13 March 1862, upon re-reading Uncle Tom's Cabin

"These negro women have a chance here women have nowhere else. They can redeem themselves. The 'impropers.' They can marry decently—and nothing is remembered against them, these colored ladies. It is not a nice topic, but Mrs [Harriet Beecher] Stowe revels in it. How delightfully pharisaic a feeling it must be, to rise superior and fancy we are so degraded as to defend and like to live with such degraded creatures around us. Such men as Legare [Legree] and his women.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
author of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
published 1851 in newspaper installments,
then in 1852 as a two-volume book

The best way to take negroes to your heart is to get as far away from them as possible. As far as I can see, Southern women do all that missionaries could to prevent and alleviate the evils. The social evil has not been suppressed in England or New England, London or Boston. And they expect more virtue from a plantation African than they can practice with all their high moral surroundings—light, education, training, and supports....
There are true, graceful, beautiful mothers of angelic Evas—North as well as South, I daresay. The Northern men and women who came here have always been hardest, for they expect an African to work and behave as a white man. We do not....
Topsys I have known—but none that were beauties—or ill-used. Evas are mostly in the heaven of Mrs Stowe's imagination. People can't love things dirty, ugly, repulsive, simply because they ought, but they can be good to them—at a distance. You see, I cannot rise very high. I can only judge what I see."

27 November 1861, the Northern misperception

"When Mrs Chesnut* married South, her husband was as wealthy as her brothers-in-law, Mr Binney or Mr Stevens. How is it now? Their money has accumulated for their children. Their old man's goes to support a horde of idle dirty Africans—while he is abused and vilified as a cruel slave-owner. I wish his 'Uncle Tom'—for he has one who never tasted calamity in any shape and whose gray hairs are honored, though they frame a black face—could be seen or could be heard as he tells me of 'me & master'—&c&c&c. We are human beings of the nineteenth century—and slavery has to go, of course. All that has been gained by it goes to the North and to negroes. The slave-owners, when they are good men and women, are the martyrs. And as far as I have seen, the people here are quite as good as anywhere else. I hate slavery. I even hate the harsh authority I see parents think it their duty to exercise toward their children.
There now!! What good does it do to write all that? I have before me a letter I wrote to Mr C while he was on our plantation in Mississippi in 1842. It is the most fervid abolition document I have ever read. I came across it, burning letters the other day. That letter I did not burn. I kept it—as showing how we were not as much of heathens as our enlightened enemies think. Their philanthropy is cheap. There are as noble, pure lives here as there—and a great deal more of self-sacrifice. . . ."

*Mary Boykin Chesnut's mother-in-law Mary Bowes Cox Chestnut (1775-1864) was from a prominent Philadelphia family. Also indicated are Philadelphia attorney/legislator Horace Binney and New Jersey entrepreneur Edwin Stevens.