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Rh his day. In Philadelphia were Robert Purvis, the Abolitionist; "William Still, of the Underground Railroad; the three men who made the catering business—Dorsey, Jones and Minton; and the rich Negro lumber merchant, Stephen Smith, whose magnificent endowment for aged Negroes stands to-day at the corner of Girard and Belmont Avenues and is valued at $400,000. In western Pennsylvania were Vashon and Woodson, and in the West were Day, librarian of the Cleveland library; the three Langstons of Oberlin, and the merchants Boyd and Wilcox of Cincinnati. Elsewhere appeared the unlettered, but brave and shrewd leaders of the fugitive slaves. It is said that 500 black messengers of this sort were passing backward and forward between the slave and the free states in this decade, and noticeable among them were Harriet Tubman and Josiah Henson, who brought thousands to the North and to Canada. Foremost of all came Frederick Douglass, born in 1817 and reborn to freedom in 1838. He made his first speech in 1841 and took a prominent part in the anti-slavery campaign of the next decade. In 1845–6, he was in England and, returning in 1847, he established his paper and met John Brown. From that time on he was Brown's chief Negro confidant, and in his house Brown's Eastern campaign was started and largely carried on. The churches also were training men in social leadership in the persons of their bishops, like John Brown's friend Loguen and the noble Daniel Payne.

About 1847 new life appeared in the free Negro