Page:Letters on the condition of the African race in the United States.djvu/8

6 brethren generally, have poured out the fires of their eloquence in this patriotic cause throughout the Northern cities, making stump speeches, and urging the people, by every instinct of love to their noble country, to cease the suicidal effort to goad the Southern States into withdrawing from this incomparable Union. Believe me, my brother, the abolitionists are as hateful to the dignified statesmen at the North, as they are, or ever can be, to those at the South. In all my journeyings at the North, and in all my arguments with Northern men, I have never met a single gentleman, who would own himself an abolitionist. Even Gov. Seward, whom we regard as so politically unsympathizing with the South—but who is nevertheless a man of talents and education, and also possesses many domestic virtues—even he, I will venture to assert, would not have his reputation for common sense, or philanthropy, or enlarged statesmanship, insulted, by really advocating, that all the negroes in the South should be made free, and let loose upon society to indulge many of their untamed fiendish passions, their extreme laziness, and their utter incapacity for governing themselves, positions that every Southern planter, and every man who has benevolently studied their character, or possesses respectable inductive power of thought, has long since acknowledged. The Northern man does not, I assure you, love the black man, and never dreams of lifting him up to equality with the Anglo-Saxon race; and when he says, "I would not own a slave," he means, that he could not tolerate negroes near him, and would not, on any account, endure the vexation and trouble of taking care of them. Did you ever hear an instance of a Northern man marrying a rich Southern girl, and then magnanimously giving up all her property in slaves, for the sake of his love to the black race, or of the abstract principle of freedom? And do we not know from daily observation, that the most exacting and hard-hearted masters in the Southern States, are Northern men, and foreigners? The reason of which is, that they are not acquainted with the negro capacity of mind or body, and therefore expect the master's orders to be appreciated, and his work done, in quality and quantity, such as the white laborer accomplishes with ease for his employer at the North. Even the clergymen, who come from New York to South Carolina, and take charge of our country churches, rarely if ever command the confidence of the poor blacks. In Grahamville, South Carolina, where the slaves are so numerous, they have said to me, over and again, "We do not like that Northern parson; we see he despises us in his heart, and his manners are so cold and unsympathizing, and so exacting towards us, that we