I had to stop on a bench to gather myself. What I would have given for my own mother to see me that way. My world felt complete.

She took me to church with her one Sunday, a Unitarian church “full of Dissenters,” and led me straight to the front pew. I had set foot in many churches, felt the exaltation of high ceilings, but this was new to me. Dr. Richard Price was short, thin, and dour-looking, with thick eyebrows angled like arrows, a stiff black coat, and full-bottomed white wig. I half expected a speech on damnation, hellfire, and brimstone, but when he opened his mouth, his voice was so soft and quiet, I had to lean forward to hear him. To my surprise, he spoke affectingly of individual conscience and reason, the habit of attention, patience of thought, the sagacity of mind that protects us against error. America had just secured a victory over us, and he pointed to it as progress. Freedom from tyranny—this was his subject!

The widow made a point of introducing us after the sermon, and I was gratified he knew who I was.

“Mrs. Burgh has spoken to me of your originality, and a passion for reform, that’s what she said, which naturally endears you to me. We need someone to school our future torchbearers. We won’t be around forever, you know.”

I hadn’t thought of it as a torch to be carried, but over the weeks, through his sermons, our deepening conversations, I came to understand where we two saw the world the same. For Dr. Price, as for me, education was the path to a more perfect future. The great American experiment was his ideal, the best example we had of the potential of an enlightened citizenry who might govern themselves. And if it failed, he said, what a tragedy that would be for humankind.

He knew Benjamin Franklin, the Adamses, both man and wife, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine. I asked him everything about all of them, each conversation they’d had, every letter written. But we had Locke in common, who had given me a new vocabulary to express what had always been my intuitive sense of injustice, my rage. Even before I’d read Locke, I’d felt the feelings, which had given me the strength to fight for myself and others, to challenge my father, save my brother, my sister, start a school. It was personal for me, and the stakes high—our very lives and futures—but Dr. Price gave me a politics that made it whole. My own life was the life of the world; my own struggle, the struggle of all people simply to be free.

Fanny, who took her Sundays to rest, rarely came with me, but she would insist that I sit on the edge of her bed and recite his sermons, our conversations, word for word.