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When Aunt Sarah was seventeen she was a liberal with dangerous radical tendencies, and, like most of the liberals in her day, she exercised her trouble-making qualities in the abolitionist movement. The town, being made up principally of merchants, many of whom were interested in cotton, was on the whole pro-slavery, but the cultural environment of Wickford Valley had become different from the town. Wickford Valley inveighed against mercantile crassness, purely out of self-defense perhaps, and resorted to self-righteousness. Thus Aunt Sarah in her lifetime never would allow liquor or cards in the house, although her brother, Horace, used them both. Incidentally, her brother Horace came to an unpleasant end in an altercation with a gambler in the San Francisco Gold Rush. It is odd how easily one gets off the subject, speaking of the family.

During those days of the early 1850's, when the Fugitive Slave Act was enforced, it seems, from what Aunt Sarah told me, that Wickford Point was a station of the Underground Railroad, and that fugitive Negroes had a way of appearing there suddenly at night in boats or in the back of covered wagons. They were customarily kept down cellar for a day or so in what had once been a wine closet under the brick arch which supported the front parlor chimney. At the proper time Aunt Sarah or her sister Georgianna or my grandmother, aided often by some sympathetic house guest, placed these visitors in a boat and rowed them across the river to the cow stable of the Brill farm. After this they continued their way north by way of Exeter, and sometimes wrote back bread-and-butter notes telling of their safe arrival in the province of Quebec. Aunt Sarah used to keep a package of these letters in the Moorish cabinet which her father had brought from Spain when he was an agent for the Bosworth firm in Boston. Until her last years, she never threw anything away.