Every one who has heard you speak
has felt, and, I am confident, every one who reads your book will feel,
persuaded that you give them a fair specimen of the whole truth. No
one-sided portrait,--no wholesale complaints,--but strict justice done,
whenever individual kindliness has neutralized, for a moment, the deadly
system with which it was strangely allied. You have been with us, too,
some years, and can fairly compare the twilight of rights, which your
race enjoy at the North, with that "noon of night" under which they
labor south of Mason and Dixon's line. Tell us whether, after all, the
half-free colored man of Massachusetts is worse off than the pampered
slave of the rice swamps!
In reading your life, no one can say that we have unfairly picked out
some rare specimens of cruelty. We know that the bitter drops, which
even you have drained from the cup, are no incidental aggravations, no
individual ills, but such as must mingle always and necessarily in
the lot of every slave. They are the essential ingredients, not the
occasional results, of the system.
After all, I shall read your book with trembling for you. Some years
ago, when you were beginning to tell me your real name and birthplace,
you may remember I stopped you, and preferred to remain ignorant of
all. With the exception of a vague description, so I continued, till the
other day, when you read me your memoirs. I hardly knew, at the time,
whether to thank you or not for the sight of them, when I reflected that
it was still dangerous, in Massachusetts, for honest men to tell
their names! They say the fathers, in 1776, signed the Declaration of
Independence with the halter about their necks.
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