"Reading Mrs Stowe or Redpath's John Brown,* one feels utterly confounded at the atrocity of African slavery. We look upon the miserable black race as crushed to earth, habitually knocked down, as John Brown says, 'by an iron shovel or anything that comes handy.' At home we see them, the idlest, laziest, fattest, most comfortably contented peasantry that ever cumbered the earth—and we forget there is anything wrong in slavery at all.
I daresay the truth lies between the two extremes."
*The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (1860) by antislavery journalist James Redpath.
