“This spirit of persecution was the cause of our convention. It was this that induced us to seek an asylum in the Canadas; and the convention feels happy to report to its brethren, that our efforts to establish a settlement in that province have not been made in vain. Our prospects are cheering; our friends and funds are daily increasing; wonders have been performed far exceeding our most sanguine expectations; already have our brethren purchased eight hundred acres of land—and two thousand of them have left the soil of their birth, crossed the lines, and laid the foundation for a structure which promises to prove an asylum for the colored population of these United States. They have erected two hundred log-houses, and have five hundred acres under cultivation.”
A college “on the manual labor system” was planned: “For the present ignorant and degraded condition of many of our brethren in these United States (which has been a subject of much concern to the convention) can excite no astonishment (although used by our enemies to show our inferiority in the scale of human beings); for, what opportunities have they possessed for mental cultivation or improvement? Mere ignorance, however, in a people divested of the means of acquiring information by books, or an extensive connection with the world, is no just criterion of their intellectual incapacity; and it has been actually seen, in various remarkable instances, that the degradation of the mind and character, which has been too hastily imputed to a people kept, as we are, at a distance from those sources of knowledge which abound in civilized and enlightened communities, has resulted from no other causes than our unhappy situation and circumstances.”[[169]]
The convention met again in 1833 and resolved on further plans for settling in Canada. These conventions continued to assemble annually for five years, when they were succeeded by the convention of the American Moral Reform Society which met two years longer. Meantime Nat Turner had terrorized Virginia and the South and sent a wave of repression over the North that led to the disfranchisement of Pennsylvania Negroes in 1837.
Notwithstanding all this the Negroes were struggling on. Beside the general conventions arose the Phœnix Societies, which “planned an organization of the colored people in their municipal subdivisions with the special object of the promotion of their improvement in morals, literature and the mechanic arts.” Lewis Tappan refers to them in his biography. The “Mental Feast,” which was a social feature, survived thirty years later in some of the interior towns of Pennsylvania and the West.[[170]]
The first Negro paper, Freedom’s Journal, had been established in 1827 and organizations like the Massachusetts General Colored Association were coöperating with the Abolitionists. The news of emancipation in the British West Indies cheered the Negroes, and indeed without the long effective and self-sacrificing efforts of the Northern freed Negroes, the Abolition movement in the United States could not have been successful. Garrison’s first subscriber to The Liberator was a black man of Philadelphia, and before and after the Negroes were admitted to membership in the anti-slavery societies, their aid was invaluable. In the West, despite proscription, a fight for schools was carried on from 1830 to 1840, which finally resulted in a wide system of Negro schools partially supported by public funds. Toward 1840 signs of promise began gradually to appear. A West Indian endowed a Negro school in Philadelphia in 1837. The Negro population increased from two and one-third to two and nine-tenths millions in the decade, and evidences of economic success were seen among the free Negroes. Philadelphia had in 1838 one hundred small beneficial societies; Ohio Negroes owned ten thousand acres of land in 1840, while the Canada refugees were beginning to prosper. The mutiny on the Creole, the establishment of the Negro Odd Fellows, and the doubling, in ten years, of the membership of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, all pointed to an awakening after the long period of distress.
The decade of 1840 to 1850 was a new era—an era of self-assertion and rapid advance for the free Northern Negro. For the first time conscious leadership of undoubted ability appeared. In Boston there was De Grasse, a physician, trained in this country and in France and a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Robert Morris was a member of the bar, as was E. R. Walker, whose “Appeal” in 1829 startled the country. William Wells Brown and William Nell were writing, while Charles Lennox Remond was one of the first of the Abolition orators. In New York were the gifted preacher, Henry Highland Garnet; the teachers, Reason and Peterson who made the Negro schools effective; and the physician, McCune Smith, one of the best trained men of his day. In Philadelphia were Robert Purvis, the Abolitionist; William Still, of the Underground Railroad; the three men who made the catering business—Dorsey, Jones and Minton; and the rich Negro lumber merchant, Stephen Smith, whose magnificent endowment for aged Negroes stands to-day at the corner of Girard and Belmont Avenues and is valued at $400,000. In western Pennsylvania were Vashon and Woodson, and in the West were Day, librarian of the Cleveland library; the three Langstons of Oberlin, and the merchants Boyd and Wilcox of Cincinnati. Elsewhere appeared the unlettered, but brave and shrewd leaders of the fugitive slaves. It is said that 500 black messengers of this sort were passing backward and forward between the slave and the free states in this decade, and noticeable among them were Harriet Tubman and Josiah Henson, who brought thousands to the North and to Canada. Foremost of all came Frederick Douglass, born in 1817 and reborn to freedom in 1838. He made his first speech in 1841 and took a prominent part in the anti-slavery campaign of the next decade. In 1845–6, he was in England and, returning in 1847, he established his paper and met John Brown. From that time on he was Brown’s chief Negro confidant, and in his house Brown’s Eastern campaign was started and largely carried on. The churches also were training men in social leadership in the persons of their bishops, like John Brown’s friend Loguen and the noble Daniel Payne.
About 1847 new life appeared in the free Negro group. The Odd Fellows, under Peter Ogden, maintained their independence against aggressions of the whites, and the first of a new series of national colored conventions assembled at Troy, N. Y. “The first article in the first number of Frederick Douglass’s North Star, published January, 1848, was an extended notice of this convention held at the Liberty Street Church, Troy, N. Y., 1847.”
The next year, 1848, Cleveland welcomed a similar national convention. Nearly seventy delegates assembled there on September 6th, “the sessions alternating between the Court-House and the Tabernacle. Frederick Douglass was chosen president. As in previous conventions education was encouraged, the importance of statistical information stated and temperance societies urged.”[[171]]
The representative character of the delegates was shown by the fact that printers, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, engineers, dentists, gunsmiths, farmers, physicians, plasterers, masons, college students, clergymen, barbers, hair-dressers, laborers, coopers, livery-stable keepers, bath-house keepers and grocers were among the members who were present.[[172]]
The same year Frederick Douglass attended a Free Soil convention at Buffalo, N. Y., and writes: “I was not the only colored man well known to the country who was present at this convention. Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Highland Garnet, Charles L. Remond, and Henry Bibb were there and made speeches which were received with surprise and gratification by the thousands there assembled. As a colored man I felt greatly encouraged and strengthened for my cause while listening to these men, in the presence of the ablest men of the Caucasian race. Mr. Ward especially attracted attention at that convention. As an orator and thinker he was vastly superior, I thought, to any of us, and being perfectly black and of unmixed African descent, the splendors of his intellect went directly to the glory of race. In depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness, and general intelligence, Samuel R. Ward has left no successor among the colored men amongst us, and it was a sad day for our cause when he was laid low in the soil of a foreign country.”[[173]]