The Sable Cloud | Page 3

aside than that there should not be, in some way,
deception about this letter. But still, here is the letter; and it is written to
her father, whom she could not deceive, whom she had no motive, no
wish, to delude. Had it been written to a Northerner, I could have
surmised that she was attempting to make false impressions about
slavery, and its influence on the slave-holder. Why should she tell her
father this simple tale, unless real affection for the babe and its mother
were impelling her? This tries my faith. It is like an undesigned
coincidence in holy writ, which used so to stagger my unbelief.
Possibly, however,--for I must maintain my previous convictions if I
can,--possibly her father is such as our anti-slavery lecturers and writers
declare a slave-holder naturally to be, and his daughter, herself a
mother, is seeking to touch his heart and turn him from his cruelties as
a slave-holder by showing him, in this indirect, beautiful manner, that
slave-mothers have the feelings of human beings. Perhaps I may
therefore compromise this matter by allowing, on one hand, that the
daughter is all that she appears to be, and claiming, on the other, that
the father is all that a slave-holder ought to be to verify our Northern
theories. But she herself is a slave-holder, and therefore by our theory
she ought to be imbruted. I beg her pardon, and that of her father; but
they must consider how hard it is for us at the North to conquer all our
prejudices even under the influence of such a demonstration as her
letter. I ask one simple question: Is not this slave-babe, (and her
mother,) of "the down-trodden," and is not this lady one of the
down-treading? And yet she weeps,--not because, as I would have
supposed, she had lost one hundred and fifty dollars in the child, but as
though she loved it like the sick and dying child of a fellow-creature, of
a mother like herself. Now, who at the North ever hears of such a thing
in slavery? The old New York Tabernacle could have said, It is not in
me;--the modern Boston Music Hall says, It is not in me. None of the

antislavery papers, political or religious, say, We have heard the fame
thereof with our ears. Our Northern instructors on the subject of slavery,
the orators, the Uncle Tom's Cabins, "The Scholar an Agitator," have
never taught us to believe this. The South, we are instructed to think, is
a Golgotha, a valley of Hinnom; compacts with it are covenants with
hell. But here is one holy angel with its music; a ministering spirit; but
is she a Lot in Sodom? Abdiel in the revolted principality? a desolate,
mourning Rizpah on that rock which overlooks four millions of slaves
and their tortures?
In a less instructed state of mind on this subject, I should once have
said, on reading this letter,--This is slavery. Here is a view of life at the
South. As a traveller accidentally catches a sight of a family around
their table, and domestic life gleams upon him for a moment; as the
opening door of a church suffers a few notes of the psalm to reach the
ear of one at a distance, this letter, written evidently amidst household
duties and cares, discloses, in a touching manner, the domestic relations
of Southern families and their servants wherever Christianity prevails.
It is one strain of the ordinary music of life in ten thousands of those
households, falling accidentally upon our ears, and giving us truthful,
artless impressions, such as labored statements and solemn depositions
would not so well convey, and which theories, counter-statements,
arguments, and invectives never can refute. Our senior pastor would
say that the letter is like the Epistles of John,--not a doctrinal exposition,
but a breathing forth of the spirit which the evangelical history had
inspired. I have come to know more, however, than I did when I could
have had such amiable but unenlightened feelings. I have read the "Key
to Uncle Tom" and the "Barbarism of Slavery."
Still, I am sorely puzzled. "Kate," she says, "wanted to have it go, it
had been sick so long; but I knew, when she said it, she did not know
what the parting would be."
"The parting!" Has she read our Northern abstracts and versions of the
Dred Scott Decision, and are there, in her view, any rights in a negro
which she is bound to respect? Has she not heard that the Supreme
Court of the United States has absolved her from all her feelings of

humanity? "The parting!" Where has she lived not to know how,
according to our lecturers, families are parted at the auction-block in
the Southern States without the