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, is apt to lose his integrity; there is a Circean
influence there for Northern people; thousands of once good,
anti-slavery men now lie dead and buried as to their reputations here at
the North, in consequence of having to do with the seductive
slave-power; they would fill Bonaventura Cemetery, in Savannah; the
Spanish moss, swaying on the limbs of its trees, would be, in number,
fit signals of their subjection to what you call right views on the
subject of slavery.