The titles of the newspapers indicate the opening and continuance of a period of anti-slavery agitation.  Their columns were filled with arguments and appeals furnished by men who gave their whole souls to the work.  It was a period of great mental activity on the part of the free colored people.  They were discussing all probable methods of bettering their condition.  It was the period that produced both writers and orators.  In 1830 the first convention called by colored men to consider the general condition of the race and devise means to improve that condition, met in the city of Philadelphia.  The history of this convention is so important that I append a full account of it as published in the Anglo-African nearly thirty years after the convention met.  It was called through the efforts of Hezekiah Grice, of Baltimore, who afterwards emigrated to Hayti, and for many years followed there the occupation of carver and gilder and finally became Director of Public Works of the city of Port-au-Prince.  While visiting that city years ago, I met a descendant of Mr. Grice, a lady of great personal beauty, charming manners, accomplished in the French language, but incapable of conversing at all in English.

The conventions, begun in 1830, continued to be held annually for a brief period, and then dropped into occasional and special gatherings.  They did much good in the way of giving prominence to the colored orators and in stemming the tide of hostile sentiment by appealing to the country at large in language that reached many hearts.

The physical condition, so far as the health and strength of the free colored people were concerned, was good.  Their mean age was the greatest of any element of our population, and their increase was about normal, or 1.50 per cent. annually.  In the twenty years from 1840 to 1860 it had kept up this rate with hardly the slightest variation, while the increase of the free colored people of the South during the same period had been 1 per cent, annually.[4] The increase of persons of mixed blood in the North did not necessarily imply laxity of morals, as the census compilers always delighted to say, but could be easily accounted for by the marriages occurring between persons of this class.  I have seen more than fifty persons, all of mixed blood, descend from one couple, and these with the persons joined to them by marriages as they have come to marriageable age, amounted to over seventy souls—­all in about a half century.  That the slaves had, despite their fearful death rate, the manumissions and the escapes, increased twice as fast as the free colored people of the North, three times as fast as the free colored people of the South, and faster than the white people with all the immigration of that period, can be accounted for only by the enormous birth rate of that people consequent upon their sad condition.  Their increase was abnormal, and when properly viewed, proves too much.