“Look! Look!” He was pointing at an imposing house that stood on a hill behind the town. “That’s the kind of house we’ll have. A fine, big house! I’ll make it with my own hands. I’m free, Anna, I’m free to build a house like that!” Her eyes laughed with him. So it was that they landed on the rocky shores of New England, where free men had set their feet before them. Leif, son of Eric the Red, touched this coast with his Norsemen. In 1497 and ’98 John Cabot, Venetian navigator, explored here and gave England her claim to the region. Cabot under the British flag, Verrazzano under the _fleur de lis_, and Gomez under the flag of Spain, all of them had come even before the Pilgrim Fathers. It was from Rhode Island--from Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, all part of the rising winds of rebellion--that New Bedford got its start. Time and again this salty breeze had blown through the Massachusetts commonwealth. It rose and blew steadily during most of the eighteenth century, bringing gains in political freedom and education and religious tolerance. Impoverished farmers had followed Daniel Shays; and an early governor, James Sullivan, had been stirred to say, “Where the mass of people are ignorant, poor and miserable, there is no public opinion excepting what is the offspring of fear.” The winds had died down during the rise of Federalism, but now once more a little breeze fanned the cheeks of the mill girls in Lowell and the mechanics in Boston. It rustled the dead, dry leaves piled high in Cambridge and Concord. It was scattering the seeds of Abolitionism. Boston had William Lloyd Garrison, whom neither jails, fires, threats, nor the elegant rhetoric of William Ellery Channing could stifle. He waved his paper, the _Liberator_, high in the air, whipping the breeze higher. He stood his ground and loosed a blast destined to shake the rafters of the nation. “Urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch--and I will be heard!” Certain slave states had set a price on William Lloyd Garrison’s head. But in February, 1837, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society had convened in the hall of the House of Representatives in Boston, and after every space was filled nearly five thousand people were turned away. Nathan Johnson had been one of the delegates from New Bedford.