As it took
some time to secure adequate funds, the main building was not
completed, and students were not admitted before 1862.

[Footnote 1: _African Repository_, under the caption of "Education in
Liberia" in various volumes; and Alexander, _A History of Col._, pp.
348, 391.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 348.]

[Footnote 3: Monroe, _Cyclopaedia of Education_, vol. iv., p. 6.]

Though the majority of the colored students scoffed at the idea of
preparing for work in Liberia their education for service in the
United States was not encouraged. No Negro had graduated from a
college before 1828, when John B. Russworm, a classmate of Hon. John
P. Hale, received his degree from Bowdoin.[1] During the thirties
and forties, colored persons, however well prepared, were generally
debarred from colleges despite the protests of prominent men. We have
no record that as many as fifteen Negroes were admitted to higher
institutions in this country before 1840. It was only after much
debate that Union College agreed to accept a colored student on
condition that he should swear that he had no Negro blood in his
veins.[2]

[Footnote 1: Dyer, Speech in Congress on the Progress of the Negro,
1914.]

[Footnote 2: Clarke, _The Condition of the Free People of Color_,
1859, p. 3, and the _Sixth Annual Report of the American Antislavery
Society_, p. 11.]

Having had such a little to encourage them to expect a general
admission into northern institutions, free blacks and abolitionists
concluded that separate colleges for colored people were necessary.
The institution demanded for them was thought to have an advantage
over the aristocratic college in that labor would be combined with
study, making the stay at school pleasant and enabling the poorest
youth to secure an education.[1] It was the kind of higher institution
which had already been established in several States to meet the needs
of the illiterate whites. Such higher training for the Negroes was
considered necessary, also, because their intermediate schools were
after the reaction in a languishing state. The children of color were
able to advance but little on account of having nothing to stimulate
them. The desired college was, therefore, boomed as an institution to
give the common schools vigor, "to kindle the flame of emulation,"
"to open to beginners discerning the mysteries of arithmetic other
mysteries beyond," and above all to serve them as Yale or Harvard did
as the capsto