always open and few there were interested in the cause of the Colored American who visited the National Capital without visiting the Sage of Anacostia at Cedar Hill.

Among the honors bestowed on him was the U. S. Marshalship by President Hayes in 1877, the Recorder of Deeds by President Garfield in 1881, and the U. S. Ministership to Haiti in 1889, by President Harrison. In 1893 he was Haitian Commissioner at the World's Exposition at Chicago, and for several years one of the trustees of Howard University. He died February 20, 1895, at his home after having attended a Woman's Suffrage Convention in session.

The intelligence of his death occasioned sadness and sorrow throughout the land, memorials were held in his honor and the expression was unanimous that one of the greatest men of the century had passed away. His funeral ceremonies were held at the Metropolitan A. M. E. Church in Washington, of which he was a worshiper, where his remains were viewed by thousands. Tens of thousands of the city's population lined the sidewalks, as the funeral procession made its way to the depot, thence to Rochester his former home, where his remains were deposited in Mount Hope Cemetery by the side of his former wife, Anna Murray Douglass.

In 1899 a monument erected in his honor was unveiled in Rochester in one of the most conspicuous parts of his city. The Republic of Haiti appropriated $1,000 towards its erection. The only other monument in Rochester is one to Abraham Lincoln. A bust of Mr. Douglass occupies a niche in the University of Rochester, placed there during his life by act of the municipal council and on one of the pillars of the State House at Albany, are the lineaments of the great orator and reformer."

• Visitors of will be attracted by the grand stairway of the majestic Capitol at Albany that leads to its legislative chambers. Ascending to the third floor, they will behold on a line with the entrance to the State Library four finely executed heads handsomely carved in Scottish sand

A corporation has been formed to preserve Cedar Hill as a historical memorial to be visited by millions as the years go by in grateful acknowledgment of the work of a man who more than any other made the abolition movement a vital issue in the history of the country.

stone and forming one of the capitals of its massive pillars; a rock of brownish hue, more durable than granite and capable of better artistic effect. Here you behold the rugged lineaments of Abraham Lincoln, the martyred emancipator president; there, that of U. S. Grant, the silent soldier who immortalized Appomattox; in a third you recognize Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, the hero of Winchester, bold, defiant, invincible; while the fourth, near the entrance to the assembly chamber, is the leonine countenance of Frederick Douglass. Not far distant on the same floor carved on similar pillars are busts of men famous in their country's history and all opponents of slavery.-The author, before the Bethel Literary.

XXVI

JOHN MERCER LANGSTON

JOHN MERCER LANGSTON, slave and son of Captain Ralph Quarles, veteran of the Revolutionary War, and Lucy Langston, whom he had manumitted in 1806, first saw the light in Louisa County, Virginia, December 14, 1829. Captain Quarles was a large landed proprietor with peculiar views as to the management of his slaves. No white man was allowed by him to oversee them, this work being done by his own men. On his death in 1834, Captain Quarles manumitted all his slaves and appointed trustees to remove them to Ohio with liberal provisions for the education of those recognized by him as his children.

In those days it was not uncommon for free Negroes to be kidnapped in the Northern States and be sold into slavery. John, when quite a lad, was being taken away from Chillicothe, Ohio, by Colonel William D. Gooch, his guardian, under circumstances that made it appear as if he were to be the victim of one of these attempts. Had it not been for the forethought of an elder brother and the legal skill of the lawyer, Allen G. Thurman, afterwards Senator from Ohio, Langston might have been sold into slavery. In due time young Mercer entered Oberlin College, living meantime in the family of George Whipple, one of the professors and later better known as Secretary of the American Missionary Association which did such phenomenal work in the normal and higher education of the Negro at the South. While in college he spent a vacation as a teacher in a country school at a salary of ten dollars a month and board, the salary being paid in five-cent and ten-cent pieces. Fifty dollars

was the sum realized from this service. Langston graduated from the college in 1849; but he aspired to be a lawyer and with this end in view he made an application to the Albany Law School and was frank enough to let it be known that he was in part of Negro blood. This caused his refusal, but it was intimated that if he were to claim other than African blood he could enter. Langston scorned to sail under such false colors.

He returned to Oberlin and took up a course there in theology for its disciplinary effect and graduated once more in 1853. He also pursued legal studies in the law office of Philimon Bliss and was admitted to the bar in 1855 after an examination in open court, and was the first of his race to pursue that vocation in the West. Thus he began his remarkable career. He filled several elective township offices, was twice elected to the Oberlin council and for eleven years was a member of the board of education. During these years he diligently practiced his profession and was a factor in the events of that epoch which include the election of Lincoln, the Civil War and Emancipation.

When the policy of Negro enlistments was settled, he became a successful recruiting officer for these regiments, and his first visit to Washington was to suggest the propriety of obtaining a colonel's commission in one of these regiments. Gen. James A. Garfield, subsequently President, accompanied him to the White House and introduced him to President Lincoln.

At the National Convention of colored men held at Syracuse in 1864, he was chosen head of the Equal Rights League, the plan for which had been adopted by that body. Mr. Langston entered upon the work of organizing the league with enthusiasm and energy, contributing very largely to the success of this first movement among colored men, which embraced the South as well as the North. Upon the undertaking by the Freedmen's Bureau of the work of assisting in the maintenance of colored schools in the South, Langston was, at the suggestion of Chief Justice Chase, appointed its Inspector-General, with the duty of

visiting the schools under its control for the colored youth of the South, and reporting their condition from time to time to General O. O. Howard, the head of the Bureau.

In the discharge of this work he found opportunity to arouse the recently emancipated with respect to education. The popularity and strength he developed led Andrew Johnson, President, to tender Langston the position then held by General Howard, but it was courteously declined as was also the ministership to Haiti. When Howard University was established and a law department opened, the task of organizing it was imposed on Mr. Langston, and he was equal to the emergency.1 Young men came from different sections of the country and the West Indies and began the study of the law, an opening denied colored youth twenty years before. He gave all his energy to this new opportunity, resigned from the Oberlin Board of Education and brought his family to Washington.

In 1871, the year of the first commencement, the presence of Charles Sumner as the orator attracted wide attention, as he had made it a rule to refuse all such invitations. His acceptance was an act of courtesy to Langston and an encouragement to colored men to study law. Through the good offices of Senator Sumner the presence of Ralph Waldo Emerson was secured in one of the Sunday morning course of lectures on Ethics, given to the law students.

President Grant appointed Mr. Langston a member of the first Washington Board of Health, a position held by him for seven years. This Board of Health had plenary, almost absolute, powers in the sphere of municipal sanitation and hygiene. The only lawyer on the board, Mr. Langston's abilities were called into constant use.

Shortly after their organization they visited several Northern

1 He was admitted to practice in the U. S. Supreme Court, Jan. 17, 1867, on motion of General J. A. Garfield. The first Negro was John A. Rock of Massachusetts.