During my stay in Charleston, I became acquainted with a gentleman of colour, who followed a lucrative business as a dealer of some kind, and who had formerly been a slave.  The introduction arose in rather a singular way, it being through a proposition made to open a school for the education of coloured children, in which I took an interest.

Great opposition was offered to the scheme by the white rulers of the place, who declared the project illegal, the enactments passed subsequent and prior to the insurrection stringently forbidding it, or any attempt to impart secular knowledge to the slaves.  Notwithstanding the violent threats used to prevent it, a meeting was however convened to be held at the house of the gentleman referred to, and which I resolved, though not unaccompanied with danger to my person, to take an active part in.  I accordingly went to his home on the evening appointed; this was a spacious house, furnished in sumptuous style, with extensive premises adjoining, contiguous to the north end of the levee.  I noticed that the walls were hung with good oil paintings gorgeously framed, principally family portraits, but the most prominent in position was that of the unfortunate Haytian chief, Toussaint L’Ouverture, whose cruel end, at the instigation of the vindictive Bonaparte, will for ever reflect shame on the French name as long as a sense of justice and love of virtue and probity exists in the bosom of mankind.  Far be it from me to trample on the name of one whom retributive justice has consigned to the dust, but the cruelty of Napoleon towards this magnanimous prince, and his final barbarity in consigning him to a damp dungeon in a fastness amongst the Alps, where he perished in exile from his subjects and family after ten months’ miserable endurance of the hardships wrongfully imposed on him, almost causes a feeling of exultation at the downfall of a despot, who, aiming at the sovereignty of the world, scrupled not to sacrifice virtue and good faith at the shrine of ambition.  The fate of both chiefs was similar, for both perished in captivity—­the one the victim, perhaps, of inordinate ambition, the other of unscrupulous avarice and envious malignity.  The misfortunes of Toussaint L’Ouverture have indeed with justice been pronounced the “history of the negro race,” for, in almost every instance where coloured men have pushed themselves above the common level, they have incurred the envy of white men, and, in too many instances, have been crushed by their overbearing tyranny.

The meeting was conducted with religious decorum, most, if not all, of the coloured gentlemen present being members of the Wesleyan connection.  I was pleased with the temperate spirit in which their wrongs were discussed; and, after drawing up the rules, forming a committee, and arranging other necessary preliminaries, the meeting broke up.