When a slaver arrived
at Boston, your pious Puritan clergyman offered public prayer of thanks
that 'A gracious and overruling Providence had been pleased to bring to
this land of freedom another cargo of benighted heathen to enjoy the
blessings of a gospel dispensation----'"

She looked at him with angry incredulity and cried:

"Go on."

"Twenty-three times the Legislature of Virginia passed acts against the
importation of slaves, which the king vetoed on petition of the
Massachusetts slave traders. Jefferson made these acts of the king one of
the grievances of the Declaration of Independence, but a Massachusetts
member succeeded in striking it out. The Southern men in the convention
which framed the Constitution put into it a clause abolishing the slave
trade, but the Massachusetts men succeeded in adding a clause extending
the trade twenty years----"

He smiled and paused.

"Go on," she said, with impatience.

"In Colonial days a negro woman was publicly burned to death in Boston.
The first Abolition paper was published in Tennessee by Embree. Benjamin
Lundy, his successor, could not find a single Abolitionist in Boston. In
1828 over half the people of Tennessee favoured Abolition. At this time
there were one hundred and forty Abolition Societies in America--one
hundred and three in the South, and not one in Massachusetts. It was not
until 1836 that Massachusetts led in Abolition--not until all her own
slaves had been sold to us at a profit and the slave trade had been
destroyed----"

She looked at Ben with anger for a moment and met his tantalizing look of
good humour.

"Can you stand any more?"

"Certainly, I enjoy it."

"I'm just breaking down the barriers--so to speak," he said, with the
laughter still lurking in his eyes, as he looked steadily ahead.

"By all means go on," she said soberly. "I thought at first you were
trying to tease me. I see that you are in earnest."

"Never more so. This is about the only little path of history I'm at home
in--I love to show off in it. I heard a cheerful idiot say the other day
that your father meant to carry the civilization of Massachusetts to the
Rio Grande until we had a Democracy in America. I smiled. While
Massachusetts was enforcing laws about the dress of the rich and the poor,
founding a church with a whipping-post, jail, and gibbet, and limiting the
right to vote to a church membership fixed by pew rents, Carolina was the
home of freedom where first