Mary had a clear-eyed view of slavery. She had lived among enslaved men and women all her life and understood that it was the foundation of Southern society. She opposed abolition and called Lincoln a “horrid black republican ogre.” But she loathed the institution’s most unsavory aspect, the sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls. “God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity!” she wrote. “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children.
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