I am sometimes inclined to put down all that I see and hear, good and
bad, and publish a book to satisfy my truly candid but mistaken friends
at the North as to the real truth on this subject. But I have in mind
the way in which similar works have already been received and treated by
an unreasoning, passionate North. I have amused myself sometimes in
imagining what certain writers would say to some of the incidents which
I have related in this letter. Let me attempt to show you the spirit and
manner of our Northern reviewers when one ventures to state favorable
things relating to slavery. I will take some of the incidents already
related in this letter and let these men review them. I am perfectly
familiar with their style, from having been employed in helping your
uncle prepare the notices of new publications for the "---- Review."
Here, then, I will give you first a supposed notice of my little book,
should I make one, from a Northern religious newspaper, quoting, in all
cases, the identical expressions from articles which I have read:--
"'The authoress, it seems, is yet in her Paradise of slavery.' Her
'opulent friends' and the slave-holders generally, it would appear, got
up little tableaux for her, to impose on her good-nature. Knowing the
times when she took her daily walks, they put the fattest and sleekest
black boy whom they could find, into a truckle-cart, and made two of the
sons of the 'most opulent' citizens race down hill with him. Slavery,
therefore, is not the bad thing she and we had supposed. The female
teacher of a school in the neighborhood of her daily walk was suborned,
most probably, by the 'opulent' ladies of the place, to practise another
pleasing trick. Two white girls and a black girl were made to practise
running with their arms interlocked, and one day, as our friend came in
sight, they were pushed out to astonish her with one instance of white
girls hugging a negro slave-child. No doubt our friend, on seeing these
three together, soliloquized as follows:--
"See Truth, Love, and Mercy in triumph descending,
All nature now glowing in Eden's first bloom."
The old negro, respectable and well off, was one of those rare
exceptions to surrounding degradation which you now and then see in
Southern cities. The poor slave in the cars, gentle, timid, quivering,
was the true exponent of slavery. Had our authoress filled her book with
such illustrations exclusively, she would have written more truthfully,
more for her reputation with the real 'friends of the slave,' and, we
confess, more in accordance with our taste."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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