"Mr. President, I have yet to learn that one man can make a slave of another," King said on the Senate floor in 1820. "I hold that all laws or compacts imposing any such condition upon any human being are absolutely void, because contrary to the law of nature, which is the law of God, by which he makes his ways known to man, and is paramount to all human control."

King’s speech, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams said in his journal that day, made people furious.

"He spoke with great power," Secy. Adams said, "and the great slave-holders gnawed their lips and clenched their fists as they heard him. The slave-holders cannot hear of him without being seized with cramps."

"Being seized with cramps," Fox likes to say, can be translated into today’s language as "having a royal pain in the butt."

King’s 18th-century house, officially a museum, is full of period furniture, textiles, costumes, ceramics, china and glass, paintings and prints, musical instruments, toys and personal effects.

There are about 1,400 items in the house’s collection, many of them donations from the estates of local residents.

The items, ranging from the grand and exotic to the small and plain, paint an interesting picture of how people lived here long ago, before not only shopping malls and automobiles, but even electricity and indoor plumbing.

Notable items include a 19th-century pianoforte, an 1824 map of the "Village of Jamaica" and a portable indoor toilet that requires the user to discard an interior tray after use.

There are also 4,000 catalogued archaeological artifacts from recent excavations in King Manor’s collection. Local kids from grades 4 to 6 can participate in the museum’s "Archaeology Education Program"; in it they supplement in-class preparation and study with a two-and-a-half-hour site visit in which they use techniques used by professional archaeologists to examine the items found in King Park, which King Manor calls home.

There are site tours, interactive exhibits, public workshops on arts and crafts and theme events, like the annual Creepy Tours during Halloween, in which caretaker Roy Fox dresses as a (very convincing) mad scientist and throws skulls down dark stairways to scare the daylights out of (later) delighted kids.

Fox, who often refers to himself in the third person as The Fox, also gives powerful lectures on Rufus King, a man he admires greatly.

Like King, who as the U.S. senator from New York took a strong public stand against slavery with a then-shocking speech against the Missouri Compromise in 1819, Fox is an incredible orator.

A 30-year talk radio veteran, the man brings King’s bold declarations against a widely accepted institution to life with a voice that goes from a yearning whisper to a devastating boom in a single sentence.

"You never heard such a speaker," Daniel Webster once said of King. "In strength and dignity and fire; in ease, in natural effect, and gesture as well as in matter, he is unequaled."

Also at the house are King’s personal journals, pages from period paper "The Long Island Farmer" and King’s first-floor library, which, with 5,000 books, was the Harvard man’s favorite room in the house.

King had another residence in Manhattan, just south of today’s World Trade Center site, but King preferred to call Jamaica home, Fox said.

He loved his books, and considered wherever he kept them to be his real home.

Where King’s fancy imported cows once roamed (his plot of land here at one point measured 122 acres), now roam hundreds of Jamaica’s kids and families, having picnics, taking strolls and playing all sorts of sports, including soccer, basketball, handball and volleyball.

All is not perfect at King Park, though.

The drought and back-to-back soccer games have done a lot of damage to the once-lush grass, according to Fox.

The Parks Department has placed giant boulders around the park to discourage the soccer games, but the athletic will prevails; the boulders are used for field markings, and the games continue.

There is also a homeless problem in King Park, Fox said, with about 25 people sleeping there overnight and even more spending time there during the day. Fox said that many of them came to the park after getting kicked out of their previous "homes" because of the Port Authority’s AirTrain construction in the area.

The homeless in King Park are generally not dangerous, Fox said, but they do harass visitors and occasionally come knocking at the home Rufus built.

The Museum will host Hofstra University’s Archaeology Field School in the summer of 2003.

It will also expand its Archaeology Education Program beyond its current District 28 area, open an "Archaeology at King Manor" exhibition, establish a relationship with the Academy of American Studies, a history magnet high school, and host the Gilder-Lehrman Institute’s traveling "Free at Last: A History of the Abolition of Slavery in America" exhibition, all in the next year.

Fox is also confident about higher attendance because of Queens’ newfound popularity with the culture crowd from other boroughs, people who are coming to see the new MoMA QNS and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City and venturing further east after that.

King Manor Museum is on Jamaica Ave., between 150th and 153rd streets.

It is open Thursday and Friday from noon to 2 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m.; tours are given every half-hour on the half-hour.

Admission is $5 for adults, $3 for seniors and students and $2 for children age four to 13. Families with a maximum of two adults and three children may visit for $12.