He supposed it all went back to when she’d read that infernal book. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been no help to his marriage, that was for sure. It was amazing to Frank that the issue of slavery could have come between him and his wife; yet perhaps, he considered, he shouldn’t be so surprised when it had managed to divide the whole country. Nor was it only the rights and wrongs of the slavery question, but the profound difference in philosophy that the argument had revealed—a difference about which, at the end of the day, he could do nothing.

If Hetty believed that slavery was wrong, Frank didn’t disagree with her. But to his mind, it wasn’t as simple as that. “We have to deal with the world as it is, not as it should be,” he would gently point out.

It wasn’t as if the issue was new. Washington and Jefferson, both slave owners, had recognized the inconsistency of slave-owning with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Both had hoped that slavery would slowly disappear, but they also realized how difficult that would be.

A few summers ago, Frank and Hetty had gone up the Hudson to the resort of Saratoga. At the hotel, they had got to know a charming family from Virginia who owned a small plantation. Frank had particularly liked the father, a tall, elegant, gray-haired old gentleman, who had been partial to sitting in his library reading a good book. They had enjoyed many hours of conversation, during which the Virginian had been very frank about the slave question.

“Some people say that slaves are like the family servants of their owners,” he’d remarked. “Others say that slaves are treated worse than animals. In a way, both statements are true, because there are two kinds of slave plantation. In small plantations like mine, the slaves that work in the house are more like family retainers, I’d say. And I hope we treat the men in the fields kindly as well. But there’s a reason why we should. Back in the last century, remember, most slaves were imported. Slave owners might be considerate, or they might not—usually the latter, I’m afraid. But once they’d got all they could out of a slave, they just bought another one. Early in this century, however, when Congress ended the slave-importation business, slaves had to be home-grown, and their owners had an incentive to treat them as valuable livestock, if you like, rather than chattels to be worked to death. So you might have thought that would improve the lot of the slave.