In the spring of 1835, on a Sabbath morning, within hearing of the solemn peals of the church bells at a distant village, a Northern traveller through the State of Virginia drew up his horse to drink at a sparkling brook, near the edge of a dark pine forest. Speaking of marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities, we come before our readers. But alas! he is still enveloped in darkness, and we return from the pursuit like a wearied and disheartened mother, (after a tedious and unsuccessful search for a lost child,) who returns weighed down with disappointment and sorrow. Like a guiding star on a stormy night, he is seen through the parted clouds and the howling tempests or, like the gray peak of a menacing rock on a perilous coast, he is seen by the quivering flash of angry lightning, and he again disappears covered with mystery.Ĭuriously, earnestly, anxiously we peer into the dark, and wish even for the blinding flash, or the light of northern skies to reveal him. He is brought to view only by a few transient incidents, and these afford but partial satisfaction.

Glimpses of this great character are all that can now be presented. Let those account for it who can, but there stands the fact, that a man who loved liberty as well as did Patrick Henry,-who deserved it as much as Thomas Jefferson,-and who fought for it with a valor as high, an arm as strong, and against odds as great, as he who led all the armies of the American colonies through the great war for freedom and independence, lives now only in the chattel records of his native State. By some strange neglect, one of the truest, manliest, and bravest of her children,-one who, in after years, will, I think, command the pen of genius to set his merits forth, holds now no higher place in the records of that grand old Commonwealth than is held by a horse or an ox. Yet not all the great ones of the Old Dominion have, by the fact of their birth-place, escaped undeserved obscurity. Men, not great enough to attract special attention in their native States, have, like a certain distinguished citizen in the State of New York, sighed and repined that they were not born in Virginia. With Virginia for his birth-place, even a man of ordinary parts, on account of the general partiality for her sons, easily rises to eminent stations. Her high position in this respect, has given her an enviable distinction among her sister States.

History has not been sparing in recording their names, or in blazoning their deeds.

She has been dignified by some the mother of statesmen. The State of Virginia is famous in American annals for the multitudinous array of her statesmen and heroes.

The Heroic Slave by Frederick Douglass