George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[286] we soon show that we feel it. The Irish population among us is very large, and has already two or three times made movements to help their kinsfolk at home to break up their union with your island. But thus far they have found little or no sympathy among the rest of our population; the Anglo-Saxon part, I mean. Now, however, the tide is turning. Meagher has been lecturing in New York to immense audiences, and, since I began this letter, I see by the newspaper that Choate, the leading Whig lawyer in New England, Seaver, our Boston Whig Mayor, and many others, who six months ago would have dreamed of no such thing, have sent him a complimentary invitation to come and lecture here. He will of course come, and he will produce not a little effect, even in this conservative town. But the real danger is not yet; that will come when the troubles in Europe come. . . . .

I dare say you will smile at the results to which I come, and I am willing to believe that little of what I picture within the range of possibilities is likely to come to pass. But that the tendency of things at the present moment is toward troubles with England, . . . . nobody hereabouts, for whose opinion you or I should care a button, doubts. . . . .

I began, intending to write a letter about ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin,’ and I have talked about everything else. However, I must still say a word. I have read it with great interest. It is a book of much talent, especially dramatic talent, . . . . but it is quite without the epic attributes that alone can make a romance classical, and settle it as a part of the literature of any country. As an exhibition of manners it is much more exaggerated than it should have been, for neither its good slaveholders nor its bad slaveholders can be taken as examples of even a moderate number of either class. As a political book it greatly exasperates the slaveholders, and perhaps most seriously offends those among them who most feel the evils of slavery, and who most conscientiously endeavor to fulfil the hard duties it imposes on them, the very class whom Mrs. Stowe should, both as a Christian woman and a politician, have sustained and conciliated. Elsewhere —I mean everywhere but in our slaveholding States—it will produce an effect exactly in proportion to the distance of its readers from the scenes it describes, and their previous ignorance of the state and condition of the questions it discusses. Thus, in New England, where we have learned to distinguish between our political relations to the South and our moral relations to slavery, it deepens the horror of servitude, but it does not affect a single vote . . . . . But of one thing