nder the Friends' Association of Philadelphia, of
which Mr. H. M. Laing, of that city, was president. I also opened a
school to freedmen in Fairfax County, Virginia, at Bull Run. After
being there about three months, one of the Freedmen's Bureau Officers
came over from Manassas and placed me and my school back under the
direction of the Friends' Association and the same Mr. Laing was still
its president. I remained there two years.

When I opened the school it was a little log cabin built as a
headquarters by the Confederates. They were encamped there in the
spring or rather the winter of 1861-62. While I was teaching at Bull
Run, Prof. John M. Langston was appointed to a position in the
Freedmen's Bureau. I became acquainted with him, interested him in my
work and he secured me one hundred and fifty dollars to assist in
building there a house for two purposes, a church and a school. In
this school I gave the founder of the Manasses Industrial School, Miss
Jennie Dean, her first lessons. Now after the lapse of fifty years,
the Bull Run School is still standing as one of the public schools of
Fairfax County, Virginia.

While teaching in the Bull Run School I was elected a delegate to the
first National Negro Convention after the Civil War. This met in the
Israel Church, Washington, D. C., in 1868. This church was then A. M.
E. Zion, but now C. M. E. There I met some of the leading Negroes of
the world. Among them were Hon. Frederick Douglass, Prof. John M.
Langston, Rev. Henry H. Garnett, C. L. Remond, Robert Purvis, Geo. T.
Downing, Geo. B. Vashon, Rev. Wm. Howard Day, Prof. Bassett, Robt. W.
Elliot, Bishop Henry M. Turner, Prof. Isaac C. Weaver, Richard
Clarke, John Jones, Prof. O. M. Green, Geo. W. White, P. H. Martin,
John R. Lynch, and A. R. Green. These were some of the lights in that
convention. Hon. Fred. Douglass was elected president, with Rev. H. L.
Garnett as vice-president.

After two years at Bull Run, I returned to the District of Columbia,
where I became acquainted with a white gentleman named Edmond Tewney,
from the State of Maine, who came to the District as one of the
founders of Wayland Seminary. As there was some misunderstanding
between him and some of the other members of the faculty, he left the
school, and organized another, known as the National Theological
Institution for the Instruction of Young Colored Men and Women for
preachers and teachers.

I became associated with that school, and w