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.