On the fifteenth day of September, 1830, there was held at Bethel
Church, in the city of Philadelphia, the first convention of the
colored people of these United States. It was an event of historical
importance; and, whether we regard the times or the men of whom this
assemblage was composed, we find matter for interesting and profitable
consideration.

Emancipation had just taken place in New York, and had just been
arrested in Virginia by the Nat Turner rebellion and Walker's
pamphlet. Secret sessions of the legislatures of the several Southern
States had been held to deliberate upon the production of a colored
man who had coolly recommended to his fellow blacks the only solution
to the slave question, which, after twenty-five years of arduous labor
of the most hopeful and noble-hearted of the abolitionists, seems the
forlorn hope of freedom to-day--insurrection and bloodshed. Great
Britain was in the midst of that bloodless revolution which, two years
afterwards, culminated in the passage of the Reform Bill, and thus
prepared the joyous and generous state of the British heart which
dictated the West India Emancipation Act. France was rejoicing in the
not bloodless _trois jours de Juliet_. Indeed, the whole world seemed
stirred up with a universal excitement, which, when contrasted with
the universal panics of 1837 and 1857, leads one to regard as more
than a philosophical speculation the doctrine of those who hold the
life of mankind from the creation as but one life, beating with one
heart, animated with one soul, tending to one destiny, although made
up of millions upon millions of molecular lives, gifted with their
infinite variety of attractions and repulsions, which regulate or
crystallize them into evanescent substructures or organizations, which
we call nationalities and empires and peoples and tribes, whose minute
actions and reactions on each other are the histories which absorb our