inherent in the
relation of master and slave. We at the North should all be wicked if we
had such opportunities; we know, therefore, that you must be. Because
you will not let us reprove you for it, we cut off our correspondence
with your Southern ecclesiastical bodies. But I began to speak of little
graves. You will see by my involuntary wandering from them how full our
hearts are of your colored people, and how self-forgetful we are in our
desires and efforts to do them good. And yet some of your Southern
people can find it in their hearts to set at nought these our most
sacred Northern antipathies and commiserations!

But I constantly hear some of your words in your letter striking their
gentle, sad chimes in my ears. "It is not the parting alone, but the
helplessness that looked to you for protection which you could not
give;" "the emptiness of the home to which you return when the child is
gone."

Now, for such words, I solemnly declare that, in my opinion, you, dear
madam, never had a helpless slave look to you for protection which you
could give and which you refused; you, surely, never made a slave's home
desolate by taking her child from her. No, such words as those which I
have just quoted from your letter, are a perfect assurance that neither
you nor your kindred, within your knowledge, are guilty of ruthless
violations of domestic ties among your colored people. Otherwise, you
could not write as you do about "desolate homes" and "the child gone."
While I read your letter and think of you, I am reminded of those words:
"Is not this he whom they seek to kill?" Why, if the insurgents' pikes
were aimed at you and your child, I would almost be willing to rush in
and receive them in my own body. Yet I would not be known at the North
to have spoken so strongly as this. O my dear madam, if there were only
fifty righteous people (counting you) in the South, people who knew what
"desolate homes" and "the child gone" mean, I should almost begin to
hope that our Southern Gomorrah might be spared.

But I fear that I am trespassing too far away from my sworn fealty to
Northern opinions and feelings. I begin to fear that I may be tempted to
be recreant to my inborn, inbred notions of liberty, while holding
converse with you, for there is something extremely seductive to a
Northerner in slavery; it is like the apple and the serpent to the
woman; so that whoever goes to the South, or has anything to do with
slave-holders,