lavery, States' Rights, and Nullification; and consequently
the Negro was the topic of conversation at the table. One of the
utterances of Mr. Calhoun was to this effect--"That if he could find a
Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro
was a human being and should be treated as a man."

Just think of the crude asininity of even a great man! Mr. Calhoun went
to "Yale" to study the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. His son went
to Yale to study the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. His grandson, in
recent years, went to Yale, to learn the Greek Syntax, and graduated
there. Schools and Colleges were necessary for the Calhouns, and all
other white men to learn the Greek syntax.

And yet this great man knew that there was not a school, nor a college
in which a black boy could learn his A. B. C's. He knew that the law in
all the Southern States forbade Negro instruction under the severest
penalties. How then was the Negro to learn the Greek syntax? How then
was he to evidence to Mr. Calhoun his human nature? Why, it is manifest
that Mr. Calhoun expected the Greek syntax to grow in _Negro brains_, by
spontaneous generation!

Mr. Calhoun was then, as much as any other American, an exponent of the
nation's mind upon this point. Antagonistic as they were upon _other_
subjects, upon the rejection of the Negro intellect they were a unit.
And this, measurably, is the attitude of the American mind
today:--measurably, I say, for thanks to the Almighty, it is not
universally so.

There has always been a school of philanthropists in this land who have
always recognized mind in the Negro; and while recognizing the
limitations which _individual_ capacity demanded, claimed that for the
RACE, there was no such thing possible for its elevation save the
widest, largest, highest, improvement. Such were our friends and patrons
in New England in New York, Pennsylvania, a few among the Scotch
Presbyterians and the "Friends" in grand old North Carolina; a great
company among the Congregationalists of the East, nobly represented down
to the present, by the "American Missionary Society," which tolerates no
stint for the Negro intellect in its grand solicitudes. But these were
exceptional.

Down to the year 1825, I know of no Academy or College which would open
its doors to a Negro.[3] In the South it was a matter of absolute legal
disability. In the North, it was the ostracism of universal
caste-sentiment. The t