“All these parties were recognized and embraced by the Convention. Dr. Delaney was given a commission to go to Africa, in the Niger Valley, Whitfield to go to Central America, and Holly to Hayti, to enter into negotiations with the authorities of these various countries for Negro emigrants and to report to future conventions. Holly was the first to execute his mission, going down to Hayti in 1855, when he entered into relations with the Minister of the Interior, the father of the late President Hyppolite, and by him was presented to Emperor Faustin I. The next Emigration Convention was held at Chatham, Canada West, in 1856, when the report on Haiti was made. Dr. Delaney went off on his mission to the Niger Valley, Africa, via England in 1858. There he concluded a treaty signed by himself and eight kings, offering inducements for Negro emigrants to their territories. Whitfield went to California, intending to go later from thence to Central America, but died in San Francisco before he could do so. Meanwhile [James] Redpath went to Haiti as a John Brownist after the Harper’s Ferry raid, and reaped the first fruits of Holly’s mission by being appointed Haitian Commissioner of Emigration in the United States by the Haitian Government, but with the express injunction that Rev. Holly should be called to co-operate with him. On Redpath’s arrival in the United States, he tendered Rev. Holly a Commission from the Haitian Government at $1,000 per annum and traveling-expenses to engage emigrants to go to Haiti. The first ship load of emigrants were from Philadelphia in 1861.
“Not more than one-third of the 2000 emigrants to Haiti received through this movement, permanently abided there. They proved to be neither intellectually, industrially, nor financially prepared to undertake to wring from the soil the riches that it is ready to yield up to such as shall be thus prepared; nor are the government and influential individuals sufficiently instructed in social, industrial and financial problems which now govern the world, to turn to profitable use willing workers among the laboring class.”
“The Civil War put a stop to the African Emigration project by Dr. Delaney taking the commission of Major from President Lincoln, and the Central American project died out with Whitfield, leaving the Haitian Emigration as the only remaining practical outcome of the Emigration Convention of 1854.”
The Civil War destroyed many landmarks and the National Colored Convention, confined to the free colored people of the North and the border States, was a thing of the past.
Just after one of the darkest periods of that strife, when the dawn was apparent, there assembled in the city of Syracuse, the last National Colored Convention in which the men who began the movement in 1830, their successors and their sons had the control. The sphere of influence even in that had somewhat increased, for Southeastern Virginia, Louisiana and Tennessee had some representation. Slavery was dead; the colonizationists to Canada, the West Indies and Africa had abandoned the field of openly aiming to commit the policy of the race to what was considered expatriation.
Reconstruction even in 1864 was seen in the South peering above the horizon. The Equal Rights League came forth displacing the National Council of 1854, yet with the same object of the Legal Rights Association organized by Hezekiah Grice in Baltimore in 1832. John Mercer Langston stepped in the arena at the head of the new organization, but under more favorable auspices than was begun in the movement of 1830. A study of its rise, progress and decline, belongs to another period of the evolution of the Free Negro.
This survey of the early Negro Convention Movement has been rapid, the treatment broad, the sketch is but an outline; lights and shadows will be supplied by more detailed study, but the perspective will reveal clear and distinct these four facts:
1. The Convention Movement begun in 1830, demonstrates the ability of the Negro to construct a platform broad enough for a race to stand upon and to outline a policy alike far-sighted and statesmanlike, that has not been surpassed in the seventy years that have elapsed.
2. The earnestness, the enthusiasm and the efficiency with which the work aimed at was done, the singleness of purpose, the public spirit and the intrepidity manifested, encouraged and inspired such men as Benjamin Lundy, William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, S. S. Jocelyn, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, William Goodell and Beriah Green to greater efforts and persistence in behalf of the disfranchised American, accomplishing at last the tremendous work of revolutionizing the public sentiment of the country and making the institution of radical reforms possible.
3. The preparatory training which the convention work gave, fitted its leaders for the broader arena of abolitionism, and it can not be regarded as a mere coincidence that the only colored men who were among the organizers of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, Robert Purvis and James G. Barbadoes, were both promoters and leaders in the Convention Movement.