At this time no criticism of the “peculiar institution” was allowed at the South. Northerners traveling there were often asked for their opinion of it, but any unfavorable comment evoked displeasure. Indeed, a friend of ours, a Northern woman teaching in Louisiana, was called to book because in his presence she spoke of one of the slaves as a “man.” A negro, she was informed, was not a man, and must never be so called. “Boy” was the proper term to use. This was a logical inference from Judge Taney’s famous Dred Scott decision--_viz._, that “such persons,” _i. e._, negroes, “were not included among the people” in the words of the Declaration of Independence, and could not in any respect be considered as citizens. Yet, to quote Abraham Lincoln again, “Judge Curtis, in his dissenting opinion, shows that in five of the then thirteen States--to wit, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina--free negroes were voters, and in proportion to their numbers had the same part in making the Constitution that the white people had.” Events now began to move with ever-increasing rapidity. The scenes of the stirring prelude to the Civil War grew ever more stormy. Men became more and more wrought up as the relentless purpose of the Southern leaders was gradually revealed. The deadly serpent of slavery became a hydra-headed monster, striking north, east, and west. The hunting of fugitive slaves took on a sinister activity in the Northern “border” States; at the national capital the attempts to muzzle free speech culminated in the striking down of Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber itself; in Kansas the “border ruffians” strove to inaugurate a reign of terror, and succeeded in bringing on a local conflict which was the true opening of the Civil War. The men who combated the dragon of slavery--the Siegfrieds of that day--fought him in all these directions. In Boston Dr. Howe was among the first to organize resistance to the rendition of fugitive slaves. An escaped negro was kidnapped there in 1846. This was four years before the passage by Congress of the fugitive-slave law made it the duty (!) of the Free States to return runaway negroes to slavery. My father called a meeting of protest at Faneuil Hall. He was the chief speaker and “every sentence was a sword-thrust” (T. W. Higginson’s account). I give a brief extract from his address: