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.
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