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240 in a wide system of Negro schools partially supported by public funds. Toward 1840 signs of promise began gradually to appear. A West Indian endowed a Negro school in Philadelphia in 1837. The Negro population increased from two and one-third to two and nine-tenths millions in the decade, and evidences of economic success were seen among the free Negroes. Philadelphia had in 1838 one hundred small beneficial societies; Ohio Negroes owned ten thousand acres of land in 1810, while the Canada refugees were beginning to prosper. The mutiny on the Creole, the establishment of the Negro Odd Fellows, and the doubling, in ten years, of the membership of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, all pointed to an awakening after the long period of distress.

The decade of 1840 to 1850 was a new era—an era of self-assertion and rapid advance for the free Northern Negro. For the first time conscious leadership of undoubted ability appeared. In Boston there was De Grasse, a physician, trained in this country and in France and a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Robert Morris was a member of the bar, as was E. R. Walker, whose "Appeal" in 1829 startled the country. William Wells Brown and William Nell were writing, while Charles Lennox Remond was one of the first of the Abolition orators. In New York were the gifted preacher, Henry Highland Garnet; the teachers, Reason and Peterson who made the Negro schools effective; and the physician, McCune Smith, one of the best trained men of