Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Winslow Sewall, Ed.

Every instance of sending back poor fugitive slaves has cut into my heart like the stab of a bowie-knife, and made me dejected for days ; not only because I pitied the poor wretches who trusted the government in vain, but because I felt that all moral dignity was taken out of the conflict by such incidents, and that the enthusiasm of the soldiers and the people must be diminished by it. A soldier needs a great idea to fight for; and how can the idea of freedom be otherwise than obscured by witnessing the wicked, mean, unmanly surrendering of poor trembling fugitives? The absurd policy of the thing is also provoking. To send back those who want to serve us, to be employed by rebels to help them in shooting us It seems to me as if the eyes of the government were holden, that they cannot see. Still pursuing the old policy of years-willing to disregard the dictates of justice and humanity, for the sake of conciliating the few slave-holders we have left to be conciliated. I have said all along that we needed defeats and reverses to make us come up manfully to the work of freedom. .. . Yet these last battles, with all their terrible incidents, have made me almost down sick. Night and day I am thinking of those poor soldiers, stabbed after they were wounded, shot after they dropped down from fatigue. My heart bleeds for the mothers of those sons. And shall all this awful havoc be made without removing the cause of the war? without abolishing that detestable institution which will always be marring our prosperity and troubling our peace, so long as it is allowed to exist? But my belief is that order is to