The personality of Richard Hildreth, the historian of the United States and the unquailing opponent of African slavery in America, was one of the very first that appealed to me when my own boyish literary aspirations were first awakened. His intensely powerful novel, “Archy Moore,” which had been published in 1837, reprinted in England and again republished in the United States in 1852, under the title of “The White Slave,” appeared just when Commodore Matthew C. Perry was making his preparations to sail for Japan. Philadelphia was agog with interest about the expedition, and many of her citizens were keenly interested, among them my father, John L. Griffis, who, like my grandfather, Captain John Griffis, had voyaged to the Philippines, China, and the Far East. He had built a platform in his coalyard, which directly adjoined the shiphouse and dock of the United States Navy Yard, wherein was building the United States steam frigate “Susquehanna,” which later in Japanese waters became the flagship of Commodore Perry. It is not so many miles from the upper waters of this noble river of the three States, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, that this “foreword” is written. As a little boy, on the morning of April 6, 1850, at 8.35 A.M., I saw the graceful “Susquehanna” slide down the ways, float on the Delaware, and, like a bird of calm, “sit brooding on the charmèd wave.” I remember how, when sitting on my father’s knee, he put me down suddenly to rise and call for “three cheers for the future of the ‘Susquehanna.’” We could not then foresee what a noble part the frigate was to play in the annals of both peace and war. She bore the olive branch to Japan and she unchained her thunders in the destruction of slavery. Richard Hildreth of Massachusetts, author, journalist, economist, and historian, was born in 1807. He graduated from Harvard College in 1826 and studied law in Newburyport, entering upon practice in Boston. He left the law for journalism, and, as an editor of the “Boston Atlas,” lifted up the moral world. In 1834, in poor health, he went South and, in order to get unbiassed ideas, lived on a slave plantation to study the workings of the system of unpaid African labor. It was during this time that he wrote his famous novel, “Archy Moore, The White Slave.” Returning North he became, with pen and voice, the tireless opponent of slavery. From 1840 to 1848 Hildreth lived in Demerara, British Guiana, editing two newspapers, in which he advocated the system of free instead of slave labor, writing there also his “Theory of Morals” and his “Theory of Politics.” In the perspective of history we can now note clearly that he was one of the potent forces in destroying human slavery in America, and in helping, as an ex-Confederate officer, now president of the first Woman’s College in the Southern States, told me a few days ago, “to emancipate eleven million white men.”