, to feed the beasts, keep fires, and make one hundred rails:  and in case of failure the lash was applied so freely, that, in the spring, his back was one continued sore, from his shoulders to his waist.  Yet this man was a professor of religion, and famous for his tender sympathies to white men!”

OBJECTION IV.—­’NORTHERN VISITORS AT THE SOUTH TESTIFY THAT THE SLAVES ARE NOT CRUELLY TREATED.’