site kind, which good
people there very generally deplore.

A Southern lady here tells me that some time since, being on a visit at
the North, she received through the post-office anonymous letters with
extracts from newspapers containing little items of woe, declared to
have been experienced at the South, with here and there delirious abuse
of slave-holders and frenzied words about freedom. She could have
matched every one of them, she said, with wife-murders at the North,
during her visit. In dealing with people like the slaves, of course men
of brutal passions, provoked by their stupidity and negligence, or
exasperated by their crimes, and, in cases of ungovernable anger,
venting their displeasure upon their negroes under slight or merely
imaginary affronts, give occasion to tales of distress which are nowhere
mourned over more deeply than at the South. These cases are the natural
results of a superior and inferior class of society, standing in the
relation, the one to the other, of proprietor and dependant, and such
evils are not peculiar to this institution. Human nature is the same
everywhere. The South is willing to have the abuses of irresponsible
power among them compared with abuses, discomforts, disadvantages
elsewhere. Grant that an owner may abuse his liberty; ownership leads to
more of care and protection than of abuse and cruelty. The slaves are
here; the question is not, What would be the best possible condition for
these people under the sun, but, What is best for them, being on this
soil. "Set them all free," is the answer of some. Half the ministers at
the North every Sabbath pray for the slaves thus: "Break every yoke; let
the oppressed go free." If this means, Give the slaves their liberty,
this would be their most direful calamity; they would be chased away
from every free state, in process of time, and the Dred Scott decision
would be invoked, even in Massachusetts, by its present most bitter
opposers, and in its most misrepresented forms, as a defence of the
American white race against the blacks. "Set them free and hire them!"
is the reply of others. This, among other effects, would make them a far
more degraded people than they now are. Slavery keeps them identified
with the whites; they are more respectable and respected by far, in this
relation, than they can be, in the circumstances of the case, if they
are detached from the whites. There is no expression which conveys a
more absolute error