Nobody can tell the thousand ways in which by
trade, by family affinity, or by political expediency, the free part
of our country is constantly tempted to complicity with the
slaveholding part. It is a terrible thing to become used to hearing
the enormities of slavery, to hear of things day after day that one
would think the sun should hide his face from, and yet, to _get used
to them_, to discusss them coolly, to dismiss them coolly. For
example, the sale of intelligent, handsome colored females for vile
purposes, facts of the most public nature, have made this a perfectly
understood matter in our Northern States. I have now, myself, under
charge and educating, two girls of whose character any mother might be
proud, who have actually been rescued from this sale in the New
Orleans market.
I desire to inclose a tract [Footnote: Afterwards embodied in the
_Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin_.] in which I sketched down a few
incidents in the history of the family to which these girls belong; it
will show more than words can the kind of incident to which I allude.
The tract is not a published document, only _printed_ to assist
me in raising money, and it would not, at present, be for the good of
the parties to have it published even in England.
But though these things are known in the free States, and other
things, if possible, worse, yet there is a terrible deadness of moral
sense.
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