Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[127] on a tour with Frederick Douglass at the West, was entertained with him at a house where there was but one spare bed. To some apologies by the hostess the ever ready and imperial Douglass answered, with superb dignity, “Do not apologize, madam; I have not the slightest prejudice against color.”

This was the condition of things then prevailing around Boston; and when I went to live in Newburyport the same point of view soon presented itself in another form. The parish, which at first welcomed me, counted among its strongest supporters a group of retired seacap-tains who had traded with Charleston and New Orleans, and more than one of whom had found himself obliged, after sailing from a Southern port, to put back in order to eject some runaway slave from his lower hold. All their prejudices ran in one direction, and their view of the case differed from that of Boston society only as a rope's end differs from a rapier. One of them, perhaps the quietest, was the very Francis Todd who had caused the imprisonment of Garrison at Baltimore. It happened, besides, that the one political hero and favorite son of Newburyport, Caleb Cushing-for of Garrison himself they only felt ashamed — was at that moment fighting slavery's battles in the

Mexican war. It now seems to me strange