When “the friends of the cause” met in convention, I sometimes heard of it, and managed, boy-like, to steal in.  When I did so, I used to sit and shudder on a back seat in the little hall.  The anti-slavery denunciations poured out upon the churches, and backed up and pushed home by the logic of Green and the eloquence of Smith, were well calculated to make an orthodox boy tremble.  For these people brought the churches and the nation before their bar and condemned them, and some whom I have not named cursed them with a bitterness and effectiveness that I cannot recall to this day without a shiver.  The dramatic effect, as it then seemed to me, has never been equalled in my experience.

That these extreme ideas did not prosper financially is not to be wondered at.  The farm was soon given up, then the buildings and gardens passed into other hands, and the institution became a denominational school, known as the Whitestown Baptist Seminary.  But the ideas which had been implanted there would not consent to depart with this change in the name and the methods of the institution.  The fact that Beriah Green, after leaving the school, continued to reside at Whitesboro and gathered a church there rendered it the more difficult to eradicate the doctrines which he had implanted.  The idea of friendship for the black man was particularly tenacious, and perhaps annoying to the new and controlling denominational interest.  It clung to the very soil, like “pusley” in a garden.  It had gained a strong hold throughout the county.  The managers of the institution could not openly oppose it.  They were compelled to endure it.  And so it continued to be true that if a bright colored boy anywhere in the State desired the advantages of a superior education he would direct his steps to Whitestown Seminary.

It was during these seminary days that I became a student at the institution; and it was here that I met the hero of my story, Anthony Calvert Brown.  He was as vigorous and manly a youth of seventeen as I have ever seen.  We two were regarded as special friends.  He had been among us nearly two months, and had become a general favorite, before it was discovered that he had a tinge of African blood.  The revelation of this fact was made to us on the play-ground.  A fellow student, who had come with Anthony to the school, made the disclosure.  The two were comrades, and had often told us of their adventures together in the great North woods, or Adirondack forests, on the western border of which, in a remote settlement, they had their homes.  Their friendship did not prevent them from falling into a dispute, and it did not prevent Anthony’s comrade, who was in fact a bully, from descending to personalities.  He hinted in very expressive terms that the son of a colored woman must not be too positive.  The meanness of such an insinuation, made at such a time and in such a way, did not diminish its sting.  Perhaps it increased it.  We saw Anthony, who had stood a moment before cool and defiant, turn away cowed and subdued, his handsome face painfully suffused.  His behavior was a confession.