DISTINGUISHED COLORED MEN.
I have given above some instances of exalted moral excellence which greatly increased my regard for colored men,—instances of self-sacrificing benevolence, of rigid adherence to a promise under the strongest temptation to break it, and of their inestimable value of liberty. I wish now to tell of several colored men who have given us abundant evidences of their mental power and executive ability.
DAVID RUGGLES, LEWIS HAYDEN, AND WILLIAM C. NELL.
David Ruggles first became known to me as a most active, adventurous, and daring conductor on the underground railroad. He helped six hundred slaves to escape from one and another of the Southern States into Canada, or to places of security this side of the St. Lawrence. So great were the dangers to which he was often exposed, so severe the labors and hardships he often incurred, and so intense the excitement into which he was sometimes thrown, that his eyes became seriously diseased, and he lost entirely the sight of them. For a while he was obliged to depend for his livelihood upon the contributions of his antislavery friends, which they gave much more cheerfully than he received them. Dependence was irksome to his enterprising spirit. So soon, therefore, as his health, in other respects, was sufficiently restored, he eagerly inquired for some employment by which, notwithstanding his blindness, he could be useful to others and gain a support for himself and family. Having a strong inclination to, and not a little tact and experience in the curative art, he determined to attempt the management of a Water-cure Hospital. He was assisted to obtain the lease of suitable accommodations in or near Northampton, and conducted his establishment with great skill and good success, I believe, until his death.
Lewis Hayden and William C. Nell were active, devoted young colored men, who, in the early days of our antislavery enterprise, rendered us valuable services in various ways. The latter—Mr. Nell—especially assisted in making arrangements for our meetings, gathering important and pertinent information, and sometimes addressing our meetings very acceptably. He was always careful in preserving valuable facts and documents, and grew to be esteemed so highly for his fidelity and carefulness, that, when the Hon. J. G. Palfrey came to be the Postmaster of Boston, he appointed W. C. Nell one of his clerks; and, if I mistake not, he retains that situation to this day.
JAMES FORTEN.
While at the Convention in Philadelphia, in 1833, I became acquainted with two colored gentlemen who interested me deeply,—Mr. James Forten and Mr. Robert Purvis. The former, then nearly sixty years of age, was evidently a man of commanding mind, and well informed. He had for many years carried on the largest private sail-making establishment in that city, having at times forty men in his employ, most, if not all of them, white men. He was much respected by them, and by all with whom he had any business transactions, among whom were many of the prominent merchants of Philadelphia. He had acquired wealth, and he lived in as handsome a style as any one should wish to live. I dined at his table with several members of the Convention, and two English gentlemen who had recently come to our country on some philanthropic mission. We were entertained with as much ease and elegance as I could desire to see. Of course, the conversation was, for the most part, on topics relating to our antislavery conflict. The Colonization scheme came up for consideration, and I shall never forget Mr. Forten’s scathing satire. Among other things he said: “My great-grandfather was brought to this country a slave from Africa. My grandfather obtained his own freedom. My father never wore the yoke. He rendered valuable services to his country in the war of our Revolution; and I, though then a boy, was a drummer in that war. I was taken prisoner, and was made to suffer not a little on board the Jersey prison-ship. I have since lived and labored in a useful employment, have acquired property, and have paid taxes in this city. Here I have dwelt until I am nearly sixty years of age, and have brought up and educated a family, as you see, thus far. Yet some ingenious gentlemen have recently discovered that I am still an African; that a continent, three thousand miles, and more, from the place where I was born, is my native country. And I am advised to go home. Well, it may be so. Perhaps, if I should only be set on the shore of that distant land, I should recognize all I might see there, and run at once to the old hut where my forefathers lived a hundred years ago.” His tone of voice, his whole manner, sharpened the edge of his sarcasm. It was irresistible. And the laugh which it at first awakened soon gave way to an expression, on every countenance, of that ineffable contempt which he evidently felt for the pretence of the Colonization Society. At the table sat his excellent, motherly wife, and his lovely, accomplished daughters,—all with himself somewhat under the ban of that accursed American prejudice, which is the offspring of slavery. I learnt from him that their education, evidently of a superior kind, had cost him very much more than it would have done, if they had not been denied admission into the best schools of the city.
Soon after dinner we all left the house to attend a meeting of the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society. It was my privilege to escort one of the Misses Forten to the place of meeting. What was my surprise, when, on my return to Boston, I learnt that this action of mine had been noticed and reported at home. “Is it true, Mr. May,” said a lady to me, “that you walked in the streets of Philadelphia with a colored girl?” “I did,” was my reply, “and should be happy to do it again. And I wish that all the white young ladies of my acquaintance were as sensible, well educated, refined, and handsome withal as Miss Forten.” This was too bad, and I was set down as one of the incorrigibles.
MR. ROBERT PURVIS
was then an elegant, a brilliant young gentleman, well educated and wealthy. He was so nearly white that he was generally taken to be so. I first saw and heard him in our Antislavery Convention in Philadelphia. I was attracted to him by his fervid eloquence, and was surprised at the intimation, which fell from his lips, that he belonged to the proscribed, disfranchised class. Away from the neighborhood of his birth he might easily have passed as a white man. Indeed, I was told he had travelled much in stage-coaches, and stopped days and weeks at Saratoga and other fashionable summer resorts, and mingled, without question, among the beaux and belles, regarded by the latter as one of the most attractive of his sex. Robert Purvis, therefore, might have removed to any part of our country, far distant from Philadelphia, and have lived as one of the self-styled superior race. But, rather than forsake his kindred, or try to conceal the secret of his birth, he magnanimously chose to bear the unjust reproach, the cruel wrongs of the colored people, although he has been more annoyed, chafed, exasperated by them than any other one I have ever met with. Indeed, he seems to have grown more impatient and irascible as the heavy burden of his people has been lightened. Because all their rights have not been accorded to them, he sometimes seems to deny that any of their rights have been recognized. Because the elective franchise is still meanly withheld from them in some of the States, he will hardly acknowledge that slavery has been abolished throughout the land,—a glorious triumph in the cause of humanity, which his own eloquence and pecuniary contributions have helped to achieve. But we must make the largest allowance for Mr. Purvis. No man of conscious power and high spirit, who has not felt the gnawing, rasping, burning of a cruel stigma, can conceive how hard it is to bear.
WILLIAM WELLS BROWN
has distinguished himself as a diligent agent and able antislavery lecturer in this country and throughout Great Britain and Ireland. He has also published books that have been highly creditable to him as an author.
CHARLES LENOX REMOND,
when quite a young man, became a frequent and effective speaker in our meetings. In 1838 or 1839 he was appointed an agent of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, in which capacity he rendered abundant and very valuable services. He spent the greater part of the year 1841 in Great Britain and Ireland. He lectured in many of the most important places throughout the United Kingdom. Everywhere he drew large audiences, and was much commended and admired for the pertinence of his facts, the cogency of his arguments, and the fire of his eloquence. In The Liberator for November 19, 1841, there was copied from a Dublin paper a speech which Mr. Remond had then recently made to a large and most respectable audience in that city. Mr. Garrison commended it to his readers as “a very eloquent production, worthy of careful perusal and high commendation. Let those,” he added, “who are ever disposed to deny the possession of genius, talent, and eloquence by the colored man read that speech, and acknowledge their meanness and injustice.”
REV. J. W. LOGUEN.
Soon after I removed to Syracuse, in 1845, I became acquainted with the Rev. J. W. Loguen, then a school-teacher, and for several years since minister of the African Methodist Church here. His personal history is a remarkable one, revealing at times no little force of character. He was born in Tennessee, the slave of an ignorant, intemperate, and brutal slaveholder. He witnessed the sale of several of his mother’s children, her frantic but unavailing resistance, the horrible scourging she endured without releasing them from her embrace, and her agonizing grief when they were at last violently torn from her. Twice he was himself beaten nearly to death,—left bleeding and senseless, to be comforted and brought back to life by the care of his fond mother. At last he saw his sister (after a terrible fight with the ruffian slave-traders to whom she had been sold) subdued, manacled, and forced away, screaming for her children, imploring at least that she might have her infant. He could endure his bondage no longer. He resolved to escape to the land of the free, and there earn the means and find the way to bring his mother to partake with him of the blessings of liberty. He took his master’s best horse,—one that he had trained to do great feats, if required,—and, in company with another young slave of kindred spirit, also well mounted, he started, on the night before Christmas, 1834, from the interior of Tennessee, near Nashville, to go to Canada,—a distance of six hundred miles, half the way through a slaveholding country. They encountered, as they expected to do, fearful perils and exhausting hardships. At last they reached a place of safety, but it was in the dead of a Canadian winter. Their stock of provisions had long since been exhausted; their money was all spent; their clothing utterly insufficient; and thus they had come into a most inhospitable climate, unknowing and unknown, at a season of the year when little employment was to be had. Undaunted by this array of appalling circumstances, Mr. Loguen persevered, made friends, got work, and in the spring of 1837, only three years after his escape from slavery, had so commended himself to the confidence of an employer that he was intrusted with a farm of two hundred acres, near Hamilton, which he was to work on shares. Here, and afterwards by labor in St. Catharine, he laid up several hundred dollars, and then removed to Rochester, N. Y. In that city he obtained a situation as waiter in the best hotel, where, by his aptness and readiness to serve, he so ingratiated himself with all the boarders and transient visitors that his perquisites amounted to more than enough to support him, and being totally abstinent from the use of intoxicating liquors and tobacco, he was able to lay up all his wages,—thirty dollars a month. At the expiration of two years he found that, together with what he had brought from Canada, he was possessed of about nine hundred dollars. As much of this as might be necessary, he resolved to expend in the acquisition of knowledge. Ever since his arrival at the North he had availed himself of all the assistance he could get to learn to read, and had attained to some proficiency in the art. By plying this, whenever opportunity offered him the use of books and newspapers, he had added much to his information. But he longed for more education,—at least sufficient to enable him to be useful as a minister of religion, or as a teacher of the children of his people. So he left his lucrative situation in Rochester, and entered the Oneida Institute, a manual labor school, then under the excellent management of Rev. Beriah Green.
In 1841 Mr. Loguen came to reside in Syracuse, and undertook the duties of pastor of the “African Methodist Church,” and of school-teacher to the children of his people. In both these offices he was successful. And not in these alone. With the help of one of the best of wives, he has brought up a family of children, and educated them well. He has established a good, commodious, hospitable home. In it was fitted up an apartment for fugitive slaves, and, for years before the Emancipation Act, scarcely a week passed without some one, in his flight from slavedom to Canada, enjoyed shelter and repose at Elder Loguen’s. By industry, frugality, and the skilful investment of his property, he has gained a good estate. He is respected by his fellow-citizens, and has so risen in the esteem of his Methodist brethren, that within the last year he has been made a bishop of their order.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS.
I need give but one more example of a colored man of my acquaintance who has exhibited great intellectual ability as well as moral worth. And he is one extensively known and admired throughout our country, Great Britain, and Ireland. Of course I mean Frederick Douglass. His well-written, intensely interesting autobiography, entitled “My Bondage and My Freedom,” has probably been read so generally that I need not attempt any sketch of his life. Suffice it to say he was born a slave in Maryland. He experienced all the indignities, and suffered most of the hardships and cruelties, that passionate slaveholders could inflict upon their bondmen. When about twenty-one years of age he resolved that he would endure them no longer, and in 1838 he found his way from Baltimore to New Bedford, the best place, on the whole, to which he could have gone. There, with his young wife, he commenced the life of a freeman. The severest toil now seemed light. He worked with a will, because the avails of his labor were to be his own. Being, as most colored persons are, religiously inclined, he soon became a member of a Methodist church, and erelong was appointed a class-leader and a local preacher.
While in slavery Mr. Douglass had contrived, in various ingenious ways, to learn to read and write. So soon, therefore, as he came to live in Massachusetts, he diligently improved his enlarged opportunities to acquire knowledge. Erelong he became a subscriber for The Liberator, and week after week made himself master of its contents, in which he never found a silly or a worthless line. Of course its doctrines and its purpose were altogether such as his own bitter experience justified. And the exalted spirit of religious faith and hope, at all times inspiring the writings and speeches of Mr. Garrison, awakened in the bosom of Mr. Douglass the assurance that he was “the man,—the Moses raised up by God to deliver his Israel in America from a worse than Egyptian bondage.”
In the summer of 1841 there was a large antislavery convention held in Nantucket. Mr. Douglass attended it. In the midst of the meeting, to his great confusion, he was called upon and urged to address the convention. A number were present from New Bedford who had heard his exhortations in the Methodist church, and they would not allow his plea of inability to speak. After much hesitation he rose, and, notwithstanding his embarrassment, he gave evidence of such intellectual power—wisdom as well as wit—that all present were astonished. Mr. Garrison followed him in one of his sublimest speeches. “Here was a living witness of the justice of the severest condemnation he had ever uttered of slavery. Here was one ‘every inch a man,’ ay, a man of no common power, who yet had been held at the South as a piece of property, a chattel, and had been treated as if he were a domesticated brute,” &c.
At the close of the meeting, Mr. John A. Collins, then the general agent of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, urgently invited Mr. Douglass to become a lecturing agent. He begged to be excused. He was sure that he was not competent to such an undertaking. But Mr. Garrison and others, who had heard him that day, joined Mr. Collins in pressing him to accept the appointment. He yielded to the pressure. And, in less than three years from the day of his escape from slavery, he was introduced to the people of New England as a suitable person to lecture them upon the subject that was of more moment than any other to which the attention of our Republic had ever been called.
Mr. Douglass henceforth improved rapidly. He applied himself diligently to reading and study. The number and range of his topics in lecturing increased and widened continually. He soon became one of the favorite antislavery speakers. The notoriety which he thus acquired could not be confined to New England or the Northern States. A murmur of inquiry came up from Maryland who this man could be. A pamphlet which he felt called upon to publish in 1845, in answer to the current assertions that he was an impostor, that he had never been a slave, made it no longer possible to conceal his personality. The danger of his being captured and taken back to Maryland was so great that it was thought advisable he should go to England. Accordingly, he went thither that year in company with James N. Buffum, one of the truest of antislavery men, and with the Hutchinson family, the sweetest of singers.
Although not permitted to go as a cabin passenger, many of the cabin passengers sought to make his acquaintance and visited him in the steerage, and invited him to visit them on the saloon-deck. At length they requested him to give them an antislavery lecture. This he consented and was about to do, when some passengers who were slaveholders chose to consider it an insult to them, and were proceeding to punish him for his insolence; they threatened even to throw him overboard, and would have done so had not the captain of the steamer interposed his absolute authority: called his men, and ordered them to put those disturbers of the peace in irons if they did not instantly desist. Of course they at once obeyed, and shrank back in the consciousness that they were under the dominion of a power that had broken the staff of such oppressors as themselves.
This incident of the voyage was reported in the newspapers immediately on the arrival of the vessel at Liverpool, and introduced Mr. Douglass at once to the British public. He was treated with great attention by the Abolitionists of the United Kingdom; was invited to lecture everywhere, and rendered most valuable services to the cause of his oppressed countrymen. So deeply did he interest the philanthropists of that country that they paid seven hundred and fifty dollars to procure from his master a formal, legal certificate of manumission, so that, on his return to these United States, he would be no longer liable to be sent back into slavery. They also presented him with the sum of twenty-five hundred dollars for his own benefit, to be appropriated, if he should see fit, to the establishment of a weekly paper edited by himself, which was then his favorite project.
Soon after his return in 1847 he did establish such a paper at Rochester and conducted it with ability for several years. He has since become one of the popular lecturers of our country, and every season has as many invitations as he cares to accept. He is extensively known and much respected. Many there are who wish to see him a member of Congress; and we confidently predict that, if he shall ever be sent to Washington as a Representative or a Senator, he will soon become a prominent man in either House.