Now, for such words, I solemnly declare that, in my opinion, you, dear madam, never had a helpless slave look to you for protection which you could give and which you refused; you, surely, never made a slave’s home desolate by taking her child from her.  No, such words as those which I have just quoted from your letter, are a perfect assurance that neither you nor your kindred, within your knowledge, are guilty of ruthless violations of domestic ties among your colored people.  Otherwise, you could not write as you do about “desolate homes” and “the child gone.”  While I read your letter and think of you, I am reminded of those words:  “Is not this he whom they seek to kill?” Why, if the insurgents’ pikes were aimed at you and your child, I would almost be willing to rush in and receive them in my own body.  Yet I would not be known at the North to have spoken so strongly as this.  O my dear madam, if there were only fifty righteous people (counting you) in the South, people who knew what “desolate homes” and “the child gone” mean, I should almost begin to hope that our Southern Gomorrah might be spared.

But I fear that I am trespassing too far away from my sworn fealty to Northern opinions and feelings.  I begin to fear that I may be tempted to be recreant to my inborn, inbred notions of liberty, while holding converse with you, for there is something extremely seductive to a Northerner in slavery; it is like the apple and the serpent to the woman; so that whoever goes to the South, or has anything to do with slave-holders, is apt to lose his integrity; there is a Circean influence there for Northern people; thousands of once good, anti-slavery men now lie dead and buried as to their reputations here at the North, in consequence of having to do with the seductive slave-power; they would fill Bonaventura Cemetery, in Savannah; the Spanish moss, swaying on the limbs of its trees, would be, in number, fit signals of their subjection to what you call right views on the subject of slavery.

Though I fear almost to hold converse with you, yet, conscious of my innate love of liberty, I venture to do so.  Bunker Hill is within twenty miles of my home.  When I go to that sacred memorial of liberty, I strive to fortify my soul afresh against the slave-power.  After hearing favorable things said, in Boston, about the South, I can go to Faneuil Hall, and there, the doors being carefully shut, walk enthusiastically about the room, almost shouting, “Sam.  Adams!” “James Otis!” “Seventy-Six!” “Shade of Warren!” “No chains on the Bay State!” “Massachusetts in the van!” “Give me liberty or give me death!” I can enjoy the privilege of looking frequently on certain majestic figures in our American Apocalypse, under the present vial,—­but I need not name them.  I meet in our book-stores with “Lays of Freedom,” never sung by such as you.  I see in the shop-windows the inspiring faces, in medallion, of those masterpieces of human nature, “the champions of freedom,” our