In 1856 opened the great political drama. The candidates were James Buchanan, the Democrat, John C. Fremont, Republican, and ex-Vice-President Millard Fillmore, of the Know Nothing Party. James Buchanan, the Democrat, was elected; the world knows the consequences of the next four years in and out of Congress. Death and destruction were in the path. We had John Brown's insurrection, the Christiana riot, the tragic death of Lovejoy, and hundreds of other events which I cannot mention at this time.
In 1860 the Presidential campaign came off. The candidates were Abraham Lincoln, Republican, John C. Breckenridge, Southern Democrat, and S. A. Douglass, Northern Democrat, with John Bell, Union Democrat. This was a hot contest. Lincoln was elected.
Then came the Great Rebellion. On April 12, 1862, in company with my brother, John H. Grant, we left our home in York Co., Pa., for Washington, D. C., then the center of war activities. Both of us found employment as teamsters in the Quartermaster's Department. On June 15 we were transferred into Gen. Pope's Army in Virginia. We were relieved of our teams and put to herding horses and mules throughout Gen. Pope's campaign. After Pope was defeated at the second battle of Bull Run, I returned to Washington and went back to driving my team. In 1863 I was transferred to the woodcutter department as an outside clerk and put to measuring wood which was cut every two weeks. I also looked after the commissary. I was there until the Confederates ran us out in June.
I returned to Washington, D. C., and began my Christian and literary work. I was converted sixty-five years ago, and joined the A. M. E. Z. Church, then called Wesley Church. Rev. Abner Bishop was the pastor. The church was in Peach Bottom Township, York County, Pennsylvania.
I have been always a lover of the Sunday School work. My interest continues to this day. There is one little incident in my Sunday School work which I will relate. When I was a boy, with another young boy like myself, we found that our Sunday School needed some literature. We succeeded in collecting some money, and Moses Jones and I found that the nearest place to get the books was Lancaster City, about twenty-five miles from the church. Undaunted, we took the money and walked to Lancaster, and back again with the books. Some of those books remained a great many years in the library of that school.
I am the man who opened the first free school to colored boys in the District of Columbia. This was in the basement of the old Mt. Zion Church in 1863 under the Friends' Association of Philadelphia, of which Mr. H. M. Laing, of that city, was president. I also opened a school to freedmen in Fairfax County, Virginia, at Bull Run. After being there about three months, one of the Freedmen's Bureau Officers came over from Manassas and placed me and my school back under the direction of the Friends' Association and the same Mr. Laing was still its president. I remained there two years.
When I opened the school it was a little log cabin built as a headquarters by the Confederates. They were encamped there in the spring or rather the winter of 1861-62. While I was teaching at Bull Run, Prof. John M. Langston was appointed to a position in the Freedmen's Bureau. I became acquainted with him, interested him in my work and he secured me one hundred and fifty dollars to assist in building there a house for two purposes, a church and a school. In this school I gave the founder of the Manasses Industrial School, Miss Jennie Dean, her first lessons. Now after the lapse of fifty years, the Bull Run School is still standing as one of the public schools of Fairfax County, Virginia.
While teaching in the Bull Run School I was elected a delegate to the first National Negro Convention after the Civil War. This met in the Israel Church, Washington, D. C., in 1868. This church was then A. M. E. Zion, but now C. M. E. There I met some of the leading Negroes of the world. Among them were Hon. Frederick Douglass, Prof. John M. Langston, Rev. Henry H. Garnett, C. L. Remond, Robert Purvis, Geo. T. Downing, Geo. B. Vashon, Rev. Wm. Howard Day, Prof. Bassett, Robt. W. Elliot, Bishop Henry M. Turner, Prof. Isaac C. Weaver, Richard Clarke, John Jones, Prof. O. M. Green, Geo. W. White, P. H. Martin, John R. Lynch, and A. R. Green. These were some of the lights in that convention. Hon. Fred. Douglass was elected president, with Rev. H. L. Garnett as vice-president.
After two years at Bull Run, I returned to the District of Columbia, where I became acquainted with a white gentleman named Edmond Tewney, from the State of Maine, who came to the District as one of the founders of Wayland Seminary. As there was some misunderstanding between him and some of the other members of the faculty, he left the school, and organized another, known as the National Theological Institution for the Instruction of Young Colored Men and Women for preachers and teachers.
I became associated with that school, and was an assistant teacher and a pupil at the same time. It was a Baptist institution, and some of those who afterward became the most able Baptist preachers in the city attended that school. Some of them were Rev. John D. Brooks, Rev. James Jefferson, Rev. Edward Willis, Rev. M. J. Laws, Rev. J. M. Johnson, Rev. Henry Lee, and many others who did great good for God's church and for suffering humanity.