Five
days earlier we find her charged with one copy of Horace Mann's
speeches. In writing of this critical period of her life Mrs. Stowe
says:--
"After sending the last proof-sheet to the office I sat alone reading
Horace Mann's eloquent plea for these young men and women, then about
to be consigned to the slave warehouse of Bruin & Hill in Alexandria,
Va.,--a plea impassioned, eloquent, but vain, as all other pleas on
that side had ever proved in all courts hitherto. It seemed that there
was no hope, that nobody would hear, nobody would read, nobody pity;
that this frightful system, that had already pursued its victims into
the free States, might at last even threaten them in Canada."
[Footnote: Introduction to Illustrated Edition of _Uncle Tom_, p.
xiii. (Houghton, Osgood & Co., 1879.)]
Filled with this fear, she determined to do all that one woman might
to enlist the sympathies of England for the cause, and to avert, even
as a remote contingency, the closing of Canada as a haven of refuge
for the oppressed. To this end she at once wrote letters to Prince
Albert, to the Duke of Argyll, to the Earls of Carlisle and
Shaftesbury, to Macaulay, Dickens, and others whom she knew to be
interested in the cause of anti-slavery. These she ordered to be sent
to their several addresses, accompanied by the very earliest copies of
her book that should be printed.
Then, having done what she could, and committed the result to God, she
calmly turned her attention to other affairs.
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