Her heart was with all good through
the world. Your prophecy that we shall come out better, truer,
stronger, will, I am confident, be true, and it was worthy of yourself
and your good lineage.
Slavery will be sent out by this agony. We are only in the throes and
ravings of the exorcism. The roots of the cancer have gone everywhere,
but they must die--will. Already the Confiscation Bill is its natural
destruction. Lincoln has been too slow. He should have done it sooner,
and with an impulse, but come it must, come it will. Your mother will
live to see slavery abolished, _unless_ England forms an alliance
to hold it up. England is the great reliance of the slave-power to-
day, and next to England the faltering weakness of the North, which
palters and dare not fire the great broadside for fear of hitting
friends. These things _must_ be done, and sudden, sharp remedies
are _mercy_. Just now we are in a dark hour; but whether God be
with us or not, I know He is with the slave, and with his redemption
will come the solution of our question. I have long known _what_
and who we had to deal with in this, for when I wrote "Uncle Tom's
Cabin" I had letters addressed to me showing a state of society
perfectly _inconceivable_. That they violate graves, make
drinking-cups of skulls, that _ladies_ wear cameos cut from
bones, and treasure scalps, is no surprise to me. If I had written
what I knew of the obscenity, brutality, and cruelty of that society
down there, society would have cast out the books; and it is for their
interest, the interest of the whole race in the South, that we should
succeed.
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