We have now become pretty well acquainted with the sugar-growing part of Texas. The life of a planter who has a fair start in the world is one of the most independent imaginable. We here find the pleasures of fashionable life without its tyranny. I doubt, however, whether a person of Northern education could so far forget his home-bred notions and feelings as ever to be thoroughly Southern on the subject of slavery. We have seen none of the horrors so often described, but on the other hand I have seen nothing to change my Northern opinions.

Letter to his mother, Sophia Birchard Hayes (27 January 1849) - Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)