“So that, let me add,” said I, “in opposing slavery, I am necessarily confined to the evils and abuses committed in the relationship of master.  But, even in doing this, why should I be meddlesome?  We have a most offensive air and manner in our behavior towards Southerners, in connection with their duties as masters.  It is perfectly disgusting.  I may oppose slavery, on the grounds of political economy or for national reasons.  But if I mix up with it wrathful opposition to the sin, so called, or the unrighteousness of holding property in man, it has no countenance in the Bible.  If I speak of it publicly, as a system fraught with evil, I must discriminate; or they whom I would influence, knowing that I am mistaken, will regard me as an infatuated enemy, who will effect more injury than I can repair.  As to Mr. Jefferson’s testimony, there are as good and conscientious men at the South in our day as Thomas Jefferson.  Mr. Calhoun was as worthy a witness in all respects.”

“Now tell us,” said Mrs. North, “your sober convictions, apart from this Northern controversy, about that twenty-first chapter of Exodus, where God directs that slaves, in certain cases, shall be slaves forever; and, moreover, in certain cases, that slave husbands may have their wives and children withheld from them, and the husbands leave them forever.  How do you reconcile this with the justice and goodness of God?”

I said to her, “To make the case fully appear, before we converse upon it, hear this passage, Leviticus XXV. 44-46:—­’Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.’  So, in the next verses, ’The children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land; and they shall be your possession:  And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen forever; but over your brethren, the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigor.’

“Here, and in all the divine legislation on this subject, a distinction is made between Hebrews who became slaves, and slaves who were foreigners, or of foreign extraction, though resident in Israel.  Slaves of Hebrew extraction might go free after six years, and upon the death of the owner; and in every jubilee year they must all return to freedom, and be free from every disability by reason of bondage, except where the ear was bored.

“Not so with the slaves of foreign extraction; nor even with the Hebrew whose ear was bored, provided his wife was given him in slavery, and he had elected to live with her rather than be free.  Not even upon the death of the owner could such slaves be manumitted, as was the case ordinarily with regard to Hebrew slaves; but property in these Gentile slaves, and in Hebrew slaves reduced to the same condition, God ordained should be an ‘inheritance,’ passing down forever from father to child.