in the South or publicly in the North for service in Liberia.  Dr. William Taylor and Dr. Fleet were thus educated in the District of Columbia.  In the same way John V. De Grasse, of New York, and Thomas J. White, of Brooklyn, were allowed to complete the medical course at Bowdoin in 1849.  In 1854 Dr. De Grasse was admitted as a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society.’"[1] Martin V. Delany, more than once referred to in these pages, after being refused admission at a number of institutions, was admitted to the medical school at Harvard.  He became distinguished for his work in a cholera epidemic in Pittsburgh in 1854.  It was of course not until after the Civil War that medical departments were established in connection with some of the new higher institutions of learning for Negro students.

[Footnote 1:  Kelly Miller:  “The Background of the Negro Physician,” Journal of Negro History, April, 1916, quoting in part Woodson:  The Education of the Negro prior to 1861.]

Before 1860 a situation that arose more than once took from Negroes the real credit for inventions.  If a slave made an invention he was not permitted to take out a patent, for no slave could make a contract.  At the same time the slave’s master could not take out a patent for him, for the Government would not recognize the slave as having the legal right to make the assignment to his master.  It is certain that Negroes, who did most of the mechanical work in the South before the Civil War, made more than one suggestion for the improvement of machinery.  We have already referred to the strong claim put forth by a member of the race for the real credit of the cotton-gin.  The honor of being the first Negro to be granted a patent belongs to Henry Blair, of Maryland, who in 1834 received official protection for a corn harvester.

Throughout the century there were numerous attempts at poetical composition, and several booklets were published.  Perhaps the most promising was George Horton’s The Hope of Liberty, which appeared in 1829.  Unfortunately, Horton could not get the encouragement that he needed and in course of time settled down to the life of a janitor at the University of North Carolina.[1] Six years before the war Frances Ellen Watkins (later Mrs. Harper) struck the popular note by readings from her Miscellaneous Poems, which ran through several editions.  About the same time William Wells Brown was prominent, though he also worked for several years after the war.  He was a man of decided talent and had traveled considerably.  He wrote several books dealing with Negro history and biography; and he also treated racial subjects in a novel, Clotel, and in a drama, The Escape.  The latter suffers from an excess of moralizing, but several times it flashes out with the quality of genuine drama, especially when it deals with the jealousy of a mistress for a favorite slave and the escape of the latter with