ring to show how
this policy would please all concerned. Anxious fathers whose minds
had been exercised by the inquiry as to what to do with their sons
would welcome the opportunity to have them taught trades. It would be
in line with the "eminently practical philanthropy of the Negroes'
trans-Atlantic friends." America would scarcely object to it as an
attempt to agitate the mind on slavery or to destroy the Union. "It
could not be tortured into a cause for hard words by the American
people," but the noble and good of all classes would see in the effort
"an excellent motive, a benevolent object, temperately, wisely, and
practically manifested."[2] The leading free people of color heeded
this message. Appealing to them through their delegates assembled in
Rochester in 1853, Douglass secured a warm endorsement of his plan in
eloquent speeches and resolutions passed by the convention.

[Footnote 1: _African Repository_, vol. xxix., p. 136.]

[Footnote 2: Douglass, _Life and Times of_, p. 252.]

This great enterprise, like all others, was soon to encounter
opposition. Mrs. Stowe was attacked as soliciting money abroad for her
own private use. So bitter were these proslavery diatribes that Henry
Ward Beecher and Frederick Douglass had some difficulty in convincing
the world that her maligners had no grounds for this vicious
accusation. Furthermore, on taking up the matter with Mrs. Stowe after
her return to the United States, Douglass was disappointed to learn
that she had abandoned her plan to found a vocational institution.
He was never able to see any force in the reasons for the change of
policy; but believed that Mrs. Stowe acted conscientiously, although
her action was decidedly embarrassing to him both at home and
abroad.[1]

[Footnote 1: _Ibid_., p. 252.]

CHAPTER XIII

EDUCATION AT PUBLIC EXPENSE

The persistent struggle of the colored people to have their children
educated at public expense shows how resolved they were to be
enlightened. In the beginning Negroes had no aspiration to secure such
assistance. Because the free public schools were first regarded as a
system to educate the poor, the friends of the free blacks turned
them away from these institutions lest men might reproach them with
becoming a public charge. Moreover, philanthropists deemed it wise to
provide separate schools for Negroes to bring them into contact with
sympathetic persons, who knew their peculiar needs. In the course of