ent connection. He rather
presumes on his former great intimacy with my father, and undertakes to
lecture me occasionally when opportunity is afforded. He was greatly
scandalized at my speaking of Emily as my wife; and seemed to think me
cracked because I talked of endeavouring to procure a governess for my
children, or of sending them abroad to be educated. He has a holy horror of
everything approaching to amalgamation; and of all the men I ever met,
cherishes the most unchristian prejudice against coloured people. He says,
the existence of "a gentleman" with African blood in his veins, is a moral
and physical impossibility, and that by no exertion can anything be made of
that description of people. He is connected with a society for the
deportation of free coloured people, and thinks they ought to be all sent
to Africa, unless they are willing to become the property of some good
master."
"Oh, yes; it is quite a hobby of his," here interposed Mr. Winston. "He
makes lengthy speeches on the subject, and has published two of them in
pamphlet form. Have you seen them?"
"Yes, he sent them to me. I tried to get through one of them, but it was
too heavy, I had to give it up. Besides, I had no patience with them; they
abounded in mis-statements respecting the free coloured people. Why even
here in the slave states--in the cities of Savanah and Charleston--they are
much better situated than he describes them to be in New York; and since
they can and do prosper here, where they have such tremendous difficulties
to encounter, I know they cannot be in the condition he paints, in a state
where they are relieved from many of the oppressions they labour under
here. And, on questioning him on the subject, I found he was entirely
unacquainted with coloured people; profoundly ignorant as to the real facts
of their case. He had never been within a coloured church or school; did
not even know that they had a literary society amongst them. Positively, I,
living down here in Georgia, knew more about the character and condition of
the coloured people of the Northern States, than he who lived right in the
midst of them. Would you believe that beyond their laundress and a drunken
negro that they occasionally employed to do odd jobs for them, they were
actually unacquainted with any coloured people: and how unjust was it for
him to form his opinion respecting a class numbering over twenty thousand
in his own state, from the two individuals I
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