the Baptist Boarding School at Bexley, and the Protestant Episcopal High School at Cape Palmas also offered courses in higher branches.[2] Still better opportunities were given by the College of West Africa and Liberia College.  The former was founded in 1839 as the head of a system of schools established by the Methodist Episcopal Church in every county of the Republic.[3] Liberia College was at the request of its founders, the directors of the American Colonization Society, incorporated by the legislature of the country in 1851.  As it took some time to secure adequate funds, the main building was not completed, and students were not admitted before 1862.

[Footnote 1:  African Repository, under the caption of “Education in Liberia” in various volumes; and Alexander, A History of Col., pp. 348, 391.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 348.]

[Footnote 3:  Monroe, Cyclopaedia of Education, vol. iv., p. 6.]

Though the majority of the colored students scoffed at the idea of preparing for work in Liberia their education for service in the United States was not encouraged.  No Negro had graduated from a college before 1828, when John B. Russworm, a classmate of Hon. John P. Hale, received his degree from Bowdoin.[1] During the thirties and forties, colored persons, however well prepared, were generally debarred from colleges despite the protests of prominent men.  We have no record that as many as fifteen Negroes were admitted to higher institutions in this country before 1840.  It was only after much debate that Union College agreed to accept a colored student on condition that he should swear that he had no Negro blood in his veins.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Dyer, Speech in Congress on the Progress of the Negro, 1914.]

[Footnote 2:  Clarke, The Condition of the Free People of Color, 1859, p. 3, and the Sixth Annual Report of the American Antislavery Society, p. 11.]

Having had such a little to encourage them to expect a general admission into northern institutions, free blacks and abolitionists concluded that separate colleges for colored people were necessary.  The institution demanded for them was thought to have an advantage over the aristocratic college in that labor would be combined with study, making the stay at school pleasant and enabling the poorest youth to secure an education.[1] It was the kind of higher institution which had already been established in several States to meet the needs of the illiterate whites.  Such higher training for the Negroes was considered necessary, also, because their intermediate schools were after the reaction in a languishing state.  The children of color were able to advance but little on account of having nothing to stimulate them.  The desired college was, therefore, boomed as an institution to give the common schools vigor, “to kindle the flame of emulation,” “to open to beginners discerning the mysteries of arithmetic other mysteries beyond,” and above all to serve them as Yale or Harvard did as the capstone of the educational system of the other race.[2]