Lowell, Oct. 9th, 1848.

Dear Douglass:—If you deem the following facts of sufficient importance, please give them an insertion in the North Star. While travelling, a short time since, from Whitehall to Troy, on a canal boat, it was my good or ill fortune to fall in with a mean and contemptible creature from Kentucky, of the name of Carpenter, who calls himself a lawyer. He was undoubtedly a slaveholder, and here by hireship, for he certainly lacked the necessary brain to acquire property by his own exertion. This slaveholder, and an old man, quite as bad as himself, held a conversation in the hearing of myself and other passengers, the substance of which I propose to give. Though old, it may not be uninteresting. Slavery was affirmed to be a patriarchal institution; the negroes were descendants of Ham; a curse was upon them; God had ordained them to be slaves; caste was of divine origin. The old man said that the negroes were a distinct race, approximating to human beings only in form, but without intellect and without morality; that they were evidently intended by God to be a servile race. To confirm this miserable stuff, the old man cited the sayings of some author, whose name I do not remember, on anatomy, who had founded an argument on the resemblance of the bones of a monkey with those of a negro, and that the negro race was merely a connecting link between the human and the brute creation.—In the midst of these profound speculations about the origin and relations of our abused race, a shallow-patel priest, but little superior to the slaveholder in point of intellect, came to the rescue. He said he thought his friend from Kentucky mistaken in respect to the intellectual powers of the negro, and named several men among us whose talents are unquestioned—among others yourself. "Frederick Douglass," said the Kentuckian, "is an ignorant fellow—the most so of any I ever heard speak in public. He is no speaker at all, but the veriest negro story-teller." To this, the servile priest answered only that he was opposed to slavery, but in the same breath said he was no abolitionist. Here some one made allusion to the notorious wholesale amalgamation carried on by slaveholders with their slaves, which seemed to cut the slaveholder to the quick, and we all looked to see how he would answer it.—Strange to say, he owned up the "whole corn," and said that the same was true of the patriarchs. He said that colored women were not like white women; the former were destitute of virtue or intelligence, and were fit only to perpetuate the race, and never could be qualified for society. "What white man," said he, "would marry one of them?" Here, for the benefit of the ladies, I stated the case of the celebrated R. M. Johnson, who has two colored daughters by a slave woman, and has educated them, and these same daughters are the wives of wealthy white men of the South, and I believe slaveholders. These, I said, are facts, and considering the remarks of this Billingsgate fellow insulting to myself and to decency, I should take no further notice of him. In this conclusion I had the sympathy of most of the passengers.

Ever yours for Equal Rights,

H. W. FOSTER.