sincere and no less profound than those of the millions in other places
and other lands, whom you have instructed, improved, delighted, and
thrilled. We beg permission to lay before you the expressions of a
gratitude and an enthusiasm in some measure commensurate with your
transcendent literary merit and moral worth. We congratulate you on the
success of the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of your genius, a success altogether
unparalleled, and in all probability never to be paralleled in the
history of literature. We congratulate you still more warmly on that
nobility and benevolence of nature which made you from childhood the
friend of the unhappy slave, and led you to accumulate unconsciously the
materials for the immortal tale of Uncle Tom's Cabin. We congratulate
you in having in that tale supported with matchless eloquence and pathos
the cause of the crushed, the forgotten, the injured, of those who had
no help of man at all, and who had even been blasphemously taught by
professed ministers of the gospel of mercy that Heaven too was opposed
to their liberation, and had blotted them out from the catalogue of man.
We recognize, too, with delight, the spirit of enlightened and
evangelical piety which breathes through your work, and serves to
confute the calumny that none but infidels are interested in the cause
of abolition--a calumny which cuts at Christianity with a yet sharper
edge than at abolition, but which you have proved to be a foul and
malignant falsehood. We congratulate you not only on the richness of the
laurels which you have won, but on the dignity, the meekness, and the
magnanimity with which these laurels have been worn. We hail in you our
most gifted sister in the great cause of liberty--we bid you warmly
welcome to our city, and we pray Almighty God, the God of the oppressed,
to pour his selectest blessings on your head, and to spare your
invaluable life, till yours, and ours, and others' efforts for the cause
of abolition are crowned with success, and till the shouts of a
universal jubilee shall proclaim that in all quarters of the globe the