Such had been the state of mind of Anthony Brown. The light had,
however, been gradually let in upon him in the course of an excursion
which he and his comrade Ray had made the year previous to their
appearance at Whitestown Seminary. In that excursion they had visited
Chicago, Cleveland, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, New
York, and Albany. They had strayed into a court-room in the City Hall at
Albany, where many people were listening to the argument of counsel who
were discussing the provisions of the will of a wealthy lady, deceased.
A colored man was mixed up in the matter in some way,--probably as
executor and legatee. Anthony heard with breathless interest the legal
disabilities of colored people set forth, and their inferior social
position commented upon. He learned that the ancestral color descended
to the children of a colored mother, although they might appear to be
white. These statements had impressed him deeply. They furnished to his
mind an explanation of the various evidences of the degradation of the
colored people he had seen upon his journey. Talking of these matters,
he had found that Ray was much better informed than himself upon the
entire subject. Ray, in fact, frankly explained that a colored man had
no chance in this country. This was in 1859. Anthony suggested in his
letter to me that he had probably been kept from acquiring this
knowledge earlier in life by his mother's anxious care and the kindness
of friends and neighbors. He explained that he did not mean to be
understood as intimating that he had not some general knowledge of the
facts previously, but it was this experience which had made him feel
that slavery was a reality and that all colored people belonged to a
despised race. After his return home he had carefully refrained from
imparting to his mother any hint of his newly-acquired impressions in
reference to the social and legal standing of the colored race. In the
enjoyment of home comforts, and in the freedom of the wild woods and