It was written with
intensity of feeling, with the revivalist's method and emotion. It was
like her brother's sermons, and equally unauthentic. Yet how strangely
was this book received. It won Macaulay and Longfellow and George Sand,
and stirred the heart of Heine. It exasperated the South. The winds of
destiny previously let loose were blowing madly now.
In the midst of my own cares I awoke one morning to read that Douglas
was on his way to Cuba. The thought went through my mind, why not take
Dorothy and go in order to give her the benefit of this summer climate
through the winter? As Douglas had traveled by way of New Orleans he had
stopped in Memphis and I read in the _Tribune_ what he had said to the
people there: "If old Joshua R. Giddings should raise a colony in Ohio
and settle down in Louisiana he would be the strongest advocate of
slavery in the South; he would find when he got there that his opinion
would be very much modified; he would find on those sugar plantations
that it was not a question between the white man and the negro, but
between the negro and the crocodile. You come right back to the
principle of dollars and cents."
At New Orleans he had uttered the God of nature doctrine: "There is a
line or belt of country meandering through the valleys and over the
mountain tops which is a natural barrier between free territory and
slave territory, on the south of which are to be found the productions
suitable to slave labor, while on the north exists a country adapted to
free labor alone.
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