Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[236] mulatto girls in neat pink calico frocks suggesting a careful mother. Some question being asked, Mr. Lynch responded cheerfully, “Strip her and examine for yourself. I never have any secrets. from my customers.” This ceremony being waived, the eldest was chosen; and the planter, patting her on the head kindly enough, asked, “Don't you want to go with me?” when the child, bursting into a flood of tears, said, “I want to stay with my mother.” Mr. Lynch's face ceased to be good-natured when he ordered the children to go out, but the bargain was finally completed. It was an epitome of slavery; the perfectly matter-of-fact character of the transaction, and the circumstance that those before me did not seem exceptionally cruel men, made the whole thing more terrible. I was beholding a case, not of special outrage, but of every-day business, which was worse. If these were the commonplaces of the institution, what must its exceptional tragedies be?

With such an experience in my mind, and the fact everywhere visible in Kansas of the armed antagonism of the Free State and pro-slavery parties, I readily shared the feeling-then more widely spread than we can now easily recall — of the possible necessity of accepting the disunion forced upon us by the