I rejoice that dear Dorothy is benefited by your traveling, and pray
for every blessing on you both. As to the possibility of my coming to
England and not finding you there, my dear H----; I can say nothing and
you must do what you think right.
God bless you.
I am ever yours,
F. A. B.
[The ideas and expectations, with which I entered upon my Northern
country life, near Philadelphia, were impossible of fulfillment, and
simply ridiculous under the circumstances. Those with which I
contemplated an existence on our Southern estate, or the new one
suggested in this letter, in the State of Alabama, were not only
ridiculously impossible, but would speedily have found their only
result in the ruin, danger, and very probably death, of all
concerned in the endeavor to realize them.
The laws of the Southern States would certainly have been
forestalled by the speedier action of lynch-law, in putting a stop
to my experimental abolitionism. And I am now able to understand,
and appreciate, what, when I wrote this letter, I had not the
remotest suspicion of,--the amazement and dismay, the terror and
disgust, with which such theories as those I have expressed in it
must have filled every member of the American family with which my
marriage had connected me; I must have appeared to them nothing but
a mischievous madwoman.]
BRANCHTOWN, March 28th, 1836.
MY DEAREST H----,
You say that thinking of you makes me fancy that I have written to you:
not quite so, for no day passes with me without many thoughts of you,
and I certainly am well aware that I do not write to you daily.... But,
dearest H----, once for all, believe this: whether I am silent
altogether, or simply unsatisfactory in my communications, I love you
dearly, and hope for a happier intercourse with you,--if never
here--hereafter, in that more perfect state, where, endowed with higher
natures, our communion with those we love will, I believe, be infinitely
more intimate than it can be here, subject as it is to all the
imperfections of our present existence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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