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