group. The Odd Fellows, under Peter Ogden, maintained their independence against aggressions of the whites, and the first of a new series of national colored conventions assembled at Troy, N. Y. "The first article in the first number of Frederick Douglass's North Star, published January, 1848, was an extended notice of this convention held at the Liberty Street Church, Troy, N. Y., 1847."
The next year, 1848, Cleveland welcomed a similar national convention. Nearly seventy delegates assembled there on September 6th, "the sessions alternating between the Court-House and the Tabernacle. Frederick Douglass was chosen president. As in previous conventions education was encouraged, the importance of statistical information stated and temperance societies urged."[1]
The representative character of the delegates was shown by the fact that printers, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, engineers, dentists, gunsmiths, farmers, physicians, plasterers, masons, college students, clergymen, barbers, hair-dressers, laborers, coopers, livery-stable keepers, bath-house keepers and grocers were among the members who were present.[2]
The same year Frederick Douglass attended a Free Soil convention at Buffalo, N. Y., and writes: "I was not the only colored man well known to the country who was present at this convention. Samuel Rin-
