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.
