, 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