o sit as full member!--Saul ejected
from among the prophets!--Yet he was heard on the subject of rights,
and the doctrine of "our rights," as well as the first colored
convention, are due to the same man.
In 1832, chagrined at the colored people of the United States, he
migrated to Hayti, where, until 1843, he pursued the business of
carver and gilder. In the latter year he was appointed Director of
Public Works in Port-au-Prince, which office he held until two years
ago. He is also engaged in, and has wide knowledge of machinery and
engineering. Every two or three years he visits New York, and is
welcomed to the arcana of such men as James J. Mapes, the Bensons,
Dunhams, and at the various works where steam and iron obey human
ingenuity in our city. He is at present in this city, lodging at the
house of the widow of his old friend and coadjutor, Thomas L.
Jinnings, 133 Reade street. We have availed ourselves of his presence
among us to glean from him the statements which we have imperfectly
put together in this article.
We cannot dismiss this subject without the remark, of peculiar
pertinence at this moment, that it would have been better for our
people had Mr. Grice never left these United States. The twenty-seven
years he has passed in Hayti, although not without their mark on the
fortunes of that island, are yet with out such mark as he would have
made in the land and upon the institutions among which he was born. So
early as his thirty-second year, before he had reached his
intellectual prime, he had inaugurated two of the leading ideas on
which our people have since acted, conventions to consider and
alleviate their grievances, and the struggle for legal rights. If he
did such things in early youth, what might he not have done with the
full force and bent of his matured intellect? And where, in the wide
world, in what region, or under what sun, could he so effectually have
labored to elevate the black man as on this soil and under American
institutions?
So profoundly are we opposed to the favorite doctrine of the Puritans
and their co-workers, the colonizationists--Ubi Libertas, ibi
Patria--that we could almost beseech Divine Providence to reverse some
past events and to fling back into the heart of Virginia and Maryland
their Sam Wards, Highland Garnets, J.W. Penningtons, Frederick
Douglasses, and the twenty thousand who now shout hosannas in
Canada--and we would soon see some stirring in the direction of
|