A little negro slave-babe, it seems, is dead, and its owner and mistress
is acting and speaking as Northerners do! Yes, as Northerners do even
when their own daughters' babes lie dead!

The letter must be a forgery. No; here it is before me, in the
handwriting of the lady, post-marked at the place of her residence. But
is it not, after all, a fiction? I can believe almost anything sooner
than that I am mistaken in the opinions and feelings which are
contradicted by this letter. In the spirit of Hume's argument against
the miracles of the Bible, I feel disposed, almost, to urge that it
would be a greater miracle that the course of nature at the South in a
slave-holder's heart should thus be set 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