I CANNOT remember when my father began his anti-slavery work, because at that time I was an infant. It was the kidnapping of a runaway negro in the streets of Boston that roused him to action. He called a meeting in Faneuil Hall over which John Quincy Adams presided. My father made the principal address. Colonel Higginson tells us that “Every sentence was a sword-thrust.” The result of the meeting was the formation of a Vigilance Committee of forty with my father as chairman. Its object was to prevent the returning of fugitives to the slavery from which they had escaped. To the descendants of the men who had fought in the Revolution for the cause of Liberty, the thought that “the port of Boston had been opened to the slave-trader” was intolerable. The records of that Vigilance Committee have never been published. It is to be hoped that some day they will be, unless they have been destroyed. Thomas Wentworth Higginson has told us that my father’s part in the anti-slavery movement was almost unique and wholly characteristic of the man, who was a natural crusader or paladin. The little Howes did not know of the existence of this committee. Neither did we know of our father’s strenuous labors in connection with the election to the Senate of his friend Charles Sumner. We were too young to be intrusted with state secrets. But from our early childhood my father taught us to love freedom and to hate slavery. He told us of the successive aggressions of the slave power and of the steps by which it had grown to threaten the whole land. We learned of the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott Decision, the Kansas and Nebraska Bill. We knew these, not as dry political facts from the office of a lawyer, but as the successive invasions of a fire that was destined, ere many years had passed, to involve our beloved country in the terrible conflagration of the Civil War. To my father and his co-workers in the anti-slavery cause, these successive encroachments of slavery on the territory which the framers of our Federal Constitution had declared should remain eternally free, were a growing menace of evil. He strongly impressed upon our minds the sin of compromise of principle. Did he not see, in the bloody struggle in Kansas, the sinister results of those weak yieldings of the North? The electric current of indignation that thrilled through our home we felt very strongly, as we did the stir of action. Lowell’s lines, splendid in themselves, gained a new force and intensity as my father repeated them to us. Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God with the shadow, keeping watch above His own. Sometimes I would hear him and his friends talking together over the political situation with deep earnestness and indignation. Those were exciting days. As children, we knew nothing of the approaching storm, but we felt the stir in the air!