It was months before Dorothy sat up and began to walk again.  I could see that she was frailer than before and might never be strong again.  Our boy Reverdy was not robust.  And the winter was coming on.  At the same time Dorothy did not wish to return to Washington.  She wanted to hear no more of politics.  I had to select her books for her, something that soothed her, led her into dreams. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was now appearing in serial form.  I was reading it with great amusement.  But I dared not show it to Dorothy.  I had heard Beecher and knew his sentimental attitude.  This book had for me the same quality.  Yet it helped me to pass many hours while watching by Dorothy’s side.  Somehow I felt that it would produce a storm akin to the religious psychology which was sweeping the country.  Critics were already noting its moral effect.  Mrs. Stowe was hailed by Sumner as a “Christian genius,” a Joan of Arc.  Garrison said that it would make two million abolitionists.  In Paris it was compared to Dumas’ The Three Guardsmen as a popular tour de force.  Others detected in it a resemblance to Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise.  One pleaded for the liberty of the slave, the other for the rights of the peasant.  But I knew that the book was not really true.  It forefronted the brutality of slavery, it minimized the benevolent aspects of the institution, which I had myself seen.  It was written with intensity of feeling, with the revivalist’s method and emotion.  It was like her brother’s sermons, and equally unauthentic.  Yet how strangely was this book received.  It won Macaulay and Longfellow and George Sand, and stirred the heart of Heine.  It exasperated the South.  The winds of destiny previously let loose were blowing madly now.

In the midst of my own cares I awoke one morning to read that Douglas was on his way to Cuba.  The thought went through my mind, why not take Dorothy and go in order to give her the benefit of this summer climate through the winter?  As Douglas had traveled by way of New Orleans he had stopped in Memphis and I read in the Tribune what he had said to the people there:  “If old Joshua R. Giddings should raise a colony in Ohio and settle down in Louisiana he would be the strongest advocate of slavery in the South; he would find when he got there that his opinion would be very much modified; he would find on those sugar plantations that it was not a question between the white man and the negro, but between the negro and the crocodile.  You come right back to the principle of dollars and cents.”

At New Orleans he had uttered the God of nature doctrine:  “There is a line or belt of country meandering through the valleys and over the mountain tops which is a natural barrier between free territory and slave territory, on the south of which are to be found the productions suitable to slave labor, while on the north exists a country adapted to free labor alone.  But in the great central region, where there may be some doubt as to the effect of natural causes, who ought to decide the question except the people residing there, who have all their interests there, who have gone there to live with their wives and children?”