In the Presbytery which includes Charleston, S.C., there are two thousand eight hundred and eighty-nine church-members, and of these one thousand six hundred-and thirty-seven, more than one half, are colored.  In State Street, Mobile, there is a colored Methodist Church who pay their minister, from their own money, twelve hundred dollars a year.  Not long since they took up a voluntary contribution for Home Missions, amounting to one hundred and twenty dollars.  Their preacher was sent by the Conference, according to rotation, into another field, and the blacks presented him with a valuable suit of clothes.

You see things here, good and evil, side by side, and mixed up together, one thing counterbalancing another.  If you reason theoretically upon this subject, as you do “about the moon,” to quote from your letter, it is enough to make one almost a lunatic, and I do not wonder that some of our good people at the North, who pore over this subject in this way, are on the borders of insanity.

My great mistake at the North with regard to this subject of slavery was, I reasoned about it in the abstract, instead of considering it in connection with those who are slaves under our laws, bound up with us in our civil constitution.  Things might be true or false, right or wrong, in connection with the enslavement of a race who had never been slaves, which cannot be applied to the colored people of the South.  Hence, the arguments and the appeals founded on the wrongfulness of reducing you or me to slavery are obviously misapplied when used to urge the emancipation of these slaves.  Moreover, my thoughts about slavery were governed by my associations with the word slave, in its worst sense.  This is wholly wrong, and it is the source of most of our mistakes on this subject.

Dreadful things happen here to some of the slaves in the hands of passionate men.  One slave who had run away was caught, and was beaten for a long time, and melted turpentine was then poured upon his wounds.  He lingered for several hours.  But the horror and execration which this deed met with were no greater at the North than at the South.  It cannot be denied that slavery, as well as marriage, affords peculiar provocations and facilities for cruel deeds,—­according to the doctrine of your friend and fellow-Sophomore.  But in which section there is the more of unpunished wickedness, I am slow to pronounce, for I do not wish to condemn my own people, nor to justify others in their sins.  An excellent minister in Cincinnati not long since preached a sermon on murder, in which he stated that “during his residence in that city, there had been more than one hundred murders, or an average of two a month, while in no instance had the perpetrator been executed.”  Reading lately of a husband at the North throwing oil of vitriol from a bottle, filled for the purpose, over his wife’s face and neck, and of a Northern clergyman feeding his young wife, as she sat on his