Mr.Cox treated me with considerable contempt, and pointing to Mr.Dawes, who had charge of the bill then under discussion, but who had not given any reply to Cox's attack, said, with a contemptuous look at me: "Massachusetts does not send her Hector to the field," to which I answered that it was not necessary to send Hector to the field when the attack was led by Thersites.

The retort seemed to strike the House favorably, and was printed in the papers throughout the country, and Cox let me and Massachusetts alone thereafter.
I had a like encounter with Daniel W.Voorhees of Indiana, who was a more formidable competitor.

Mr.Voorhees made the same charge against the people of Massachusetts of having burned witches at the stake in the old Puritan time.

It was in a debate under the five-minute rule.

After reiterating the old familiar slander that the State of Massachusetts in her early history had burned witches at the stake, Mr.Voorhees added that in 1854 or 1855 the Know Nothings broke up convents, burned Catholic churches, and would have burned Catholics and Sisters of Charity themselves at the stake within her borders, if they had dared to do so.
I declared both of these charges to be utterly false, and said that no human being was ever burned at the stake in Massachusetts for the crime of witchcraft, and though at a time when the whole civilized world believed in witchcraft on the authority of certain passages in the Old Testament, the courts of Massachusetts did execute some nineteen or twenty persons of both sexes for the alleged crime of witchcraft, it was also true that the people of Massachusetts were the first among men to see the error and wickedness of this course; that although late in the following century, many people were condemned for witchcraft in England and on the Continent, the love of justice and the intelligence of Massachusetts first exposed that error and wickedness.
I explained that a convent was burned in Massachusetts, not in 1854 or 1855 by the Know Nothings, but in 1836, by a mob excited by a rumor that some terrible cruelty had been inflicted upon some young women who had been placed in a convent at Charlestown; that the criminals were arrested, tried and sentenced, and that their crime left no more stain upon the State than any criminal act committed within the limits of any civilized country.