If freedom in the abstract is the best thing under the sun, of course you will prefer it to everything else.

No happy condition, no happy prospect for this life, and the life to come can, in your view, make being 'a slave,' as you call it, capable of being compared with this abstract privilege of being free.

In this you and your friends labor under a huge mistake, and it poisons all your views and feelings about slavery.

When you denounce slave-holders and slavery, and depict the condition of the slave in your awful colors, they at the South know that in hundreds of thousands of instances, as it regards masters and slaves, all that you say is practically false; you are carried away by your zeal against a theoretical wrong.
"Now suppose that instead of starting with the theoretical wrong and getting only such facts as illustrate it, you should travel through the South to pick up such letters as you consider this, respecting Kate, to be;--what a pleasing view might be presented of the slaves' condition in cases without number!" "But," said he, "there are terrible evils underlying these fair features of slavery." "True," said I, "but why, in the name of truth and love do you never hear such a letter as this read on the platforms of Northern abolition societies?
What mingled groans and hisses and shrieks for freedom, and then what an emptying of the demoniacal epithets there would be, if such a letter should be offered.

One case of whipping would have more effect than a thousand such letters, in your assemblies and newspapers.