se 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 Goo