Page:The black man.djvu/224

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THE BLACK MAN'S GENIUS AND ACHIEVEMENTS.

He is polite in his manners, and genteel in his personal appearance. As a preacher, he is considered sound, and well versed in theology. He is regarded as one of the ablest men in prayer in Boston. His sermons are characterized by deep feeling and good sense. No man in the city has fewer enemies or more friends than Leonard A. Grimes.




PRESIDENT GEFFRARD.

Fabre Geffrard, born at Cayes, in the year 1806, was the son of a general who had shown himself humane under Dessalines, and had been with Petion, one of the chief promoters of the constitution of 1806. Left early an orphan, young Geffrard entered the army at the age of fifteen, and only after twenty-two years' service obtained his captain's commission. He took part—unwisely, as events proved—in the revolution of 1843, which overturned the able but indolent Boyer, and distinguished himself at the head of a small body of troops against the government forces, deceiving them as to his numbers by the rapidity of his movements, and as to his resources by supplying provisions to his famished enemies at a time when he himself was short of rations. When the revolution, which had originated with the most impatient of the mulattoes, led in turn to a rising of that portion of the blacks who represented absolute barbarism, and whose axiom was that every mulatto should be exterminated, Geffrard marched against and defeated the black leader, Arcaau; but, true to that humanity which seems the