Answers, pamphlets, newspaper attacks came thick and fast, and certain
Northern papers, religious,--so called,--turned and began to denounce
the work as unchristian, heretical, etc. The reason of all this is
that it has been seen that the book has a direct tendency to do what
it was written for,--to awaken conscience in the slaveholding States
and lead to emancipation.
Now there is nothing that Southern political leaders and capitalists
so dread as anti-slavery feeling among themselves. All the force of
lynch law is employed to smother discussion and blind conscience on
this question. The question is not allowed to be discussed, and he who
sells a book or publishes a tract makes himself liable to fine and
imprisonment.
My book is, therefore, as much under an interdict in some parts of the
South as the Bible is in Italy. It is not allowed in the bookstores,
and the greater part of the people hear of it and me only through
grossly caricatured representations in the papers, with garbled
extracts from the book.
A cousin residing in Georgia this winter says that the prejudice
against my name is so strong that she dares not have it appear on the
outside of her letters, and that very amiable and excellent people
have asked her if such as I could be received into reputable society
at the North.
Under these circumstances, it is a matter of particular regret that
the "New York Observer," an old and long-established religious paper
in the United States, extensively read at the South, should have come
out in such a bitter and unscrupulous style of attack as even to
induce some Southern papers, with a generosity one often finds at the
South, to protest against it.
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