hern legislators in 1829 to
the terrors of abolitionism.

In 1831 there met that first Negro convention in Philadelphia, at which
the world gaped curiously but which bravely attacked the problems of race
and slavery, crying out against persecution and declaring that "Laws as
cruel in themselves as they were unconstitutional and unjust, have in many
places been enacted against our poor, unfriended and unoffending brethren
(without a shadow of provocation on our part), at whose bare recital the
very savage draws himself up for fear of contagion--looks noble and
prides himself because he bears not the name of Christian." Side by side
this free Negro movement, and the movement for abolition, strove until
they merged into one strong stream. Too little notice has been taken of
the work which the Talented Tenth among Negroes took in the great
abolition crusade. From the very day that a Philadelphia colored man
became the first subscriber to Garrison's "Liberator," to the day when
Negro soldiers made the Emancipation Proclamation possible, black leaders
worked shoulder to shoulder with white men in a movement, the success of
which would have been impossible without them. There was Purvis and
Remond, Pennington and Highland Garnett, Sojourner Truth and Alexander
Crummel, and above all, Frederick Douglass--what would the abolition
movement have been without them? They stood as living examples of the
possibilities of the Negro race, their own hard experiences and well
wrought culture said silently more than all the drawn periods of
orators--they were the men who made American slavery impossible. As Maria
Weston Chapman once said, from the school of anti-slavery agitation "a
throng of authors, editors, lawyers, orators and accomplished gentlemen of
color have taken their degree! It has equally implanted hopes and
aspirations, noble thoughts, and sublime purposes, in the hearts of both
races. It has prepared the white man for the freedom of the black man, and
it has made the black man scorn the thought of enslavement, as does a
white man, as far as its influence has extended. Strengthen that noble
influence! Before its organization, the country only saw here and there in
slavery some faithful Cudjoe or Dinah, whose strong natures blossomed even
in bondage, like a fine plant beneath a heavy stone. Now, under the
elevating and cherishing influence of the American Anti-slavery Society,
the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinth