Uncle Tom's Cabin.From the New Orleans Picayune. We publish an extract which we have been allowed to make from a letter from a lady's friend to her sister at the North. The views she expresses concerning the above widely circulated book we believe to be the genuine sentiment of the Southern ladies in regard to the influence of the work, and the false mission of its author: 'You ask for my opinion of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. I will give it to you with much pleasure. 'I do not like this said Harriet, for she has proved herself false to her womanly mission—a stirrer up of strife, rather than a 'peace maker'; deficient in the delicacy and purity of a woman, inasmuch as she has painted from her own libidinous imagination, scenes which no modest woman could conceive of. I know her to have given an awfully wicked and false representation of the South and its institutions. 'If she wrote for money, she has gained her object; and like the hypocrites referred to by the Messiah, she also has her reward. If she wants to obtain the passing applause of the multitude, thirsting for stimulants, however deathly the draught may prove, she has gained this fast flitting flattery. If she wrote for the reprobation of every truth-wooing, right-minded person, who from personal observation and knowledge, or by their sincere and earnest inquiries into the truth, has attained the true knowledge, she will be ere long overwhelmed with this compensation. 'The truth is, dear M., the work is a powerful, coarse, vulgar, overwrought, deliberate misstatement—a tissue of wicked, wilful lies, from beginning to end. The woman has unsexed herself. I for one hold her in even greater detestation than Abby Kelly or Abby Folsom, inasmuch as she has more and a higher order of talents entrusted to her keeping. 'The reading of her work has had one good effect on my mind—it has given me a horror for what we call clear, strong-minded women. Before, I was somewhat inclined to sympathize with some of the supposed wrongs of women—to advocate for a little more freedom for them, &c.; but I would rather be a bondswoman on one of the southern estates than be Harriet Beecher Stowe. 'I tell my 'lordly half,' I would promise to 'obey' now more loudly, were we to be married over again. I think, when I look back, every evil act of my life had its origin in false pride—independence of spirit—and I thank the man Harriet for opening my eyes to the perils surrounding a women who believes herself sufficient unto herself; I thank the man Harriet for making more of a true woman of me—for creating in me a greater distaste for the appearance of the untrue and false.' |