When Douglas accepted Reid's invitation to visit North Carolina, the scene of the romance begun on the Potomac shifted to the banks of the Dan. Southern hospitality became more than a conventional phrase on Douglas's lips. He enjoyed a social privilege which grew rarer as North and South fell apart. Intercourse like this broke down many of those prejudices unconsciously cherished by Northerners. Slavery in the concrete, on a North Carolina plantation, with a kindly master like Colonel Martin,[297] bore none of the marks of a direful tyranny. Whatever may have been his mental reservations as to slavery as a system of labor, Douglas could not fail to feel the injustice of the taunts hurled against his Southern friends by the Abolitionist press. As he saw the South, the master was not a monster of cruelty, nor the slave a victim of malevolent violence. The romance on the banks of the Dan flowed far more clearly and smoothly toward its goal than the waters of that turbid stream. On April 7, 1847, Miss Martin became the wife of the Honorable Stephen Arnold Douglas, who had just become Senator from the State of Illinois. It was in every way a fateful alliance. Next to his Illinois environment, no external circumstance more directly shaped his career than his marriage to the daughter of a North Carolina planter. The subtle influences of a home and a wife dominated by Southern culture, were now to work upon him. Constant intercourse with Southern men and women emancipated him from the narrowness of his hereditary environment.[298] He was bound to acquire an insight into the nature of Southern life; he was compelled to comprehend, by the most tender and intimate of human relationships, the meaning and responsibility of a social order reared upon slave labor.