aware, probably, what overflowing love and tender pity there is among us
Northerners, toward your slaves and their children. We are
disinterested, too; for we nearly forget our own black people here at
the North, and more especially in Canada, to care for you and your
people. And though hundreds of innocent young people are decoyed into
our Northern cities yearly from the country and are made the victims of
unhallowed passions, yet the thought that some of your young people on
those remote, solitary plantations, can be compelled by their masters to
do wrong on pain of being sold, fills us with such unaffected distress
that we think but little of voluntary or compulsory debauchery in our
own cities; but we think of dissolving the Union to rid ourselves of
seeming complicity with such wickedness as we see to be 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