ows to
kiss a negro baby I saw Beriah Green walk hand in hand along the
sidewalk with a black man and fondle the hand he held conspicuously.
Among his intimates were Ward and Garnet, both very black, as well as
very talented and very eloquent.

When "the friends of the cause" met in convention, I sometimes heard of
it, and managed, boy-like, to steal in. When I did so, I used to sit and
shudder on a back seat in the little hall. The anti-slavery
denunciations poured out upon the churches, and backed up and pushed
home by the logic of Green and the eloquence of Smith, were well
calculated to make an orthodox boy tremble. For these people brought the
churches and the nation before their bar and condemned them, and some
whom I have not named cursed them with a bitterness and effectiveness
that I cannot recall to this day without a shiver. The dramatic effect,
as it then seemed to me, has never been equalled in my experience.

That these extreme ideas did not prosper financially is not to be
wondered at. The farm was soon given up, then the buildings and gardens
passed into other hands, and the institution became a denominational
school, known as the Whitestown Baptist Seminary. But the ideas which
had been implanted there would not consent to depart with this change in
the name and the methods of the institution. The fact that Beriah Green,
after leaving the school, continued to reside at Whitesboro and gathered
a church there rendered it the more difficult to eradicate the doctrines
which he had implanted. The idea of friendship for the black man was
particularly tenacious, and perhaps annoying to the new and controlling
denominational interest. It clung to the very soil, like "pusley" in a
garden. It had gained a strong hold throughout the county. The managers
of the institution could not openly oppose it. They were compelled to
endure it. And so it continued to be true that if a bright colored boy
anywhere in the State desired the advantages of a superior education he
would direct his steps to Whitestown Seminary.

It was during these seminary days that I became a student at the
institution; and it was here that I met the hero of my story, Anthony
Calvert Brown. He was as vigorous and manly a youth of seventeen as I
have ever seen. We two were regarded as special friends. He had been
among us nearly two months, and had become a general favorite, before it
was discovered that he had a tinge of African blood. The revela