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Title: Autograph Letter Signed about free Blacks in Oberlin, Ohio Author: Smith, Moses Place: Oberlin, OH Publisher: Date: February 2, 1861 Description: 4 pp. Written from Smith in Oberlin, Ohio to his brother in Albion, Illinois. “…I believe the great excitement has stopped concerning the ‘war’. I thought for a few days we would have war in a short time, there was every day fresh telegraph news which just kept the people on pins, especially the colored people of Oberlin. We have one splendid negro Lawyer here, they send for him from Cleveland to their business. They still keep up their revival here but do not get many joiners…” Smith was a student at Oberlin, the first college in America to regularly admit African-American students before the Civil War. Among its most notable Black graduates was John Mercer Langston – the “splendid Negro lawyer” to whom Smith refers. Born a mixed-race freedman in Virginia, Langston received both degrees from Oberlin (and there married a Black woman graduate) before being admitted to the bar in Ohio in 1854. With Frederick Douglass, he was one of the most prominent Black abolitionists before the Civil War, a Union Army recruiter of Black troops during the War, and afterwards, Inspector General of the Reconstruction-era Freedmans Bureau, first Dean of Howard University Law School and the first African-American elected to Congress from Virginia. Lot Amendments Condition: A bit yellowed; very good. Item number: 234024