“The parting!” Has she read our Northern abstracts and versions of the Dred Scott Decision, and are there, in her view, any rights in a negro which she is bound to respect?  Has she not heard that the Supreme Court of the United States has absolved her from all her feelings of humanity?  “The parting!” Where has she lived not to know how, according to our lecturers, families are parted at the auction-block in the Southern States without the least compunction?  We are constantly told,—­has she not heard it?—­that the slave at the South is a mere “chattel,” and that a slave-child is bought and sold as recklessly as a calf, and that a parting between a slave-mother and her children, sold and separated for life, is an occurrence as familiar as the separation of animals and their young, and no more regarded by slave-holders than divorcements in the barn-yard.  This being so, it must follow that when a slave-babe dies, the only sorrow in the hearts of the white owners is such as they feel when a colt is kicked to death or a heifer is choked.  This must be so, if all is true which is meant to be conveyed when we are told so often at the North that the slave is a mere “chattel.”  Therefore I am puzzled by this lady’s tears for the mother of this little black babe.  She says of the mother of that poor little negro infant slave, “I knew she did not dream what the parting would be.”  I repeat it, my theory of slavery, that which I hold in common with all enlightened friends of freedom, requires that this lady should have a debased, imbruted nature, for she owns human beings, has made property of God’s image in man.  And now I feel creeping over me a dreadful temptation to think that one may hold fellow-creatures in bondage and yet be really humane, gentle, and as good as a Northerner!  What fearful changes in politics would come about should our people believe this!  It cannot be that our great party of Freedom can ever go to pieces and disappoint the hopes of the world; yet this would be the case, if the feelings stirred by this letter should gain a general acceptance.  I cannot gainsay the facts.  Here is the letter.  May it never see the light; people are much more influenced by such things than by mere logic, and oh, what would befall the nation should our Northern excitement against slavery cease, and should we leave the whole subject to the South and to God!  “What if people should come to believe that the Southerners—­fifteen or sixteen States of this Union—­are as humane, Christian, and conscientious as the North!

Who will resolve my painful doubts?  I do crave to know what possible motive this lady could have had in taking so much thought and care about the last resting-place of this poor little black “chattel.”  You and your husband, dear lady, seem to be as kind and painstaking as though you knew that a fellow-creature of yours was returning, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”