d on the white man, and the manifold evils it
brings with it.'"

In determining how far the sentiments contained in this oration were
the current opinions of the time, it became necessary for me to know
something definite of the "Maryland Society for the Abolition of
Slavery," of the Virginia, the Pennsylvania, and other societies,
which existed at that time. This information I could not obtain from
anti-slavery books, or from the most prominent abolitionists whom I
consulted. The matter seemed to have been forgotten, and it was the
common idea that there was nothing worth remembering of the
anti-slavery movement before 1830, when Mr. Garrison and his radical
friends came upon the stage in Boston. For the want of the facts I
needed, I laid aside the idea of reproducing the tract. The subject
was brought again to mind by hearing the excellent paper, by Mr. S. E.
Wright, our secretary, on the anti-slavery labors of Benjamin Lundy,
which he read to this Club, a few months ago. The labors of Mr. Lundy
began in 1816, and ended with his death in 1839. Quite recently I
have obtained much of the information I needed.

Among the unknown facts to which I could get no clue at the time I
have mentioned, were the names of the "Virginia Calculator" and the
"Physician of New Orleans," whom Dr. Buchanan mentions with Phillis
Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and Banneker, the Maryland astronomer, as
being negroes who were distinguished for their literary and
mathematical acquirements. Mr. Phillips had never heard of them, and
he took the trouble to make inquiries among his anti-slavery friends,
but without success.

A year or more after I had abandoned my little project, in looking
over the files of the Columbian Centinal, printed in Boston, for 1790,
I found under the date of December 29th, in the column of deaths, the
following:

"DIED--Negro Tom, the famous African calculator, aged 80 years. He
was the property of Mrs. Elizabeth Cox, of Alexandria. Tom was a
very black man. He was brought to this country at the age of
fourteen, and was sold as a slave with many of his unfortunate
countrymen. This man was a prodigy. Though he could neither read
nor write, he had perfectly acquired the use of enumeration. He
could give the number of months, days, weeks, hours, and seconds,
for any period of time that a person chose to mention, allowing in
his calculations for all the leap years that happened in the