voice of its faculty. His power to mould young men was phenomenal. It
was a common saying that he turned out graduates who were the perfect
image of Beriah Green, except the wart. The wart was a large one, which,
being situated in the centre of Mr. Green's forehead, seemed to be a
part of his method to those who were magnetized by his personality or
persuaded by his eloquence.

About 1845, when I began to be an observing boy, it was understood
throughout Oneida County that Beriah Green was an intellectual giant,
and that he would sell his life, if need be, to befriend the colored
man. Oneida Institute was a refuge for the oppressed, quite as much as a
place where the students were magnetized and taught to weed onions.
Fifteen years before John Brown paused in his march to the gallows to
kiss a negro baby I saw Beriah Green walk hand in hand along the
sidewalk with a black man and fondle the hand he held conspicuously.
Among his intimates were Ward and Garnet, both very black, as well as
very talented and very eloquent.

When "the friends of the cause" met in convention, I sometimes heard of
it, and managed, boy-like, to steal in. When I did so, I used to sit and
shudder on a back seat in the little hall. The anti-slavery
denunciations poured out upon the churches, and backed up and pushed
home by the logic of Green and the eloquence of Smith, were well
calculated to make an orthodox boy tremble. For these people brought the
churches and the nation before their bar and condemned them, and some
whom I have not named cursed them with a bitterness and effectiveness
that I cannot recall to this day without a shiver. The dramatic effect,
as it then seemed to me, has never been equalled in my experience.

That these extreme ideas did not prosper financially is not to be