These assaults and attempts at ridicule served to bring me into general notice.  I soon found that, by reason of them, and without merit or effort of my own, I had become known throughout the whole country as “the Colored Professor.”  I had a status.  The lady being the daughter of a highly respectable minister, she also had a status.  To permit therefore the union of these parties would be to bring the principle of amalgamation into respectability.  So reasoned those who attempted to reason on behalf, or rather in excuse, of the mob.  “We are sorry,” they went on condescendingly to say, “for Professor Allen, for though a man of color, he is nevertheless a gentleman, a Christian and a scholar.  But this union must not be; the ‘proprieties of society,’ must not be violated!” Here then was the secret of this extraordinary outbreak.  Had we moved in what these good people would have been pleased to term a lower strata of society, they would have let us alone with infinite contempt.

The most lamentable feature of this Fulton mob was the fact, that we could not, if we had sought it, have secured any redress.  No court of law in the State would have undertaken to bring to justice the perpetrators of this outrage.  But on the contrary, such court would have been inclined to take sides with the mobocrats, and to justify them in the means which they employed wherewith to chastise a colored man who had presumed so grossly to violate the “proprieties of society.”

Before closing I cannot forebear a further word with regard to New York Central College.  During the four years I was in connexion with that college as professor, I never experienced the slightest disrespect from trustees, professors or students.  All treated me kindly, so kindly indeed that I can truly say that the period of my professorship forms one of the pleasantest remembrances of my life.  Terrible as prejudice against color is, my experience has taught me that it is not invincible; though, as it is the offspring of slavery, it will never be fully vanquished until slavery has been abolished.

In illustration of the direct influences of slavery as they affect the free man of color, I again go back for a single moment.  Having spent three years at Oneida Institute, I proposed to myself a visit to Virginia, to look once more into the faces of beloved parents, relatives and friends, to walk again upon the strand at Fortress Monroe, where I had so often in childhood beheld the sunbeams play upon the coves and inlets, and seen the surf beat upon the rocks.  I, at first, had some difficulty in getting a passage to Virginia, most of the masters of the New York vessels to whom I applied seeming to be of a friendly nature, and not willing to expose me to the slave laws of Virginia.  I, however, succeeded at last—­the captain of a Philadelphia vessel consenting to land me at the fortress of Monroe.  I remained in the home of my childhood and youth seven days in peace; but