He knew that beneath many a dark skin he had found real ladies and gentlemen, and he knew how sharper than a serpent's tooth to them was the American prejudice against their color.

In 1832, just after a visit to Philadelphia, where he was the guest of Robert Purvis, and had seen much of the Fortens, he wrote a friend: "I wish you had been with me in Philadelphia to see what I saw, to hear what I heard, and to experience what I felt in associating with many colored families.

There are colored men and women, young men and young ladies, in that city, who have few superiors in refinement, in moral worth, and in all that makes the human character worthy of admiration and praise." Strange to say, notwithstanding all their merits and advancement, the free people of color received nothing but disparagement and contempt from eminent divines like Dr.Leonard W.Bacon and the emissaries of the Colonization Society.

They were "the most abandoned wretches on the face of the earth"; they were "all that is vile, loathsome, and dangerous"; they were "more degraded and miserable than the slaves," and _ad infinitum_ through the whole gamut of falsehood and traduction.

It was human for the American people to hate a class whom they had so deeply wronged, and altogether human for them to justify their atrocious treatment by blackening before the world the reputation of the said class.