Groton
was a center of anti-slavery operations in that part of the State.
Several copies of the _Liberator_ were taken in the town, and anti-
slavery meetings were held not infrequently. The first speech that
George Thompson made in America was made in Groton.
One Sunday morning I walked out towards what is now called the Island.
The road was marked by a rail fence, but of buildings there were none.
I went so far that I was near the slave pen, a building now standing
and which I have visited within a few years. It was of brick, enclosed
within a brick wall, and all of a dingy straw color. At a short
distance from the building, I met a black woman walking slowly away
from it. I said to her: "What building is that?" At once she was in
tears, and she said: "That is the pen where the poor black people are
kept who are going down to Louisiana." She had then been to visit her
daughter, a girl of about eighteen years of age, according to the
mother's statement, who was to leave the next morning. She was the
last of a family of nine as the woman said, who had been sold and taken
away from her. As I was leaving I said: "Who is your master?" She
answered: "Mr. Blair, of the _Globe_." In the fourteen years of my
manhood, that I acted with the Democratic party, I never said anything
in favor of the system of slavery.
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