s, noble-minded men and women, of the South,--you, whose
virtue, and magnanimity and purity of character, are the greater for the
severer trial it has encountered,--to you is her appeal. Have you not,
in your own secret souls, in your own private conversings, felt that
there are woes and evils, in this accursed system, far beyond what are
here shadowed, or can be shadowed? Can it be otherwise? Is _man_ ever a
creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power? And does not the
slave system, by denying the slave all legal right of testimony, make
every individual owner an irresponsible despot? Can anybody fall to
make the inference what the practical result will be? If there is, as we
admit, a public sentiment among you, men of honor, justice and humanity,
is there not also another kind of public sentiment among the ruffian,
the brutal and debased? And cannot the ruffian, the brutal, the debased,
by slave law, own just as many slaves as the best and purest? Are the
honorable, the just, the high-minded and compassionate, the majority
anywhere in this world?

The slave-trade is now, by American law, considered as piracy. But
a slave-trade, as systematic as ever was carried on on the coast of
Africa, is an inevitable attendant and result of American slavery. And
its heart-break and its horrors, can they be told?

The writer has given only a faint shadow, a dim picture, of the anguish
and despair that are, at this very moment, riving thousands of hearts,
shattering thousands of families, and driving a helpless and sensitive
race to frenzy and despair. There are those living who know the mothers
whom this accursed traffic has driven to the murder of their children;
and themselves seeking in death a shelter from woes more dreaded
than death. Nothing of tragedy can be written, can be spoken, can be
conceived, that equals the frightful reality of scenes daily and hourly
acting on our shores, beneath the shadow of American law, and the shadow
of the cross of Christ.

And now, men and women of America, is this a thing to be trifled with,
apologized for, and passed over in silence? Farmers of Massachusetts,
of New Hampshire, of Vermont, of Connecticut, who read this book by the
blaze of your winter-evening fire,--strong-hearted, generous sailors
and ship-owners of Maine,--is this a thing for you to countenance and
encourage? Brave and generous men of New York, farmers of rich and
joyous Ohio, and ye of the wide prairie states