LETTER: Autograph letter signed, to her father and mother.
Autograph Letter Signed. 4 pp. including stampless address leaf.
To her wealthy father and mother, (Colonel Richard H.[ardison] Bonner and Elisabeth Lee Bonner), Washington, North Carolina. The young woman, away from home for the first time, visiting Northern friends, compared New England with her beloved home of “warm sunshine”: The “Yankees” were always in “great haste…real go ahead folks, and do not stop for trifles; if they did, poverty would be their end; for the land is what we would call barren, and it is only by perseverance that it produces anything…” She saw little ostentation, even famed Daniel Webster’s house being “a large and commodious dwelling but plain and simple as everything is in Boston”. Her “very kind” friends “have no servants, nor can they procure one, yet I have not seen a dirty house since I landed in New York…they have a regular time to clean everything, whether it needs it or no, and they do it themselves…as it should be, which makes a great difference and they are far happier without [slaves] than we are with them. We never heard a word on slavery till we were in the last train of cars going to Worcester, when two men opposite us discussed the question high, and such gross ideas you never heard; one of them I don’t believe ever saw a slave, and yet he said that no man would love his country or feared god while he encouraged such heinous sin, as he pleased to call it…” Yet she herself felt close to their Black servants, advising her mother about one in particular, “Make Dianna a smart girl, for she is capable of it. These people here, some of them think negroes are not capable of any improvement whatever; but I know she is…” The University of North Carolina holds a large collection of Mary Bonner’s papers, including her expense account of this trip to Massachusetts.
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