Note 132 — VI THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW
Reading edition
Page 202, note 1. Mr. F. B. Sanborn, in his Life of Thoreau, says that Webster gave, as a reason for not visiting Concord in his later years, that “Many of those whom I so highly esteemed in your beautiful and quiet village have become a good deal estranged, to my great grief, by abolitionism, free-soilism, transcendentalism and other notions which I cannot but regard as so many vagaries of the imagination.”