The Colored Regulars in the United States Army by T. G. Steward
page 45 of 387 (11%)
page 45 of 387 (11%)
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colored people.
And yet the idea of the first colored convention did not originate with any of these distinguished men; it came from a young man of Baltimore; then, and still, unknown to fame. Born in that city in 1801, he was in 1817 apprenticed to a man some two hundred miles off in the Southeast. Arriving at his field of labor, he worked hard nearly a week and received poor fare in return. One day, while at work near the house, the mistress came out and gave him a furious scolding, so furious, indeed, that her husband mildly interfered; she drove the latter away, and threatened to take the Baltimore out of the lad with cowhide, etc., etc. At this moment, to use his own expression, the lad became converted, that is, he determined to be his own master as long as he lived. Early nightfall found him on his way to Baltimore which he reached after a severe journey which tested his energy and ingenuity to the utmost. At the age of twenty-three he was engaged in the summer time in supplying Baltimore with ice from his cart, and in winter in cutting up pork for Ellicotts' establishment. He must have been strong and swift with knife and cleaver, for in one day he cut up and dressed some four hundred and fifteen porkers. In 1824 our young friend fell in with Benjamin Lundy, and in 1828-9, with William Lloyd Garrison, editors and publishers of the "Genius of Universal Emancipation," a radical anti-slavery paper, whose boldness would put the "National Era" to shame, printed and published in the slave State of Maryland. In 1829-30 the colored people of the free States were much excited on the subject of emigration; there had been an emigration to Hayti, and also to Canada, and some had been driven to Liberia by the severe laws and brutal conduct of the fermenters of colonization in Virginia and Maryland. In some districts of these |
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