The intellectual progress of the colored people of that day, however, was not restricted to their clergymen.  Other Negroes were learning to excel in various walks of life.  Two such persons were found in North Carolina.  One of these was known as Caesar, the author of a collection of poems, which, when published in that State, attained a popularity equal to that of Bloomfield’s.[1] Those who had the pleasure of reading the poems stated that they were characterized by “simplicity, purity, and natural grace."[2] The other noted Negro of North Carolina was mentioned in 1799 by Buchan in his Domestic Medicine as the discoverer of a remedy for the bite of the rattlesnake.  Buchan learned from Dr. Brooks that, in view of the benefits resulting from the discovery of this slave, the General Assembly of North Carolina purchased his freedom and settled upon him a hundred pounds per annum.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Baldwin, Observations, etc., p. 20.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 21.]

[Footnote 3:  Smyth, A Tour in the U.S., p. 109; and Baldwin, Observations, p. 20.]

To this class of bright Negroes belonged Thomas Fuller, a native African, who resided near Alexandria, Virginia, where he startled the students of his time by his unusual attainments in mathematics, despite the fact that he could neither read nor write.  Once acquainted with the power of numbers, he commenced his education by counting the hairs of the tail of the horse with which he worked the fields.  He soon devised processes for shortening his modes of calculation, attaining such skill and accuracy as to solve the most difficult problems.  Depending upon his own system of mental arithmetic he learned to obtain accurate results just as quickly as Mr. Zerah Colburn, a noted calculator of that day, who tested the Negro mathematician.[1] The most abstruse questions in relation to time, distance, and space were no task for his miraculous memory, which, when the mathematician was interrupted in the midst of a long and tedious calculation, enabled him to take up some other work and later resume his calculation where he left off.[2] One of the questions propounded him, was how many seconds of time had elapsed since the birth of an individual who had lived seventy years, seven months, and as many days.  Fuller was able to answer the question in a minute and a half.

[Footnote 1:  Baldwin, Observations, p. 21.]

[Footnote 2:  Needles, An Historical Memoir, etc., p. 32.]

Another Negro of this type was James Durham, a native slave of the city of Philadelphia.  Durham was purchased by Dr. Dove, a physician in New Orleans, who, seeing the divine spark in the slave, gave him a chance for mental development.  It was fortunate that he was thrown upon his own resources in this environment, where the miscegenation of the races since the early French settlement, had given rise to